Portland
October 11, 2025
In Portland, rain-soaked streets weave through murals and food carts, where centuries-old forests edge up against a city humming with bikes, indie bookstores, and weekend farmers’ markets. Here, innovators, adventurers, and makers from St. Johns to Sellwood, and from Vancouver to Hood River, gather to exchange bold ideas beneath the ever-present gaze of Mt. Hood. This is an invitation to immerse yourself in Portland’s spirit of sustainability, DIY ingenuity, and offbeat charm—forming connections that are as authentic and unexpected as the city itself.
XO Ruby Portland 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.
Joe Masilotti
Joe is on a mission to make mobile app development easier for Rails developers. He’s been working with Hotwire Native since 2016, is a maintainer of the library, and the author of “Hotwire Native for Rails Developers”.
Kayla Reopelle
Kayla is a Lead Software Engineer at New Relic and a maintainer for the OpenTelemetry Ruby project. She's currently on a mission to bring stability to OpenTelemetry's logs and metrics signals for the Ruby project.
Renée Hendricksen
Renée is a Staff Software Engineer at GitLab whose career has bounced back and forth between IC roles and Engineering leadership. For the last 5 years, she has been focusing on individual contributor work while training some very demanding 90 billion node neural networks at home! She has been working with Ruby since 2009, and brings a unique perspective from having seen codebases from both the C-suite and the git trenches.
Sam Livingston-Gray
Sam wrote his first Rails app in 2006, and is somehow still writing them? These days, he spends his time co-parenting a very cool human, working as a Staff Engineer for Valimail, and making sawdust. Ask him about TDD, refactoring, or Weighted Companion Cubes – yes, plural.
Ryan Davis
Ryan Davis has been using Ruby since 2000 and is a founding member of the Seattle Ruby Brigade, the ass-kickingest ruby brigade (per-capita). His background includes QA, automation, language and tool development, object databases, and smalltalk. In ruby/rails, he has worked on developer productivity, profiling and optimization, and developer tools such as minitest, ruby_parser, ruby2ruby, hoe, RubyInline, and much more..
Aaron Patterson
Aaron is on a mission to make Ruby and Rails more fun and accessible for developers everywhere. As a core team member and prolific open source contributor, he balances serious engineering—like working on Ruby’s garbage collector and just-in-time compilers—with a passion for sharing knowledge and making even the hardest problems approachable.
133 SE Madison St. - Industrial Chic Warehouse
Close to the river in an up-and-coming part of town and steps away from one of Portland's newest food pods. This flexible space has been used by community and artist groups to host meetings, conferences, workshops, dances and more. The industrial chic space feels expansive, with a stage area set up at the far side of the space, kitchen and food prep spaces, and bathrooms.
