Why Evil Martians hosted a Ruby conference in San Francisco
“I really wanted to have something to look forward to. I didn’t want to feel like RailsConf was the end.” – Irina Nazarova, Evil Martians CEO
Since March 2024, we’ve been running monthly SF Ruby meetups. The demand was clear: developers wanted connection, companies wanted to host, speakers wanted to share. We took that signal and scaled it up to the San Francisco Ruby Conference: 400+ Ruby engineers at Fort Mason, three days of technical talks and startup demos.
Why San Francisco needs Ruby (and vice versa)
Here’s the technical reality: “Ruby is best for ambitious startups that are not just building once—they are iterating, they’re changing their offering, their product, they are looking for a new audience. This is when Ruby works best.” – Irina
Support SF Ruby
Become a post-production sponsor and help bring these invaluable talks to developers worldwide.
The proof surrounds us in San Francisco. GitHub, Stripe, Heroku, Chime, New Relic, Cisco, Figma—all built on Ruby. The next wave is already here: Cactus (Y Combinator’s latest batch), Finta, Ubicloud, Stepful, Cora Computer.
These represent deliberate technical choices by teams that understand Ruby’s superpower: shipping fast without sacrificing maintainability.
But here’s the problem: startup founders in SF weren’t traveling to Ruby conferences.
“Usually they will not travel somewhere for a Ruby and Rails conference. Why? I mean they are builders, they are too busy. That’s why we brought the conference here. So they can demo, find engineers, and build their team.” – Irina
Why Evil Martians?
We’re a developer tools consultancy; perhaps the developer tools consultancy. We help 30-40 early-stage startups annually transform from proof-of-concept to profitable. We’ve built 100+ open source projects. We know what makes developers productive.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are doing a lot of Ruby on Rails open source. Rails was always on the forefront of developer experience.” – Irina
But there’s more than that. We maintain AnyCable for real-time Rails apps at scale. We built PostCSS that powers CSS processing for millions of websites. We created Overmind for better process management. These aren’t side projects. They’re production tools, solving real problems.
“Personally, I do this for one reason: this is the ecosystem we’ve chosen at Evil Martians. It works best for us to help our customers grow into unicorns. I want pragmatism and intellectual honesty to win over hype and well-funded marketing.” – Irina
Six months from vision to execution
“How about we go crazy and take a leap of faith—build this conference in six months?” – Irina
We had the infrastructure: monthly meetups running since March, community connections, technical expertise.
The goal was specific: “Connect passionate Ruby developers and open source authors with startup founders building with Ruby in San Francisco.”
Every detail was taken into account: the transparent chairs, the Cloud Cards (AI-powered personal invitations using RubyLLM), the SpacePulse emotion-detecting lights, the live screen-printed t-shirts—all were designed to show Ruby’s technical capabilities while creating memorable experiences.
Technical and community impact
Fort Mason, November 19-21, 2025. The numbers tell part of the story:
- 410 Ruby engineers
- 23 startup demos showcasing production Ruby implementations
- Sponsors running Ruby at scale: Bolt.new, Chime, Cisco, Gusto, Intercom, PlanetScale, Temporal, Omada Health, Thatch, Finta, Avo, AngelList, GitButler and more
- Technical talks covering YJIT performance, MCP tooling, Rails at 2 million MySQL requests/second
But the technical depth of the conference matters more than attendance.
ChaelCodes documented the technical talks: “Marco Roth demonstrated Herb, an HTML-aware ERB parser… Vladimir painted a picture of a future ideal Rails X version.”
Adrian Marin framed the bigger picture: “SF Ruby made a statement: Ruby and Rails is still powering big and upcoming companies… The new generation of Shopify-level companies.”
Ruby AI News captured the technical significance: “Ruby now has the pieces in place to build what comes next. It has the generative AI libraries, the context engineering tools, the agentic protocol servers.”
The Remote Ruby podcast highlighted what matters: “The focus on startups and entrepreneurship… the thing that really drives me is sitting down and talking to customers.”
Even the surprise open-water swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz happened: four developers actually did it, including Brittany Martin Springer and Ben Sheldon.
Thank you to our community
This conference was only possible through the dedication of many incredible people!
Organizers and Team:
- Program Committee: Maple Ong (Gusto), Cameron Dutro (Cisco), Noel Rappin (Chime), Vladimir Dementyev (Evil Martians)
- Speaker liaison: Aurelie Verrot (Zendesk)
- Volunteer coordinator: Steven Ancheta (Gemini Legal)
- Scholarship Program: Gary Tou (Hack Club)
- Organization and Vendors: Aleksander Berdiugin and Amanda Kinney (Evil Martians)
- Design: Anton Lovchikov and Yaroslav Lozhkin (Evil Martians)
- Marketing: Victoria Melnikova (Evil Martians)
- Software: Vladimir Dementyev and Irina Nazarova (Evil Martians)
Our generous sponsors:
- Pickaxe Sponsors: Bolt.new, Chime, Cisco
- Ruby Sponsors: Gusto, Temporal, Omada Health, Avo, Thatch, Finta, PlanetScale, Intercom, AngelList
- Reception Sponsor: GitButler
- Emerald Sponsors: Saeloun, Binti, Typesense, Planet Argon, Cactus, Visuality, Ubicloud, Uscreen, Superconductor, CompanyCam, WyeWorks, Beyond
- Travel Sponsors: Tidewave, Hack Club, EzCater
Amazing speakers:
- Marco Roth, Vladimir Dementyev, Rachael Wright-Munn, Noel Rappin, JP Camara, Takashi Kokubun, Justin Bowen, Adrian Marin, Sam Poder, Dave Thomas, Paweł Strzałkowski, Brandon Shar, Svyatoslav Kryukov, Brian Knoles, Obie Fernandez, Carmine Paolino, Colleen Schnettler, Stephan Hagemann, Jeremy Evans, Sarah Mei, Mike Perham, Fito von Zastrow, Alan Ridlehoover, Brandon Weaver, Ben Sheldon, Kasper Timm Hansen, Tia Anderson, Enrique Carlos Mogollán, Evgeny Li, André Arko, José Valim, Eugene Kenny
- Inspiring startups that demoed: Bolt.new, Stepful, AccessGrid, Suppli, NexHealth, Simple AI, Sixfold, Cactus, CorePilot, Tend, Spinel (SunChaser.io), Cora, Terminalwire, Superconductor, Mainwoven (powered by AI Squared), Recognize, Fin (by Intercom), Ubicloud, ChatWithWork, Thatch, Finta, AngelList, PlanetScale, llamapress, Cleary, Bemi
Thanks to the amazing group of 30 volunteers who helped make this happen.
…and most importantly: Thanks to every single attendee who took the leap of faith with us to make SF Ruby Conference a reality!
The path forward
“The promise of Rails is getting fulfilled. People have just not caught up with this reality yet.” – Irina
SF Ruby was a technical statement. We’re fighting skepticism with running code. We’re bringing Ruby-powered startups into production at scale. We’re building the tools the ecosystem needs.
The talk recordings are coming soon! Look out for those and see where Ruby is heading: Rails X. Herb and ReActionView. RubyLLM with async fibers. MCP tooling for Rails applications.
Stay tuned!
