Vancouver
August 15, 2026
Vancouver lives at the intersection of ocean air, mountain trails, and a busy city core. Positioned on the coast of the Pacific Ocean where world-class outdoor culture meets one of North America's most vibrant and diverse city scenes. Here, creatives, coders, and dreamers from Kitsilano to Gastown, and from North Van to New West, converge to collaborate on ideas beneath a skyline framed by snow-capped peaks. This is your invitation to plug into Vancouver's rhythm of West Coast cool, multicultural hustle, and keep-it-local spirit, forging connections as diverse and dynamic as the city itself.
XO Ruby 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
Welcome
Fish bowl
Break
More feedback! Quantity becomes quality
Is it possible for someone to write a large quantity of high quality code? Absolutely! There is a thought that in order to produce quality code, one must move slowly, or that the developer who writes lots of code must not write quality code. This is not true at all. The real key is the amount of feedback, both internally and externally gathered. Aiming for feedback quantity instead of quality might be a big shift. But in reality, you are still focusing on quality. We will explore some of the research that supports this and highlight ways you can gather lots of feedback to be able to consistently produce high quality code.
Kyle d'Oliveira
Passing the CAPTCHA: Why AI is Making Recruitment More Human, Not Less
Recruiters have been hearing some version of the same question lately: how has AI changed recruitment? The AI CEOs exclaim we're obsolete, the layoffs say we're expensive, and the tools claim they'll solve all of our problems.
Colleen Carroll
Break
Git Power Tools
Come see tips and tricks from an experienced Rubyist who shows off his tooling, development process, and strategies for debugging large changes to million+ line codebases. Learn how to use git to your advantage to identify and isolate bugs down to the exact line. In the context of AI, these tools and strategies are only getting more vital. Come see how to extract order from the chaos.
Ryan Davis
AI is coming for our jobs! It's time to fight back!
Ruby is fast. Mass produced. Impersonal. What if it wasn't? What if we could return to a simpler time, when every computation was handcrafted by a real human being?
Joé Dupuis
Lunch
The Ruby Guide to Responsible LLM Integration
Shipping an LLM into your Ruby app ""as is"" invites frustrated users and surprise bills. A look at the failures that show up in production – malformed input, leaked data, prompt injection, outages, rate limits – and patterns that hold up under pressure.
Fernando Perales
TBD
Break
Schrödinger's local - Defining variables dynamically
A quirk of Ruby and ERB templates is that it's not always obvious what's a local variable and what's a method. I'll explain why that is, the problems it creates, and a strange new way we could solve it by making a ruby-to-ruby transpiler which rewrites local variable access.
John Hawthorn
Closing
John Hawthorn
John Hawthorn is a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Ruby Infrastructure team at Shopify. He's a Ruby committer and on the Rails Core team, and works on performance: garbage collection, Ractors, and profiling. He's based in Victoria.
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..
Colleen Carroll
Colleen spends her days connecting technical people to the opportunities they actually want. After several years as a web developer and five more as a technical recruiter, she's been around for everything from the great front-end framework battle of 2015, to the COVID hiring boom, to whatever is happening currently. As a human-centered recruiter, she spends a lot of her time advocating to hiring teams for better, more human practices. Off the clock, she's an avid roller skater who has otherwise done everything from stand-up comedy to rock climbing.
Fernando Perales
Fer is a software engineer who writes web applications in his favorite language: Ruby. He has been working as a software consultant for around 13 years and now is continuing the consulting path as development team lead at thoughtbot.
Joé Dupuis
Joé Dupuis is a Senior DevOps Consultant at Test Double based in Vancouver, BC. He has helped clients solve infrastructure and software problems at the root, from reducing AWS spend and improving deployment speed to identifying incident causes and optimizing build pipelines.
Kyle d'Oliveira
Kyle d’Oliveira is a principal software engineer at Aha! who brings extensive experience in Ruby on Rails, software architecture, and developer experience. His career has included work on scaling databases, breaking up monoliths, and building internal tools that help engineering teams move faster.
TBA
We're finalizing some details with our remaining speakers and will announce them shortly. Stay tuned for more details.
VIFF Centre
1181 Seymour St, Vancouver, BC
Venue
VIFF Centre is the year-round home of the Vancouver International Film Festival, in the heart of downtown Vancouver. With a 169-seat cinema featuring 4K projection and Dolby surround sound, plush seating with double armrests, and an atrium lobby made for mingling, you'll be watching talks in serious comfort.
Transportation
Whether you drive or use public transit, VIFF Centre provides flexible and convenient transportation options. The venue is accessible via SkyTrain, Yaletown-Roundhouse Station (Canada Line) is about a 5-minute walk, and Granville Station is about 10 minutes, with bus stops along Davie and Granville Streets just a couple of minutes away. If you're driving, there's metered street parking and several paid parkades within a short walk.
Nearby
