IANAL, but I can say that I obtained a TN Visa, and renewed it twice, for a Software Engineer job without a degree in Computer Science. I do have a BS and a MS in Civil and Aerospace Eng. respectively.

The TN status has an allowance for "engineers" without other qualifications, so your engineering degree actually is related to that class.

Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman The Rails 4 Way, Obie Fernandez

I did some performance analysis on puma vs unicorn vs thin a while ago:

http://ylan.segal-family.com/blog/2012/08/20/better-performa...

Although as noted in the comments, I neglected to run threadsafe! and should have probably tried rubinius or jruby. I have been meaning to redo. Take with a grain of salt

You should give a try to puma 2.0 currently in beta 6 (https://rubygems.org/gems/puma). Lots of performance improvements. I haven't benchmarked it but my guess is it outperforms unicorn.

You seem have written one of the very few articles I've seen benchmarking this. I'd love to know more about how Puma compares to Unicorn (especially unicorn configurations mentioned by some in this conversation) and Thin for serving rails on Heroku. Many of the Unicorners pushing their solution don't appear to be aware of Puma and its potential benefits. I'm curious if Puma with MRI has benefits, too. Thanks!

AFAIK Puma should have a lower memory footprint on MRI than Thin but I haven't done benchmarks myself.

Also note that Rails 4 will have threadsafe! on by default, too, so if you didn't have it on here, that'll make it different for those apps.