Corporate Training

Do you wish your team knew more about how to make your Ruby on Rails application faster? Performance work can be intimidating at first: it might feel like it's over your head, too boring, or too esoteric. I disagree. My one-day workshops teach the fundamental skills of making Rails web applications fast, and do it in a way that's accessible and memorable.

Make Your App Faster than "Fast Enough"

Ruby web applications don't have to be slow, and you don't have to do backflips or refactor your entire application into service objects and microservices to do it. Four of the largest Rails applications in the world are all monolithic Rails applications and they all have response times of less than 100 milliseconds on average - Github, Shopify, Basecamp and Cookpad. None of them use a lot of Javascript or single-page-app frameworks like Vue, React, or Angular (3 out of 4 use Turbolinks!). Frequently, squeezing more performance out of your application ends up being a simple one-line change. Performance optimization is about measurement and experience more than execution, which is why learning the fundamental performance skills of benchmarking, profiling, and measurement can save you and your team weeks of banging your head against the wall and blind, premature optimization. We'll also talk about provisioning and cost savings, including how to use multi-threading and auto-scaling to your advantage. You'll easily pay for the fee just by what I'll teach you about reducing your server costs!

One-On-One Intensive

Here's what you and your team will learn:

  • Lower your response times to 200 milliseconds or less.
  • Reduce how much you're spending on deployment, by as much as half.
  • Build a clear plan to scale for the next 12 months.
  • Apply the three-step "DRM" method to solve 80% of Rails performance issues quickly and simply.
  • Practice a simple, repeatable performance process to diagnose and solve any issue. No genius required.
  • Fix any N+1 scenario, even the weird ones that go 12 stack levels deep that you've never been able to figure out.
  • Set targets and performance budgets within your organization that make sense for you and your customers.
  • Learn how to diagnose performance issues anywhere in the stack: DB, Ruby itself, the browser, and more.
  • Understand what "breaks" simple preload/eager_load schemes and how to get around it.
  • Scale services mathematically without load testing.
  • Decipher metrics on services like NewRelic and Scout.
  • Reduce the memory usage of any Rails app.
  • ... and a whole lot more.

My workshops have been attended by more than 400 people. Here's what some of them had to say:

"If you haven’t checked Nate Berkopec's training, books and tutorials yet, then I highly recommend him as an expert resource with an organized set of performance diagnostics tools. His workshop shaved $7,000/year off our Heroku bills with one change."
- Ken Mayer

"After training from Nate and a concerted effort from a few engineers, we had performance improvements of 10-50% on key flows.
- Rory O’Connell, Grand Rounds

"I have a bunch of pull requests that came out of the workshop. I have more tools in my toolset that I could use for future consulting projects."
- Ernesto Tagwerker, Ombu Labs

How do I sign up?

The course is always available by appointment for your company. I welcome combining with other companies in order to make a full class. Email me for details.

Who's this?

My name is Nate Berkopec. I'm a software developer and author of the Complete Guide to Rails Performance. I've previously worked for people like Getty Images, Intercom.io, ClickFunnels and more 500Startups and YCombinator startups than I can count. I was on Shark Tank once.