Talks Worth Watching
Conference talks I keep recommending, each with one line on why it's worth your time. Most are from SF Ruby 2025; recordings are on RubyEvents.
Engineering in the AI era
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The Role of Software Design in an AI World
One of my top picks — decades of industry context on how AI changes what design work matters.
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Programming Language Evolution in the AI Era
How languages have to adapt to AI assistants, with a demo of Tidewave, his browser-based AI dev tool.
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Rails Expertise, Distilled: AI Agents That Get Your Monolith
Practical ways agents can help a team understand and work in a large Rails codebase.
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RubyLLM: One API, One Person, One Machine for AI
Shows how little code it takes to put LLMs into a Rails app.
Architecture & design
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Start Writing Ruby (Stop Using Classes)
Modules, plain functions and state-free boundaries — it challenged my "everything is a class" Rails habits.
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Pack It Up: Why Packwerk Can't Save Your Messy Rails App (But You Can)
Architecture is driven by people, not tools — domain clarity and enforced boundaries do the real work.
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Derailing Our Application: How and Why We Are Decoupling Our Code from Rails
My Cisco Meraki colleagues on breaking apart a massive Rails codebase, driven by real product needs.
Performance & scale
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Scaling Rails to Two Million MySQL Requests per Second
Intercom's sharding, replication, caching and connection-routing trade-offs — directly useful for distributed systems work.
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ZJIT: The Future of Ruby Performance
A must-see on Ruby internals — where the JIT is heading and why Ruby is about to get much faster.
Open source & craft
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Sidekiq: Open Source, Business and the Future
An honest look at business models that make open source sustainable.
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The Thin CLIent Approach
Clean, very Ruby patterns for lightweight CLI tools — something I want to try.
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From Code to Customers: Technical Marketing for People Who'd Rather Be Building
Gold for anyone building a product (or a personal site) who'd rather write code than market it.
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Play With Your Code
Why programming games are more fun than day jobs, and how to bring that curiosity back to work.