Austin
October 25
In Austin, live music spills from honky-tonks and dive bars, where rolling hill country meets a city pulsing with food trucks, tech startups, and late-night breakfast tacos. Here, musicians, coders, and creatives from South by Rainey to East Austin, and from Cedar Park to Pflugerville, converge to jam on groundbreaking concepts beneath the glow of neon signs and string lights. This is your invitation to plug into Austin's rhythm of authentic weirdness, entrepreneurial hustle, and keep-it-local spirit—forging partnerships as bold and unconventional as the capital city that dares to Keep Austin Weird.
XO Ruby Austin is a single-day, single-track conference designed to draw folks in from the city and the region. An approachable $100 ticket price coupled with no need for a hotel or airfare means you can connect with your community without breaking the bank.
Registration / Set up
Welcome
Fish Bowl Game
Intelligent Event Discovery with Ruby
What started as a simple side project to find things to do in my city evolved into a full AI-powered event recommendation engine. I'll share how I've been building an intelligent event discovery platform in my spare time using Ruby.
Landon Gray
Break
TikTok on Rails
What would it take to recreate the magic of TikTok, snappy feeds, endless scroll, and smart recommendations, using only Ruby on Rails? This talk explores just how far Rails can go as a full-stack framework, from building modern UIs to experimenting with feed algorithms that keep content engaging.
Cecy Correa
TBA
To be announced ...
Lunch
Lost and Alone Over the Pacific
On December 22, 1978, veteran US Navy pilot Jay Prochnow found himself lost over the Pacific in a tiny single-engine plane after a navigation failure during a solo ferry flight. With no land in sight and nightfall approaching, he had to find a way to survive. This is the story of how he navigated out of the crisis—and what we can learn from his experience.
Nickolas Means
Break
The Vibes Are Off In Tech (but we can fix them)
Tech as an industry is in a weird place right now. Far from being just for hobbyists, technology companies are the biggest companies in the world with market caps exceeding the GDP of many countries. Tech takes up an increasing amount of space in our lives while simultaneously becoming less fun than it once was.
Aaron Harpole
Break
Rewriting Localhost: A Modern Approach to Dev Environments
Tired of wrestling with localhost ports in your Ruby projects? A reverse proxy can simplify your local development, align it with production, and make multi-app environments effortless. In this talk, we’ll explore the evolution of reverse proxy solutions, their setup, and their role in Ruby development. Through practical examples and use cases, you’ll discover flexible strategies to enhance your local dev workflow.
Nathan Hessler
Closing
Nathan Hessler
Nathan is a software engineering leader and community builder based in Austin, Texas. Through his company, Convivial Tech, he supports startups with people-centered technical leadership and thoughtful software development. He also organizes the austin.rb meetup and runs regional conferences like ExMex (Elixir) and RBQ (Ruby).
Nickolas Means
Nickolas Means loves nothing more than a story of engineering triumph (except maybe a story of engineering disaster). He’s a student of building healthy culture for technical teams and thinks we have a lot to learn from those who have come before us. He hails from Austin, TX, and spends his spare time hanging out with his wife and kids, building keyboards, and pursuing the perfect cup of coffee.
Landon Gray
Landon Gray is a software engineer passionate about exploring the limits and abilities of LLMs through experimentation. He has published several open source projects to help the Ruby community navigate and learn about the AI landscape. When not coding, he loves discovering new restaurants and traveling.
Aaron Harpole
Aaron has been playing with computers and gadgets since childhood, and fell in love with Ruby in the early 2010s. He's made software at companies both big and small, but currently hangs his hat at Goody as a Staff Software Engineer. He also is the proprietor of 3Delights.
Cecy Correa
Cecy Correa is a Staff Software Engineer with over a decade of experience building backend systems and APIs at companies like Netlify, Shopify, and Thinkful. She holds a Master's in Cybersecurity from UC Berkeley, where her capstone project—a strategic board game teaching cybersecurity concepts—won the Lily L. Chang MICS Capstone Award, given to the top capstone in the Master of Information and Cybersecurity program.
TBA
To be announced ...
TBA
To be announced ...
The Cut ATX
401 Sabine Street Austin, TX 78701
Venue
Located in the heart Downtown Austin, Texas, The Cut ATX venue offers a curated, high-energy atmosphere that emphasizes a focus on music and community. Known for its after‑hours electronic music events, the venue is built with a broader vision in mind and occupies an intimate indoor space that aims for a strong sense of closeness between speakers and audience.