I wrote a book called Build a Ruby Gem ( http://brandonhilkert.com/books/build-a-ruby-gem/). After release, it's required very little work and has totaled about $20k in 9 months since launch.

How did you market this book? Do you think having 1k twitter followers helped with sales?

Mostly in places I knew Rubyists hang out online. Message boards, link aggregators, etc. Twitter helped very little towards sales. Although I use Twitter here and there, focusing on capturing emails was more valuable.

It's live on FunnelOptimizer.io itself, also on my site: brandonhilkert.com.

Other co-author here: I couldn't agree with you enough. We settled on Ansible, but have had our fair share of speed bumps along the way.

Out of pure curiosity, what makes Ansible the best choice for you?

For my team, I decided on Ansible because it was the simplest option (no agents to install, pure ssh).

By the way, that's the same reason I'm investigating using Pallet[1].

[1]: http://palletops.com/

We were coming from Chef where no one knew what was going on. We were looking for something simpler. There wasn't really many other options unfortunately. We're not full-time devops people...hence much of our frustration.

Author here: fair point. Ruby is only required for the client that's building machines. Ruby is our primary language so it's on all of our servers and laptops. Less about thought and more about lowest barrier to entry ;)

Seems like bash (or insert your favorite shell here) would be THE lowest barrier of entry on any Linux, BSD, whatever host--perfect for this project! :-)

Good question. I was hoping some of the MVP movement would spawn interest and create a community around idea feedback. Although, to start, I've considered possibly crowdsourcing from MT or other service to get more eyes on a idea. Any ideas?

I like the idea of getting crowdsourcing from MT but there will be out-of-pocket cost for you. Are you planning on charging your users to make up for the cost? Anyways, good luck.

Agreed. I thought it could be an option for those that want to gather feedback quickly. So something like $10 for 100 responses or something simple and to the point. If they don't want to pay, they can can spread the link and gather feedback from their network. Who knows...