Why engineers should come to the SF Ruby Conference in 2026 (+ hidden discount)

The schedule, speakers, and why the conference is engineered for your success

The conference is happening from Nov 10-12 at the iconic SFJAZZ.

Small and big teams get two tracks, and these tracks weave. So, when a big-team speaker is on stage, the small-team audience is in an organized conversation group, then they swap. 50% of the time, you get to hear the talks that fit you and meet people during the other half.

On the main stage, you can listen to talks from Ryan Sherlock (Fin), Irina Nazarova (Evil Martians), Chris Oliver (GoRails), Rosa Gutiérrez (37signals), Vladimir Dementyev (Evil Martians), Carmine Paolino (RubyLLM), Marco Roth (Herb), Madison Sites (Order.co), and many more.

Every speaker was hand-picked based on the message we want the conference to carry, including many who you might not normally see on stage. For example, we screened GitHub for people actively building in Ruby open source to find Jason Thomas, who will present 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!

The conversation rooms are themed-based and you’ll be invited based on the interests you share with us in the ticket purchase process. These include: startup founders meeting engineers who would enjoy working there, founders meeting with VCs, big teams sharing agentic coding best practices, or big companies meeting engineers for hiring purposes. See the full schedule.

Inside these rooms you get to introduce yourself for sixty seconds on stage in front of 70-100 people. So, you’ll walk out knowing exactly who to find later! Teams of five or more get extended time and slides to present the company to a room of people with similar interests.

The days are 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 you only want to come for one day this year, you can buy single-day tickets for $350.

Day three is for fun community events, these are optional but we recommend you do not sleep on them! If you want to host a community event, send us your idea: conference@sfruby.com.

What this conference does on a bigger level

We’re building the next generation of 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 the room: teammates, tooling, SDKs, clouds, a support network, and the person who solved last week the same problem they’re currently facing.

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 who obssess over a problem and build such a good solution that end up proving the rest of the world wrong.

We strongly believe the only way to move the ecosystem forward is by talking to each other about our struggles and collectively thinking of ways to solve them.

This is actually the story of how we found Inertia Rails! Irina interviewed multiple founders for her Startups on Rails keynote at RailsConf 2024. Most of them complained about not being able to build React frontends, they were always told to “use Hotwire.” That wasn’t good enough for them, so those founders ended up hiring frontend engineers who know TypeScript. Instead, we went looking for a better solution and found Inertia.

Svyatoslav Kryukov now leads that work at Evil Martians. He makes upstream contributions, inertia-rails.dev, writes blog posts, participates in production projects, and educates others on it at conferences. Now, most people recommend Inertia Rails when someone asks how to pair Rails with React.

Svyat is also speaking at this year’s conference 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.” You can ask them questions about these topics at SFJAZZ.

More reasons to come

1. What does agentic Rails look like in production?

Your job for the next few years depends on the answer. We have talks from people who’ve already adopted agentic Rails in production:

• Ryan Sherlock scales Fin, the AI customer service agent that grew out of Intercom with 150,000 HTTPS requests per second at peak from a Rails monolith. His talk is titled: “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 in January 2025. It’s one interface to every major AI provider with 11 million downloads and more than 4,000 GitHub stars. He’s preesenting a talk on RubyLLM 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 will be in the same 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 solve in three days:

• Your job queue: Rosa Gutiérrez built Solid Queue at 37signals and is giving a talk on SolidQueue’s two years on Rails. Ben Sheldon wrote GoodJob. Phillip Campbell scales the Sidekiq workloads that run payroll at Gusto. These are three different people you can approach to solve questions about your background jobs.
• 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 part makes the ticket pay for itself for different reasons:

• If you’re looking, you can already know who’s hiring on jobs board and approach them at the conference. There are 59 open Ruby and Rails roles from 41 companies, GitHub, Chime, Gusto, Persona, AngelList, Middesk and Omada among them. Gusto, Persona, and Chime are sending their team to the converence. Those hiring managers may sit in your networking group, and you get at least 60-seconds to say introduce yourself.

• If you’re building something, you can use the conversation rooms as an opportunity to demo your product to a filtered audience of engineers and founders. If you’re shipping a developer tool, this is the best place to sell your product.

• If you maintain a gem, the matching puts you in a group with people who are already using your tools. You hear all 70 to 100 introductions and find your actual users. You can then ask questions and improve your tool with edge cases.

• 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. This way you arrive and already know your crew.

4. Having fun comes with a reward

We created a pre-conference game called “The Pier.” You can complete quests, talk to people, get to know our sponsors, and earn coins as you play. The game helps you get a feel for who’s coming, what they’re working on, and how to approach them in real life. But also, the coins you win in the game can be exchanged for real life prizes, including a consultation with our backend team or a raffle for TRMNL devices. Oh, and here’s an early gift before buying (applied at checkout).

Meet the Rails community in San Francisco

Day three is for having fun as a community. It can be a walk, a bike ride, an ocean swim, a hackathon, whatever people organize. Send your community day activity to: conference@sfruby.com.

If you write Ruby, maintain open source, are weighing your next role, or are scaling something on Rails, come! Regular tickets are $500 through November 8, 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 and 10% off.

Get your tickets to SF Ruby Conference 2026.