iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

RubyLLM is such an incredibly clean interface for building apps that use AI! I appreciate @paolino.me's passion for simple interfaces and the philosophy behind it.

Carmine points at a slide:
This is Ruby's time to shine in AI

Carmine on stage. Slide says:
The RubyLLM Philosophy
1. Simple should be simple, complex should be possible
2. Models and providers are commodities
3. Convention over configuration
4. Progressive disclosure
5. One API, for One Person, in One Machine

Carmine pointing at a slide demoing RubyLLM.

Track usage with RubyLLM
```
response = RubyLLM.chat(model: "gemini-2.5-flash").ask("What's the oldest known example of conifers?")
response.input_tokens
# => 12
response.output_tokens
# => 1279
```

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I was really excited about @josevalim.bsky.social's talk because I'd heard good things about Tidewave, but now I'm more excited by some of the suggestions he made. The idea of a runtime API for fetching documentation is fascinating to me! www.rubyevents.org/talks/naviga... #sfruby

José pointing at the slides, face serious.

José addressing the crowd, the slide next to him says:

Integrate coding agents into what you are building
- Writing scripts, libraries, frameworks => EDITOR
- Building web applications => BROWSER
- Running data analysis and reports => NOTEBOOKS
- Crafting a game => GAME EDITOR

Unified documentation
- Hard to access, no metaprogramming, no doctests
- Proposal: runtime API to fetch documentation (see Python, Elixir, Clojure, PHP)
- Proposal: unified documentation website

José addresses the audience, next to him is the slide:

Structured templates
- ERB builds HTML using string interpolation
- No structure, no validations
- HERB(HTML+ERB) to the rescue?

000

Congratulations to @miss-tia.bsky.social on her first conference talk!!🎉 She's been working on pom, an app that brings together journaling, gardening, and recipes to promote peace of mind. www.rubyevents.org/talks/peace-...

Tia standing beneath her slide:

Peace, Love, and CRUD:
Finding Calm in the Chaos–With Ruby, AI, and a Little Garden Magic

Tia Anderson - Newish Rubyist and creator of: pom

020

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 21/11/2025

I GOT MY RUBY PASSPORT!!!! ❤️🛂 Thank you to @sfruby.com and @therubypassport.com for organizing an embassy!! ❤️❤️❤️

An open Ruby Passport in front of a window overlooking the tarmac at SFO. An attempt has been made to make block letters and emulate a real passport, but it has failed. The ink is smudged and dates have been scratched out and updated. The photo is a stiff, dead-eyed smileless stare like a real passport.

First name: RACHAEL
Last name: WRIGHT-MUNN
Date of birth: (left blank)
Nationality: UNITED STATES
Signature: (squiggly ChaelCodes signature)
Date and event of issue: 19 Nov 2025 SF Ruby
Date and version when you started using Ruby: 10 Jul 2014, 2.1
Date and version when you started using Rails: 03 Mar 2015, 4.2.0

Colorful flag pennants adorn the wall as two volunteers help someone with their first Ruby Passport.

Colorful flag pennants adorn the wall, and props cover the table. The photographer stands by, waiting for the next Rubyist.

092

I really liked @adrianthedev.com's talk about the asset pipeline. The historical perspective and comparison of different ways to handle js and assets was interesting. Especially how to include assets in gems (like Avo)! www.rubyevents.org/talks/master...

Adrian on stage emoting with the audience.

Adrian on stage next to a slide:

What did we learn?
- The asset pipeline is powerful
- importmaps is low-hanging fruit
- esbuild is powerful and easy to integrate
- we can create gems with perfectly delivered assets

Adrian introduces a summary of the talk.

Summary
1. What are assets?
2. How it was in the ol' days
3. Why do we have an asset pipeline?
4. Where are we now
5. How can we leverage it to build effective Rails plugins

130

Learning about building MCP tooling to better understand your application with @baweaver.bsky.social was fascinating!! The questions AI is able to answer when it has access to introspection from Packwerk and Rails is really cool!

Packed Blackbox Theatre - standing room only. Brandon stands at the podium, the slide says "...but What if AI? MCP Tools"

Brandon addresses the audience. The slide is slightly washed out from sunlight.

Macro Tools
QueryPackwerkTool
Comprehensive Packwerk query with multiple query types:
- packages - List all packs
- violations - Basic violation counts
- ownership - Who owns what
- patterns - Most violated code with usage patterns
- consumers - Who uses a pack
- producers - What a pack uses
- graph - Full architecture analysis (dependencies, circular deps, team coupling)
- suggestions - Refactoring ideas

Brandon addresses the crowd and slide (slightly washed out from sunlight) says:

The Actual Value
- "What does my team own?" -> 2 seconds instead of 20 minutes
- "Where is this used?" -> instant instead of grepping
- "What breaks if I change this?" -> analysis instead of guessing
- "What's blocking the sprint?" -> instant instead of opening Jira
- "Find the deployment docs?" -> instant instead of searching confluence

For onboarding: Instead of 3 months to understand the codebase + tools + processes, maybe 3 weeks.

For daily work: Less context switching between tools.

000

Herb continues to enable incredible advances in the developer experience of html+erb thanks to @marcoroth.dev's work. There was a spontaneous round of applause for the new error page of ReActionView. Even as I was getting my mic, I was on tiptoe trying to see what the latest is. reactionview.dev

Marco on stage. The slide "Herb to ReActionView: A New Foundation for the View Layer"

Marco on stage next to a slide "Ruby is elegant. Ruby is expressive. Ruby is a joy."

192

To start off the conference @inazarova.bsky.social thanked everyone who was involved in making this conference happen and reminded us why we're here–to learn how to build the future in Ruby!

Irina speaking on stage, gesturing with a serious expression in an iconic orange vinyl off-shoulder dress with a white mesh long sleeve shirt under it.

Irina on stage flanked by a slide that says "How to build the future in Ruby".

Irina smiling mischievously as she prepares to announce the mystery host of the conference.

031

I love how cool and zen the zero gravity lounge is. This and the Ruby Warrior room are my go-to places to hide and be comfy.

Evil Martians socks hidden in the end tables.

A sign saying "ATTENTION ZERO GRAVITY" painted on the wall, and a flashing alarm light above the door.

A dim room with red lighting and modern curved angular couches. Imagine an octagon but with 3 segments missing.

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Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 19/11/2025

This venue is absolutely gorgeous!! I'm loving the transparent chairs and conference spaces!

Long modern tables with transparent chairs in rows for the workshop studio.

A crowded sponsor room with a screen printing setup for the t-shirts.

000

Let's go to @sfruby.com !! This time I'm trying something new and all talks and posts will be replies to this post.

A view of the bay flying into SF. The sun is shining. The water glitters. Clouds hover delicately over the horizon.

No trip to SF is complete without In-N-Out! Me and Max Tiu with burgers and fries.

A view of the water from the walk to the venue. A gnarled tree overhangs the sidewalk.

A view of the venue, the bay, and the bridge. The venue is a low, industrial building that sits on a pier above the water. A sign - San Francisco Ruby Conference - hangs over the door.

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Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 22/10/2025

I can't wait to see everyone at @sfruby.com ! These cloud cards were a fun little surprise in my inbox, and I'm really curious about everything else the organizers have in store. Tickets are $350 until tomorrow. luma.com/sfrubyconf2025

AI-generated image of Chael playing with a Ruby and a train in the clouds.

Join Rachal Wright-Munn at the San Francisco Ruby Conference on November 19-21
sfruby.com

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Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 15/10/2025

We visited the National Gallery of Victoria. These were a few of my favorites!

Ancestor of the poäng, made by Ubunji Kidokoro.

Gallery with red walls, completely covered in paintings from floor to ceiling.

000

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 15/10/2025

Good morning! Some photos from the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne for you!

Beautiful tropical flowers in vivid yellows and reds.

An Australasian swamp hen and it's baby!! The baby is a tiny black fluff with the biggest feet.

Gorgeous succulents in pastel blue, green, and pink.

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Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 14/10/2025

TFW you go to write a sassy BlueSky post about GitHub's contribution graph widget, but then you remember that you have friends at GitHub, and maybe they know the people who built it, and ask yourself, "How would they feel reading this post?" and you have to write one about self-reflection instead.

An image of the GitHub contribution graph widget, GitHub's only widget, that honestly, no one asked for, and isn't particularly helpful on a mobile phone screen because it only updates once a day, and no one ever urgently needs this information in an easily accessible way.

But it might've been a hackathon project, or an experiment with making widgets for Android on an easy target. It was someone's project and they built it, and useful or not, it works.

020

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 14/10/2025

Guess I'll have to go get some more.

Snow-capped mountains in Victoria. Photo taken from the sky with a plane wing.

Neon sun sits on the horizon with dark clouds below.

Rachael and Ken (my husband) on the plane. Rachael is smiling and Ken looks like he'd prefer to go to sleep.

110

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 12/10/2025

Awww... I'm out of vegemite. :(

100

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 10/10/2025

Thus far, you've been level-headed, empathetic, and transparent. I appreciate that. I think it's important that users of gem.coop know: - Were you aware of André's proposal to RC of selling PII associated with gem usage data? - Did you know he talked to Mike Perham about buying it?

Reddit comment from mperham:

Andre has always been exploring ideas for sustaining rubygems maintenance and paying the team a fair wage. That was the ethos behind Ruby Together.

In this case I have first hand knowledge since he pitched me on the idea: would Sidekiq, being a big sponsor of Ruby Central in the past, be interested if rubygems could somehow use the remote IP to identify the companies downloading the `sidekiq` gem so I could use that to upsell those companies to Sidekiq Pro, i.e. send them a cold email? Lead generation tools are common and valuable to literally every company. I pay $1000/mo and get a set of leads every month. Seems reasonable.

I can see how your worst case scenarios might paint this in a bad light. We never discussed edge cases or privacy concerns as he was just spitballing this idea. That's as far as it got and you can see the same level of thought in his email they published. Hope that clarifies the intent.

Email from andre@arko.net, sent on Aug 3, 2025
Subject: Secondary on-call proposal

Hi Marty, here's a written up version of the proposal that I mentioned on Friday. Let me know what you think.

### In Brief

I'd like to offer Ruby Central a contract to cover secondary on-call in exchange for a copy of the gem download access logs.

### Background

Since Ruby Central has run out of funds for a secondary on-call, and maintenance budget has been so limited, I've been brainstorming options. Yesterday I met someone who has had some success building a system to analyze download logs from a package registry and using those kids to determine which companies are installing the packages. From our conversations, the market overall isn't enough to run a company and hire employees, but seems like it could cover the costs of paying for secondary on-call. If it's more successful than expected, I would be open to potentially using it to pay the costs of primary on-call as well.

I believe this is a win-win because Ruby Central will get secondary on-call coverage that it needs but currently can't afford, and my consultancy will have a project to build that could bring us revenue in the future while we are still getting set up and are low on client work.

### Detailed proposal

My consultancy would sign a contact with Ruby Central to provide secondary on-call coverage, with rotations and shifts coverage handled by us internally. We could offer to respond to escalated alerts (from the primary on-call to us as the secondary) within 30 minutes, any time of day or night. In exchange, we would receive access to a copy of the RubyGems.org HTTP access logs.

If we are successful at turning download logs into companies using packages and versions, we would be happy to report back what we're able to determine, and make an agreement to provide that information for future RubyGems.org paid organizations customers.

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Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 09/10/2025

During Hacktoberfest, I normally like to explore, push myself, and contribute to other people's projects. Today on stream, we added a "Mutual Events" tab to a profile on RubyEvents.org, so you can see which events you and someone else are both attending!! Super special thanks to @marcoroth.dev. ✨

193

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 09/10/2025

They have this map. Obviously I'm looking forward to getting my Ruby passport, and I'm sure the lounges will be interesting. But what is this secret experience?

Map of SF Ruby Conference's venue.

There are food trucks. 2 theaters - Blackbox and Main Stage. 2 lounges - Zero Gravity and Spacesuits. A workshop studio. There's a Ruby Embassy room.

Then there's a room labeled "Secret Experience".

021

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 30/09/2025

I'm talking about this screenshot.

AWS Page showing the rubygems-production-14 database. The actions panel is open and "Stop temporarily" is highlighted.

200

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 29/09/2025

In January, his role expanded to leadership of RubyGems and Bundler. rubycentral.org/news/alpha-o...

Marty Haught’s Expanded Leadership Role as Director of Open Source

As our Interim Open Source Lead since August 2024, Marty Haught has been instrumental in guiding our open source efforts. We are thrilled for Marty to transition from a part-time to a full-time role as Director of Open Source, where he will provide dedicated leadership for Ruby Central’s Open Source Program.

Specifically, Marty will focus on:

Leadership of RubyGems and Bundler teams:
Marty will continue to provide leadership for the RubyGems and Bundler teams, overseeing their operations and ensuring that the core infrastructure remains secure, reliable, and adaptable to developer needs. This includes managing day-to-day operations and ensuring the health and sustainability of RubyGems.org.

Operationalizing security for RubyGems:
Marty will build a robust security strategy, starting by overseeing the completion of a security inventory of RubyGems’ policies, systems, and services, building on the Trail of Bits security audit.

Building a security-minded community: Marty will spearhead the creation of a security-focused community within the Ruby ecosystem. This includes forming a security working group of Ruby committers, key gem maintainers, and enterprise customers to engage in dialogue around best practices and address security gaps.

100

Rachael Wright-Munn @chael.codes · 25/09/2025

Today's stream over at twitch.tv/ChaelCodes went well, despite some issues with connectivity. I added PgSearch to MeetAnother.day, and it was shockingly smooth and easy! You can now search for profiles by name or handle. PR: github.com/ChaelCodes/M...

021

We just gathered everyone who was left at the end of the conference and headed over to Six Feet Under. Then we played post-conference mini-golf at Puttshack! It was a fantastic way to end a very full day of conferencing!

A table of 12 Rubyists in a seafood-focused pub.

Thomas, Matt, Chael, Thomas, Kat, and Jeremy all smiling under a glowing neon Ruby sign.

000

Kylie's overview of SAST in Ruby applications was so helpful! Lately, I've been thinking a lot about security on meetanother.day. This talk let me confidently close one issue and focus on the CodeQL workflows that are available for free for open-source apps on GitHub!

Kylie smiles delightedly as she describes:

Sensibility of Ruby
Tools (often gems) are:
- easy to use
- fast to set up
- naturally fit into workflow

Kylie describes a common vulnerability in Ruby.

Ruby Vulnerability - Mass Assignment
code sample demonstrating a mass assignment vulnerability

Kylie breaks down exactly which vulnerabilities each SAST tool covers.

It's a table showing what each tool sees or misses.

- All tools caught Insecure Deserialization
- CodeQL caught all listed vulnerabilities
- Brakeman and Opengrep caught everything except cross file data flows
- Code QL is the only one that caught cross file data flows

110

Javier Zon talked about issues he sees as a DBA and how to resolve them on the application side.

Javier dramatically gestures in front of the title slide.

FROM Expensive Queries
TO Smart Caching
A DBA's Guide for Rails

Javier highlights a giant uptick in connections, starting in August.

100

I loved this talk by @jeremysmith.co about ViewComponents. It has valuable insights, even if you're not using it. His insights about view complexity, volatility, and churn are spot-on! www.rubyevents.org/talks/refact...

Jeremy Smith behind the podium, microphone in hand.

Jeremy addresses the audience next to a slide:

Dimensions of View Complexity
Browsers/Clients
Viewports
Device Features
Theming/Whitelabeling
Dark/Light Mode
Accessibility
Internationalization
SEO/Open Graph
Authorization
Entitlements
Feature Flags
Framework/Version Changes
Execution Context
Testing Affordances
Design Systems/Tokens

Jeremy describes how views become complex and volatile.

Churn
Changed seven times, might not be done

Accumulation
Icon, counter, dropdown, non-tabs, etc.

Variation
Tab type, selected state, authorization, etc

Proliferation
Team wants to use this in another section

Summary

1. Implement designs in traditional templates
2. Watch for volatility (high churn & complexity)
3. Extract view components and regain stability

130

Igor Aleksandrov talked through why they moved from react to hotwire and stimulus and how it made it easier to ship code faster!

Igor gestures at the screen.

React was becoming our bottleneck
Each new feature required:
- Backend developer (Rails API)
- Frontend developer (React)
- Manager coordination
- API contract design
- State management planning
- Integration testing

Team bandwidth: Limited developers, unlimited ambition
Timeline pressure: 4 major features, 1 year deadline

Igor speaks to the audience beside the slide:

When AI changed the development game

2024 context: AI goes mainstream
- GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude become standard tools
- Stakeholders' expectations shifted dramatically

New requirements: higher efficiency expected
- "If AI can write code, why is development still slow?"
- Pressure to deliver features faster than ever

Zero tolerance for bugs
- "AI should help prevent errors, not create complexity"
- Quality expectations increased alongside speed demands

110

This talk started so much conversation and dialog, because we all know we need junior developers to keep our community alive, but no one wants to pay for them. "People need food and housing to learn." "Juniors are an asset, not a liability." www.rubyevents.org/talks/empty-...

Thomas face is full of heart as he connects with the audience.

"People need food and housing to learn" Thomas stands next to this absolute banger of a quote.

"Juniors are an asset, not a charity case or liability" Thomas next to another incredible quote.

Thomas ended his talk with a quote from his mentee.

"In my experience, companies have basically pivoted away from creating an onboarding process or junior to senior pipeline.

I'm not sure if it's due to AI or that the senior devs aren't equipped with the skills necessary to develop such programs. However, I can say that if you don't want to future proof your company that is a phenomenal approach to take.

Senior devs retire. Junior devs who are brought up within your ranks will become senior devs. You should prioritize junior devs and onboarding before you start slashing roles for budgets, because what might save you now will only hurt you (or your company) later." - Josh O'Halloran

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