Why engineers should come to the SF Ruby Startup Conference in 2026
It’s the “SF Ruby Startup Conference”, but let’s make something clear up front: this is a conference for engineers. The program is built for people who write and read Ruby, and founders are coming here to see those people. The lineup goes from seed-stage founders to the engineers keeping Shopify’s monolith up. But the community is at the center of it all. In fact, since March 2024, we’ve been developing a framework at the SF Ruby meetup that puts the spotlight on each attendee. The SF Ruby community loves it, so we’re bringing it to a bigger stage. Come experience it first-hand.
What we’re actually building
This answer is simple: we’re building new Ruby success stories, and you’ve got a big role to play.
A founder who picks Ruby can find everything they need to grow in this room. At the conference, they can find new teammates, experts sharing stories on who solved the problem you hit last week, tooling, SDKs, clouds, knowledge, and a support network. And predominantly in open source, which is how this community has always shipped.
That’s why the conference format is assembled like this and the invitation is wider than founders. If you like reading and writing Ruby and you 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, if you go back far enough, is the story of Rails.
We listen for what’s missing instead of correcting people. For instance, Irina’s Startups on Rails keynote at RailsConf 2024 came out of interviews with founders. She found there was one complaint they kept repeating: they wanted to build frontends in React, and the mainstream Rails answer was “use Hotwire.” But those founders hire frontend engineers who don’t know Hotwire but can tell you exactly what they get from TypeScript. We went looking for the answer and found Inertia.
Svyatoslav Kryukov now leads that work at Evil Martians, with contributions upstream, inertia-rails.dev, a stack of blog posts, and production projects built on it. Today, Inertia Rails is what people recommend in almost every thread asking how to do Rails with React. Irina Nazarova brings the 2026 edition of that keynote to SFJAZZ, built the same way, out of this year’s interviews.
Finally, we hand-picked each speaker based on the general message we want to convey with the conference and not just sorted the CFP inbox by score. We also screened GitHub for people actively building in Ruby open source and went after them. That’s how Jason Thomas ended up on the schedule, talking about COSMOS, the Ruby stack used to build, test, and fly satellites. How cool is it that Ruby is running in space, but almost nobody in our own community knows it. These are the stories we want to share.
SF Ruby is engineered for conference success
Startups and scaleups get two separate tracks, split for two audiences, and the tracks weave. What does that mean? When a scaleup speaker is on stage, the early-stage audience is in an organized networking session, and then they swap. You can listen to the talks that fit your interests, and meet other engineers in networking activities during talks better suited for others.
Inside a networking session, you get a spotlight on a smaller stage. You’re matched into groups of 70 to 100 people, and everyone gets 60 seconds on the mic to say who they are, what their company does, and what they are hiring for or looking for.
This matching isn’t random; you’ll fill in your interests in our conference app, and we assign you to a group. For instance: founders with founders, founders with engineers who want startup work, open source authors with the people who use their tools, and so on.
Because you hear every introduction, you walk out already knowing exactly who to find and thinking “this is the person I need to talk to about X.”
Teams of five or more get extended time and slides to present the whole company to a room of people who want to join one.
More reasons you should attend the SF Ruby conference this year
1. What does agentic Rails look like in production?
This question, over just three days in 2026, will answer what your job looks like over the next years. Four talks from people who’ve already shipped:
- Ryan Sherlock scales Fin, the AI customer service agent that grew out of Intercom, serving 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 and is giving “The System Nobody Understood (Including AI),” on what agents can and can’t fix in an old codebase.
- Carmine Paolino created RubyLLM, which gives Ruby one interface to every major AI provider. Since January 2025 it has passed 11 million downloads on RubyGems and more than 4,000 GitHub stars. He’s bringing RubyLLM 2.0.
2. The people who wrote your Gemfile, in one room
Conferences are worth the money when the author of the thing that’s currently breaking is standing ten feet away. Here’s 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 present, all willing to argue about it.
- Your real-time layer: Vladimir Dementyev wrote AnyCable, TestProf, and Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications.
- Your metrics: Andrey Novikov wrote Yabeda, the Ruby instrumentation framework with over 10 million downloads.
- Your concurrency bugs: Alex Coomans is simplifying the Rails architecture behind Persona’s identity platform, after nine years scaling Square.
- 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 runs one of the largest Rails monoliths in the world. During BFCM 2024 it peaked at 284 million requests per minute at the edge.
- Everyone gets a mic
This is the part that pays for the ticket, and it works to fit what you need. If you’re looking, the hiring is already visible. Our jobs board carries 59 open Ruby and Rails roles from 41 companies right now, including GitHub, Chime, Gusto, Persona, AngelList, Middesk, and Omada. Gusto and Persona also have engineers on this year’s stage. At the conference, those hiring managers will be sitting in your networking group, and you get at least two 60-second slots to say what you build, skipping cold emails or awkward booth experiences.
If you’re shipping something, those same slots are two product demos to a warm, filtered audience of 450 engineers and founders. For a developer-facing tool, that’s a launch channel. Founders and founding teams also get a dedicated round as a group.
If you maintain a gem, our matching system puts open source authors in the same group as people who already run their tools, you hear all 70 to 100 introductions, so you can find your actual users instead of waiting for them to find you. Everyone in that group 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, this format means you can socialize without all the awkwardness of doing it unprompted. Your ticket allows you to meet others before the event as a virtual character, chat with them via Slack from the day you register until November, and then we match you into a group by shared interests. If you know your crew before the conference, you’re not standing alone during coffee breaks.
Meet the Rails community in the tech capital of the world
Day three drops the formal program for community-run activities. If you write Ruby, maintain open source, are weighing your next role, or are scaling something on Rails right now, come! Regular tickets are $450 through September 30. Company-sponsored tickets are $650, can be invoiced and expensed, and have no deadline. Bring a team of five or more and you get stage time to present your company.
