Join us in The Windy City

Do you remember Ruby's "Golden Age"? The era of why the lucky stiff, when frameworks like Camping and Sinatra felt like artistic expressions, and every week brought a new, delightful experiment. Ruby was the language of developer happiness, defined by a magical duality: rock-solid productivity on one hand, and playful, creative exploration on the other.

In our collective journey to maturity, building stable, mission-critical applications, has some of that original spark been lost? Have we become so focused on the practical that we've forgotten the "kind of silly"?

This talk argues that the rise of Generative AI isn't just a new wave of productivity tools; it's a chance to reclaim our heritage as voyagers. It's an opportunity to bring back the magic, the art, and the sheer fun of creation.

This talk explores how working with Ruby on Rails in the not-for-profit sector can provide meaningful technical challenges while fostering personal growth, purpose, and sustainability in a developer’s career. Through real-world examples and practical advice, it highlights the unique opportunities, skills, and impact that come from building technology for social good.

Every nontrivial database has invalid data in it. Records that can't pass their validations, NULLs where background jobs silently failed, records that combine to impossible states, and even errors introduced when fixing other bugs. There's a missing tool from our toolboxes. (No, it's not SQL constraints). Come learn how to catch these bugs before your users do.

We often rely on concurrency in Ruby without really understanding how it works under the hood. In this talk, we’ll build a simple TCP server and iteratively improve it using processes, threads, and fibers, measuring along the way. By connecting these primitives to real-world servers like Puma, Falcon, and Unicorn, you’ll come away with a clearer grasp of how Ruby handles concurrency and the tradeoffs behind each approach.

We know testing is vital and makes refactoring painless. But how to set sail to that TDD treasure? Yarr, we need to test to get experience, but need experience to test. Let’s draw a map with simple strategies for identifying test cases and building a robust test suite. X marks the spot w/ TDD tools for newbies and seasoned pirates alike.

What really sets a 5-year-old Rails codebase apart from one that’s been evolving for over 14 years? What patterns emerge when you work in a codebase with over a million commits and more than a decade of continuous development? In this talk, we'll dive into a few of the lessons learned from working inside a very old and very large Rails codebase. We will talk about what works (and what doesn’t) as both your team and your codebase grow, which best practices stand the test of time, and how even the massive codebases share common traits with projects of all sizes. Whether you're maintaining a startup app or contributing to a legacy system, you'll leave with new insights you can apply to your work.

We truly live in the worst timeline, but should it really have come as a surprise? Learn the history of our present technosocial nightmare, and find the inspiration to start building what comes after.