Why engineers should come to the SF Ruby Conference in 2026
This is a conference for engineers. The program is built for people who write and read Ruby, and founders come to meet them. The lineup runs from seed-stage founders to the engineers keeping Shopify’s monolith up, with the community at the center. Since March 2024 we’ve been developing a format at the SF Ruby meetup that puts every attendee in the spotlight, and this year it moves to a bigger stage.
What we’re actually building
We’re building new Ruby success stories, and you’ve got a big role to play.
A founder who picks Ruby finds everything they need to grow in this room: teammates, tooling, SDKs, clouds, a support network, and the person who solved last week’s problem already. Mostly in open source, which is how this community has always shipped.
So the invitation is wider than founders. If you like reading and writing Ruby and want more companies built with it, this is your event. We’re here for the underdogs. SF Ruby speaks for the companies that intend to become the next Rails at Scale success stories, which, far enough back, is the story of Rails.
We listen for what’s missing instead of correcting people. Irina’s Startups on Rails keynote at RailsConf 2024 came out of founder interviews, and one complaint kept repeating: they wanted React frontends, and the mainstream Rails answer was “use Hotwire.” Those founders hire frontend engineers who know TypeScript and can tell you exactly what they get from it. We went looking and found Inertia.
Svyatoslav Kryukov now leads that work at Evil Martians: upstream contributions, inertia-rails.dev, blog posts, production projects. Inertia Rails is what people recommend in almost every thread asking how to do Rails with React. Svyat speaks this year on hiring when agents scale and humans don’t, and Irina brings the 2026 keynote, built from this year’s interviews: “Why start a new company on Rails, and AI, today.”
We hand-picked every speaker against the message we want the conference to carry, and screened GitHub for people actively building in Ruby open source. That’s how Jason Thomas ended up on the schedule with COSMOS, the Ruby stack used to build, test, and fly satellites. Ruby runs in space and almost nobody in our own community knows it. These are the stories we want to share.
SF Ruby is engineered for conference success
Small teams and big teams get two tracks, and the tracks weave. When a big-team speaker is on stage, the small-team audience is in an organized networking session, then they swap. You hear the talks that fit you and meet people during the ones that don’t.
The days split too. Day one is AI-heavy: agents in production, AI in legacy codebases, the Ruby tooling for both. Day two is AI-light: queues, concurrency, real-time, open source, and the businesses built on them. If only one is your year, there’s a single-day ticket.
Inside a session you get a spotlight on a smaller stage. You’re matched into groups of 70 to 100, and everyone gets 60 seconds on the mic: who you are, what your company does, what you’re hiring for or looking for.
The matching runs off the interests you fill in on the conference app. Founders with founders, founders with engineers who want startup work, open source authors with the people running their tools.
You hear every introduction, so you walk out knowing exactly who to find.
Teams of five or more get extended time and slides to present the company to a room of people who want to join one.
More reasons to come
1. What does agentic Rails look like in production?
Your job for the next few years depends on the answer. Talks from people who’ve already shipped:
- Ryan Sherlock scales Fin, the AI customer service agent that grew out of Intercom: 150,000 HTTPS requests per second at peak from a Rails monolith. His talk is “Who Watches the Agents? Closing the Rails Loop from Code to Customers.”
- CJ Avilla comes from Anthropic with “Assign to Claude: Making an Agent a First-Class Teammate in Your SaaS.”
- Madison Sites wrangles legacy Rails at Order.co. Her talk, “The System Nobody Understood (Including AI),” is on what agents can and can’t fix in an old codebase.
- Carmine Paolino created RubyLLM, one interface to every major AI provider: 11 million downloads and more than 4,000 GitHub stars since January 2025. He’s bringing 2.0.
- Sergey Karayev of Superconductor argues in “The Multiplayer AI Manifesto” that AI tools are single-player, which is why individuals got faster and teams didn’t.
2. The people who wrote your Gemfile, in one room
Conferences are worth the money when the author of the thing that’s breaking is standing ten feet away. A sample of what you can settle in three days:
- Your job queue: Rosa Gutiérrez built Solid Queue at 37signals and is giving “Solid Queue: two years on Rails.” Ben Sheldon wrote GoodJob. Phillip Campbell scales the Sidekiq workloads that run payroll at Gusto. Three independent answers to the same question, all willing to argue about it.
- Your real-time layer: Vladimir Dementyev wrote AnyCable, TestProf, and Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications. His talk is “Ruby for AI and AI for Ruby.”
- Your concurrency bugs: Alex Coomans is simplifying the Rails architecture behind Persona’s identity platform, after nine years scaling Square. JP Camara wrote the Ruby concurrency series on threads and the GVL, now becoming a book.
- Your view layer: Marco Roth builds Herb, the HTML-aware toolchain that gives ERB a parser, formatter, and language server. His talk is “Reactive Rails Views, No Rewrite Required.”
- Your runtime: Peter Zhu commits to Ruby core and works on the garbage collector at Shopify, which peaked at 284 million requests per minute at the edge during BFCM 2024.
3. Everyone gets a mic
This is the part that pays for the ticket. If you’re looking, the hiring is already visible: our jobs board carries 59 open Ruby and Rails roles from 41 companies, GitHub, Chime, Gusto, Persona, AngelList, Middesk and Omada among them. Gusto and Persona have engineers on this year’s stage too. In November those hiring managers sit in your networking group, and you get at least two 60-second slots to say what you build.
If you’re shipping something, those same slots are two product demos to a filtered audience of 450 engineers and founders. For a developer-facing tool, that’s a launch channel. One group puts founders in a room with VCs; another has big teams comparing notes on agentic coding.
If you maintain a gem, the matching puts you in a group with people already running your tools. You hear all 70 to 100 introductions and find your actual users. Everyone there ships production Rails, so what comes back is edge cases from real traffic.
And if you normally skip conferences because standing alone at the coffee table is miserable: your ticket lets you meet people beforehand as a virtual character and chat on Slack from the day you register until November, then we match you into a group by shared interests. You arrive knowing your crew.
Meet the Rails community in San Francisco
Day three drops the program for community-run activities: a walk, a bike ride, an ocean swim, a hackathon, whatever people organize. If you write Ruby, maintain open source, are weighing your next role, or are scaling something on Rails, come! Regular tickets are $450 through September 30, a single day is $350, and company-sponsored tickets are $650, invoiced and expensable with no deadline. Bring five or more and you get stage time to present your company.
