My SF Ruby 2025 Experience — Talks, Side Quests, Community & Inspiration

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My SF Ruby 2025 Experience: Craft, Performance, and the AI Revolution

aag1091

51 minutes ago

5 min read

Last week, I got to check out SF Ruby 2025, and honestly, it was one of the most exciting conferences I've been to in ages. Ruby events always have this warm, community vibe, but this one truly stood out because of the intense buzz around the ecosystem right now. We're talking about massive performance upgrades, practical AI integrations, refined architectural patterns, and a surge of exciting indie tools and startups.

I wanted to give you a detailed rundown of the insightful talks, the fun "side quests" that boosted the community feel, and the forward-looking demos that prove Ruby continues to surprise us all.

🎙️ Deep Dives: Talks I Attended & Loved

The Architecture & Design Paradigm Shift

The core theme this year was rethinking how we design and structure our systems—especially in a post-monolith world.

• Fito & Allen — Derailing Our Application: How and Why We Are Decoupling Our Code from Rails: Being a part of Cisco Meraki with these guys made this one special. They transparently shared our team's journey of breaking apart a massive Rails codebase, detailing the architectural choices driven by genuine product needs.

• Dave Thomas — Start Writing Ruby (Stop Using Classes): A simple but profoundly eye-opening talk. Dave urged us to move past reflexive class-usage and embrace:

  • Modules

  • Plain functions

  • State-free boundaries

    This really challenged my own habits after years in the "everything is a class" world of Rails.

• Stephan Hagemann — Pack It Up: Why Packwerk Can’t Save Your Messy Rails App (But You Can): A critical reminder that architecture is driven by people, not tools. Stephan argued that fixes like Packwerk aren't magic. The real work is in domain clarity, enforcing boundaries, and continuously shaping the system with intention.

Performance & Scaling: The Future Is Fast

The internals talks showed that Ruby's performance story is getting serious, while the scaling talks offered real-world blueprints.

• Takashi Kokubun — ZJIT: The Future of Ruby Performance: A must-see for anyone interested in Ruby internals. Takashi walked us through the evolution of Ruby’s JIT and demonstrated how ZJIT offers consistency and major, tangible performance boosts. Ruby 3.5 and beyond is going to be incredibly fast.

• Eugene Kenny — Scaling Rails to Two Million MySQL Requests per Second: A rapid-fire look at how Intercom handled massive scale. This was super relevant for anyone working on distributed systems, covering vital lessons on:

  • Sharding and replication

  • Caching strategies

  • Routing connections and inevitable tradeoffs

The AI & Developer Evolution

AI wasn't just hype; it was presented as a practical tool for modern Ruby development.

• José Valim — Navigating Programming Language Evolution in the AI Era: A deep dive into how languages must adapt. He demoed Tidewave, an AI-assisted, browser-based dev environment that felt both futuristic and perfectly timely.

• Brandon Weaver — Rails Expertise, Distilled: AI Agents That Get Your Monolith: Brandon showed practical, hands-on ways AI agents can help teams understand and manage large Rails codebases—a huge win for veterans and newcomers alike.

• Carmine Paolino — RubyLLM: The ideal cap for Day 1. Carmine showed how easily Rubyists can integrate LLMs into Rails apps. The impressive ease of use has me already planning experiments.

Craft, Community, and Career

From developer experience to open source sustainability, these talks focused on the human side of software.

• Sarah Mei — The Role of Software Design in an AI World: One of my top picks. Sarah provided decades of industry context to show how AI is fundamentally shifting our roles as developers—a powerful historical angle.

• Mike Perham — Sidekiq: Open Source, Business and the Future: A critical talk on OSS sustainability. He broke down successful business models and announced the Gem Fellowship, a grant program to boost Ruby tools.

• Rachael Wright-Munn — Why Are Programming Games More Fun Than Our Day Jobs?: Rachael explored how we can inject the creativity and curiosity found in programming games back into our regular engineering gigs.

• Colleen Schnettler — From Code to Customers: A fantastic guide to technical marketing for those who'd "rather be building." Pure gold for founders or anyone launching a product.

• Jeremy Evans — The Thin Client Approach: Jeremy demonstrated super clean, very Ruby patterns for building lightweight CLI tools—something I'm keen to try out soon.

🚀 Startup Demos & Community Momentum

The energy around small, focused companies building with Ruby right now was incredible. There were numerous demos showcasing AI-native dev tools, infrastructure products, and creative social apps. I ended up bookmarking several of them to follow their progress, and maybe even contribute to future projects.

🧭 The Side Quests (a.k.a. Peak Conference Fun)

SF Ruby always nails the community experience. These "side quests" made the event unforgettable:

• Fresh T-Shirt Printing: Easily one of the coolest conference merch experiences I've seen—an on-site, screen-printing station.
  

  

• Ruby Passport + Photo Booth: A cute idea: collect stamps around the venue and snap pics at the booth with props. I got a great photo with some colleagues! me in the middle

  

• The Ruby Game: The conference had a custom-built Ruby game: https://sfruby-warrior.fly.dev/. Super fun and a great modern nod to the classic Ruby Warrior.

• Company Booths (including Cisco!): It was awesome to see so many companies represented, from startups to big names. It was great to see the interest in what we're building at Cisco as well.

✨ Final Thoughts: The Future is Bright

SF Ruby reminded me why I've loved this community for so long: it’s all about craft, play, curiosity, and thinking ahead. After 14 years of writing Ruby across startups, enterprise systems, and big monoliths, I left feeling inspired to:

• Rethink how I structure code using functional patterns.

• Experiment more with AI + Rails integrations.

• Explore performance tools like ZJIT.

• Support emerging Ruby tools and startups.

Ruby keeps evolving—and events like this show that the future is bright, fast, and full of creativity. If you couldn’t make it this year, I highly recommend catching the recorded talks once they’re released!

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