Once a Maintainer: Nate Berkopec - by Allison Pike

This week we’re talking to Nate Berkopec, maintainer of the Ruby web server Puma and expert on Rails performance. Nate lives in Tokyo where he runs Speedshop, a Rails performance consultancy.

I was going to school in New York, and I kind of knew I wanted to be involved in tech startups. I was just interested in the whole scene, but I didn’t really know how to get involved. So I was just going to meetups and stuff like that in college. And I had a professor basically advise me that if I wanted to be in the tech world, the easiest way to do that was to become a programmer. This was in 2011, which in retrospect was probably the easiest time in the last 20 years to be a junior programmer and get a job. So I did Michael Hartl’s Rails tutorial. I self-studied, and then worked for a friend’s startup, and then got a job as basically the apprentice programmer at another startup, and it sort of snowballed from there. My first and last love was Ruby.

Did you have a sense at the time, say 2011-2013, that Rails was the right choice? What was the feeling that led you in that direction?

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