SF Ruby Meetup, March @ Cisco Meraki · Luma Hey, Bay Area builders and tinkerers, In March, SF Ruby meetup is hosted by our friends from Cisco Meraki ⚡️ CFP is open, send your talk details here:…

I’m giving a talk next week at #SFRuby on March 24! If you’re in the area, stop by 🙂 luma.com/aewyiph8?tk=...

Hey there, the next #SFRuby meetup is *today*, hosted by Persona 💙
Here’s the plan:
5:00 pm doors open, refreshments, and the latest ~rumors~ news.

Friends, we're meeting on January 22 for the next #SFRuby meetup at Persona HQ! I hope to see you there! We're looking for talk proposals! We are doing 10/20/30 minute presentations. Our preference:
1. demos of new and ambitious Ruby startups (just tell us what you're building with Ruby!)

Friends, the recording of the #SFRuby meetup in October at AngelList is live! Inside are talks on Zaxcel (Ruby DSL for Excel files), writing Rust extensions for Ruby, secret management with dotenvx, LiveComponent, and AI-backed domain logic in Foobara.

Always fun to speak at #SFRuby ! Go watch me ramble about Rust 😅

Hey friends, our next #SFRuby meetup is on December 18, at Intercom!
It is a Holiday Edition: bring vibes, home-cooked sweets, and your Xmas (and cold :🥶)-inspired talks!
Sign up at luma.com/sfruby
Submit a talk at forms.gle/C9HQzaT5jvwA...

🔹 Superconductor Demo at #sfruby — Multi-Agent Cloud Coding
Arjun Singh demoed an agent playground with dedicated cloud dev environments: each agent gets its own VM, browser, Rails server, and preview link.

“We want Claude and other agents to keep working even if our laptop’s closed.”

🔹 Sixfold Demo at #sfruby — Insurance Risk Intelligence
Brian Moseley talked about a system that reads 10 novels worth of material per underwriter per week and turns it into structured risk signals.

“We modelled each carrier’s risk appetite as data, then let agents make decisions inside that frame”

🔹 Fin by Intercom Demo at #sfruby — Native AI Agent + Copilot
Intercom showcased Fin, an AI customer-service agent built on LLMs, multimodal reasoning, and API-driven procedures.

“AI has superpowers. It speaks every language and works 24/7.”

🔹 Cactus Demo at #sfruby — Voice AI for Home Services
Avinash Joshi demoed a live AI phone agent that answers calls, qualifies leads, books jobs, writes summaries, and syncs to CRM — all in Ruby.

For one HVAC company alone, Cactus added $37k in extra revenue.

🔹 AI Squared Demo at #sfruby — Multiwoven (Reverse ETL)
Nagendra Hassan showed how Multiwoven brings warehouse -> SaaS syncs into one clean, Rails-driven pipeline.

- Rails monolith + pluggable workers (Sidekiq or Temporal)

“Teams don’t want more connectors, they want experiments to be fast.”

SF Ruby Conference 2025 I had an incredible time at the 2025 San Francisco Ruby Conference - two days of fantastic talks, inspiring conversations, and Ruby community magic!

I had an incredible time at SF Ruby Conference! The venue, talks, and conversations were all top tier. See why in this blog! ✨

www.chael.codes/blog/2025/11...
#sfruby #sfruby2025

Photo from WNB.rb lunch. Photo credit Dalma Boros

Me, laying on two bean bags, chatting with Tia Anderson. Photo credit Amanda Kinney

Photo of people hanging out at a bar, playing pool, in the background, Rubyists are milking about. Jeremy Smith and Jim Remsik are watching Kasper and Mike Dalton play pool.

PJ Hagerty and Chael getting a selfie at the GitButler party.

Talks are great, but the real value from conferences comes from the connections we make in downtime. ❤️

Between @wnb-rb.dev lunch, the @gitbutler.com afterparty, and unofficial get-togethers, I had a fantastic time meeting and chatting with my #rubyfriends at #sfruby!!

✨ @inazarova.bsky.social at #sfruby — Closing Words: A Moment for the Community
Irina closed the conference with a message that was quietly powerful:

- Ruby is not a trend, it’s a community with a long memory

She reminded us that: “Ruby stays alive because Rubyists stay connected.”

🔹 Sarah Mei at #sfruby — “The Hardest Part About Software Is People”
Sarah’s talk changes how you see your team

- Technical debt is usually decision-making debt: postponed choices, unclear ownership, fragile context

“The real work is making the invisible visible. Code is only one part of the job.”

🔹 Vladimir Dementyev at #sfruby — “Rails X: Reflect, Evolve, Predict”

- ActiveRecord is powerful, but power demands intention -> Rails gives freedom, teams decide how to use it

“Rails’ future isn’t authored by one person — it’s shaped by what we choose to build together.”

We already had the looking_glass gem didn't we (and that means cheshire_cat gets to come out to play 🙀)

#ai #ruby #sfruby #canigetawhatwhat #engineering

🔹 Colleen Schnettler at #sfruby — “Building Products Without Overbuilding”

- Ship constraints, not fantasies
- Business problems > frameworks

“Most founders don’t fail from under-building. They fail from building the wrong thing too well.”

🔹 Eugene Kenny at #sfruby — “Intercom Engineering: Scaling the Unscalable

- A strong “ownership culture” beats any platform tooling
- Guardrails matter more than abstractions

“You can’t scale what no one feels responsible for.”

🔹 @obiefernandez.bsky.social at #sfruby — “Performance Starts With You”

- Rails is fast enough, developers are often the bottleneck
- “Accidental complexity” compounds until it becomes culture

“You don’t scale the app. You scale the people who build the app.”

🔹 Fireside + Live Demo at #sfruby: Bolt.new (Albert Pai & Alex Kalderimis)
An unplanned fireside stepped in for the scheduled talk — and somehow turned into one of the most mind-bending sessions of the day.

- AI acts as a co-developer, guiding decisions instead of dumping code

🔹 planetscale.com — Zero-to-Sharded in Minutes
@samlambert.com at #sfruby live-sharded a MySQL cluster with zero application changes and it worked instantly.

- Vitess handles ID generation and routing

Watching “unsharded -> sharded -> serving traffic” in minutes felt unreal.

🔹 AngelList — Financial Reporting at Scale
Chamod Gamage at #sfruby showed one of the most creative engineering approaches

- Excel workbooks treated as directed graphs
- Their gem Zexcel compiles Ruby -> Excel

“When checks fail, we trace the graph to find the exact source of the mismatch”

🔹 Thatch — Modern Healthcare Benefits
@bdewater.bsky.social at #sfruby live-demoed how to set up personalized healthcare benefits for an entire team in under 10 minutes.

- Smart allowances (state-adjusted budgets)
- A wellness marketplace for leftover budget: from Kaiser plans to Oura Rings

🔹 Stepful — Healthcare Career Training

Wyatt Ades at #sfruby demoed a clean, practical product for training medical assistants and placing them into jobs, a reminder of how well Rails handles multi-party, workflow-heavy products.

🔹 Recognize — Employee Recognition Platform
Peter Philips at #sfruby showed how Recognize supports 3M+ ARR, 200+ customers, and even 80k-employee orgs, all on Rails

“Ten years of callbacks can crush throughput — so we built an event system that works in parallel.”

Vladimir on stage next to the opening slide which says "Rails" and then has a big X railroad crossing.

Brittany Martin, Amanda Kinney, Gary Tou, and Irina Nazarova standing behind a half-eaten cake that's half-vanilla and half-chocolate.

A cake with railroad tracks and a fondant train on it in the entrance.

There was a fun surprise after the closing keynote, a Rails X cake!!

#sfruby

The Dynamic Ruby Toolkit Ruby rewards thinking about types with a dynamic mindset instead of a static one. In this workshop, we’ll show how use Ruby’s dynamism to your advantage. From the humble comment to runtime type checki...

I went to @noelrappin.com's workshop! I liked the reminder to think about pure Ruby objects, and agree that data validation replaces static type checking.

I was too shy to take photos in such a cozy space, but thankfully all the workshops were recorded!

www.rubyevents.org/talks/the-dy...
#sfruby

Sarah Mei on stage - the slide next to her says "The Panic Discourse" and features a bunch of headlines panicking about AI. My favorites are "The AI coding apocalypse" and "'It's a bloodbath out there': Tech workers forced to take 'survival jobs' as AI cuts swath through workforce".

Sarah Mei on stage, the slide next to her says: Current shift: AI Coding Assistants Speculation: - Applications can be written faster - More applications will be written - More ambitious applications - More types of people can write them

Sarah Mei laughing at her own joke.

Sarah Mei looking concerned and the slide next to her reads: Our Personal Fears - I'll lose my job - Software jobs will lose prestige or pay less - The hard-won skills I have are suddenly useless - The thing I like about this job is going away

Sarah Mei is back!! I really loved how she addressed that some AI hesitancy is based on personal fears expressed as societal fears. I also completely agree with her vision of the future. But I think we'll see more small-scale niche projects too.

www.rubyevents.org/talks/the-ro...
#sfruby