RailsConf 2025
2025-07-08..2025-07-10
Philadelphia, United States
[RailsConf 2009, RailsConf 2011, RailsConf 2012, RailsConf 2013, RailsConf 2014, RailsConf 2015, RailsConf 2016, RailsConf 2017, RailsConf 2018, RailsConf 2019, RailsConf 2020 CE, RailsConf 2021, RailsConf 2022, RailsConf 2023, RailsConf 2024, RailsConf 2025]
who it's for
rails developers, ruby developers, backend engineers, frontend developers, platform engineers, open source maintainers
topics
Rails 8 new features; Rails 8.1 updates; asset pipeline best practices; Hotwire Native for Rails; ActiveRecord Attributes API; background job system redesigns; OpenTelemetry instrumentation for Rails; ruby web server internals (Puma, Falcon); Action View caching patterns; Rails I18n toolkit; progressive web apps on Rails; database performance anti patterns
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| 365 Days Later: Moving from Java to RoR and how it changed everything | John Dewsnap | 46m |
Flexcar moves from an 80 micro-services Java backend to a monolithic Ruby on Rails app and ships production after a night-of-conference data migration… | ||
| Startups on Rails in Past, Present and Future | Irina Nazarova | 34m |
Rails powers recent exits and huge raises and rapid traction with concrete numbers and tools not vague promises For example Chime completes an IPO and Bolt.new… | ||
| Opening Ceremony | Shan Cureton | 38m |
Welcome, logistics, and hard numbers: the event registers 800 attendees, the silent auction targets $10,000, sponsors include Cisco Meraki and Power Home… | ||
| Evolution of Rails within RubyGems.org | Samuel Giddins, Nick Quaranto | 32m |
Rubygems.org runs as a modern Rails 8 app on Ruby 3.4.4 after migrating from Rails 2, hosts 185,000 packages, and serves about 10 billion downloads per month… | ||
| Rails Frontend Evolution: It Was a Setup All Along | Svyatoslav Kryukov | 23m |
Argues Rails’ “retreat” was strategic and shows concrete turns: Rails becomes a reliable backend as Rails API gains traction; the Asset Pipeline and later… | ||
| Yes, You Can Work on Rails & any other Gem | Kasper Timm Hansen | 29m |
Shows concrete navigation and inspection tricks for digging into Rails or any gem: use bundle open to inspect installed code, call methods in a console and… | ||
| The Rails Features we Loved, Lost, and Laughed at | Robby Russell | 24m |
Rails claims concrete wins: database migrations version schema and avoid manual SQL, REST routing replaces ad‑hoc endpoints, and Active Record makes user.post… | ||
| Master the Rails Asset Pipeline: Best Practices for Apps & Gems | Adrian Marin | 20m |
Explains exact fixes not fluff: shows three ways to ship assets in gems (pin vendor files for importmaps, bundle JS into the gem, or publish an npm package)… | ||
| Fireside Chat | David Heinemeier Hansson, Elise Shaffer | 56m |
Claims that Rails keeps extracting fewer cruftier layers, that browsers now replace preprocessors, and that Turbo and import maps are temporary crutches… | ||
| Lightning Talks | 01h 12m | |
Rapid five minute demos hit concrete outcomes: a Ruby gems SQL dataset hosted in ClickHouse with a web playground and llm.clickhouse that auto-generates SQL; a… | ||
| Development Speed Optimizations in Rails 8 | Gannon McGibbon | 30m |
Rails 8 lands concrete boot-time fixes: a new bin rails boot command for profiling with stackprof and SpeedScope, file-watcher changes that cut… | ||
| Rails Then, Now, and Next: A Conversation with our Community | Aaron Patterson, Sarah Mei, Evan Phoenix, Nadia Odunayo, Chad Fowler, Eileen M Uchitelle, Marty Haught | 49m |
Panelists name the concrete wins and pain points: Rails powers 4.2 million users and a solo dev ships web plus iOS and Android apps using Turbo/Hotwire native… | ||
| Cache = Cash! 2.0 | Stefan Wintermeyer | 34m |
Claims concrete wins: focusing on CPU caches (L1/L2) and data layout, switching heavy ActiveRecord loads to trimmed SELECTs and smaller SQL types, adding… | ||
| Understanding Ruby Web Server Internals: Puma, Falcon, and... | Manu Janardhanan | 25m |
Puma is a hybrid multiprocess+threaded server that faces IO blocking and GVL contention (demonstrated as ~48% and ~37% latency bloat in the given example)… | ||
| The Ghosts of Action View Cache | Hartley McGuire | 26m |
Caches rendered HTML instead of relations, so switching to Action View fragment caching fixes a bug where an ActiveRecord relation was stored in Rails.cache… | ||
| 10 Costly Database Performance Mistakes (and How to Fix Them) | Andrew Atkinson | 31m |
Ten concrete mistakes cost teams time and money and each comes with fixes: 10 counted items, anchor migrations is released and lints SQL with squawk (it flags… | ||
| Derailing Our Application: How and Why We... | Fito von Zastrow, Alan Ridlehoover | 31m |
Cisco decouples about 800,000 lines of Ruby from Rails constructs by extracting business logic from controllers, models, and ERB views into plain Ruby objects… | ||
| Ruby Internals: A Guide For Rails Developers | Matheus Richard | 29m |
Shows how a tiny interpreter and a stack VM are built from lexer to bytecode and executed, demonstrates a compiler pass that flattens ASTs into sequential… | ||
| Getting More Out of LLMs for Ruby Developers Justin Wienckowski, Jake Gribschaw We're all hearing about LLM tools that are changing on a daily, if not hourly, basis | Justin Wienckowski, Jake Gribschaw | 28m |
Shows concrete workflows: using Cursor + Ruby LSP with the Shopify Ruby extension, avoiding duplicate RuboCop plugins, and troubleshooting via editor logs… | ||
| New and Improved Features in Rails 8.1 | Andrew Novoselac | 30m |
Shopify lands a set of concrete Rails 8.1 changes: Rails now substitutes SQL DEFAULT for nil primary keys in insert_all/upsert_all (PR submitted to upstream)… | ||
| Ruby Podcast Panel | David Hill, Drew Bragg, Chris Oliver, Stephanie Minn | 51m |
Panelists give concrete tactics and outcomes: a podcast wraps up after 52 episodes, sponsors include Honeybadger and Judo Scale and Go Rails, inviting guests… | ||
| Keeping the Rails Magic Alive After 18 Years | Wade Winningham | 26m |
Eighteen years of a Rails app started in 2007 grows to 3 million lines and the team migrates toward a Component Based Rails Application using Cobra while still… | ||
| Hotwire Native: A Rails developer’s secret tool to building mobile apps | Joe Masilotti | 01h 53m |
Hotwire Native shows a concrete workflow: build one HTML/CSS screen and reuse screens across web iOS Android via a thin native wrapper, run a local Rails blog… | ||
| The Past, Present and Future of Background Job... | Rosa Gutiérrez, Maciej Mensfeld, Mike Perham, Ben Sheldon | 55m |
Panelists compare four real backends: Redis-backed Sidekiq (commercial Pro/Enterprise, batches API took years to stabilize), Solid Queue on… | ||
| The Keynote of Keynotes | Aji Slater | 57m |
A project that watches 94 keynotes from 2006–2025 finds 79 videos online, three panels, one podcast and one multimedia performance and documents concrete… | ||
| How to instrument your Rails app with OpenTelemetry | Kayla Reopelle | 01h 39m |
Configures the OpenTelemetry SDK and OTLP exporter to send traces, metrics, and logs to New Relic from a minimal Rails 8 app (Ruby 3.4.2), installs… | ||
| Simplifying at Scale: 7 Years of Rails Architecture | Alex Coomans | 28m |
Starts on Google App Engine with Rails 5.2 then migrates to GKE Kubernetes migration for control over scaling, moves front end from Webpacker to Shakaacker to… | ||
| How 10 years of RailsConf can inform the next 10 years of your career | Kevin Murphy | 23m |
A personal account traces concrete career moves: built an app in Rails at work, used twitter to find conference contacts, then lands a job after networking. It… | ||
| The future of Rails begins in the browser | Vladimir Dementyev, Albert Pazderin | 25m |
A full Rails “getting started” environment runs entirely in the browser today: WebAssembly + WebContainers + Ruby Wasm + a Wasmifi Rails pack bundle a Rails… | ||
| From FTP to Kamal: 20 Years of Deploying Rails | Ben Curtis | 26m |
Traces 20 years of Rails deployment from FTP and CGI to Mongrel’s C HTTP parser, FastCGI fragility, Passenger isolating apps inside nginx, Capistrano… | ||
| Silent Killers: Lessons from the Brink | Joe Leo | 30m |
Diagnoses are concrete: four production rollbacks in four months, main builds failing 7/25 and 11/25, 140–160k LOC with 1,500 ignored CodeClimate warnings… | ||
| The Modern View Layer Rails Deserves: A Vision for 2025 and Beyond | Marco Roth | 34m |
A concrete stack appears: Herb parser in C (built on Prism) produces a unified HTML+ERB AST, plus a formatter, linter, rewriter and a VS Code extension and… | ||
| The History of Rails in 10 Blog Posts | Joel Quenneville | 31m |
Ten blog posts name concrete shifts not just ideas: Fat Model, Skinny Controller argues put business logic in models; FactoryBot provides inline test factories… | ||
| The Front-end is Omakase | Cameron Dutro | 38m |
Argues Rails needs an opinionated front end and shows a working Rails generator called velour that uses Vite and npm and installs PostCSS TypeScript a TS… | ||
| Closing Keynote | Aaron Patterson | 01h 11m |
Chronicles of experiments and failures: demonstrates a working SQLite database stored inside a Ruby script, walks through the YAML remote code execution root… | ||
| Not Invented Here: Things Rails Didn't Innovate | Caleb Hearth | 26m |
Claims that Rails borrows, not invents, and backs that with names, dates, and outcomes: MVC from Reenskaug at Xerox PARC (1979), REST from Fielding’s… | ||
| The Future of: PWAs on Rails | Edy Silva | 28m |
Claims Rails 7.2 ships PWA bits (manifest + service worker) and ActionNotifier promises easier push; demo app Ferma uses Stimulus, Cache API, IndexedDB and… | ||
| Unraveling the black box: past, present and future of authentication in Rails | Alicia RojasInd | 24m |
Built-in Rails 8 authentication generator scaffolds a readable login flow: user model with has_secure_password (bcrypt), session model and controller… | ||
| An ActiveRecord Rewrite: the Story Behind the Attributes API | Tess Griffin | 19m |
A refactor rearchitects ActiveRecord type casting into an Attributes API with per-attribute objects delegating to type objects, replacing spaghetti overrides… | ||
| From Resque to SolidQueue - Rethinking our background jobs for... | Andrew Markle | 27m |
Migration proves practical: code changes are a one-line ActiveJob override that routes new jobs to SolidQueue while older jobs stay in Resque, enabling a… | ||
| UX & Design for Rails Devs: Elevating the "One Person Framework"... | John Athayde | 31m |
Argues Rails devs need practical UX skills and shows concrete techniques that produce measurable wins: use journey maps and the six-up sketch exercise to pick… | ||
| Contributing to Rails? Start with the Gems You Already Use | Yasuo Honda | 26m |
Shows actual pull request links and a QR code to slides and gives a concrete first step: pick gems already used, fix Ruby 3.4 warnings (frozen-string issues by… | ||
| Off the Rails: Validating non-model classes with…ActiveModel? | Andy Andrea | 31m |
Builds a single validator class that accepts Hash/Struct/Data and runs ActiveModel validations (built‑in and custom), using TDD and by reading validators plus… | ||
| Internationalization on Rails: Unpacking the Rails I18n Toolkit | Chris Fung | 29m |
Claims that Rails plus a few gems let an app go from monolingual to multilingual with real formatting and plural rules, not just translated strings. Uses… | ||
| Rails Framework Defaults: Defusing the Time Bomb in Your Upgraded App | Josh Puetz | 27m |
Upgrading Rails 5 → 7 at Donut reveals that the app still breaks unless config.load_defaults = 6.0 and each entry in new_framework_defaults.rb is audited and… | ||
| The Closing of RailsConf | Chris Oliver, Ufuk Kayserilioglu | 10m |
RailsConf is ending as we know it, with Ruby Central shifting the format and asking for ideas on future events. The conference credits core and issues teams… | ||
| The Rails Story: Two Decades of Design and Decisions | Ratnadeep Deshmane | 30m |
Tells why Rails chose Ruby for developer happiness, shows that Rails extracts tooling from Basecamp and becomes a battery‑included web framework with… | ||
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