Rails World 2025

Had a day mostly to myself in Amsterdam on Wednesday, drinking coffee, eating chocolates, meeting friends, visiting the Anne Frank House and generally enjoying the vibe of the city while avoiding its insalubrious corners.

I even mananged a run around the city before the conference.

David kicked off with a typical combative mixture of what’s new in Rails, his current enthusiasms and accidental set ups for Aaron’s punchlines in the closing keynote.

Omarchy seems very appealing and I do have an urge to buy a Framework machine. The independence from exploitative gatekeepers (e.g. Apple) is a theme that I can get behind. That is the ongoing, upstart, driven, energy that an established framework like Rails really benefits from.

I also deleted all the system tests for CoverageBook in 2018, so I’m well ahead on that curve.

He performs the stage role of “50% more DHH” incredibly well during the keynote, and then puts in an additional extraordinary amount of energy and personal human-time talking to folks in the hallways over the next couple of days. Not sure I ever saw a moment when he wasn’t in intense conversation with an attendee, or likely more.

I enjoyed the more “depth on new features” talks that followed David’s keynote: Rosa (offline) Joe (Hotwire Native) Adrianna (Events) Mike & Donal (even more DB/SQLite). Plus Marco’s work on the view layer is innovative, super-useful, and a huge upgrade. And the quality was as good as it’s ever been. And the talks I wanted to see, but missed through being in a different track or getting caught up in conversation will be there for me on YouTube.

The MCs, Harriet and Chris, made a great success of what is actually a horrible job: they’re “on” all day, under huge pressure and barely even get to see the talks. The after party was incredibly cool, much too cool for me really but had a good time anyway. Food good. Coffee plentiful. Sponsors friendly.

My main takeaway from this year’s event was the imperceptible additional smoothness and polish where things weren’t even wrong in the previous two editions.

Those improvements are the hallmark of a great event organiser. Which is what we are fortunate to have in Amanda Perino.

She arrived to some scepticism in parts of our community. But her positivity energy and enthusiasm have created a festival where we can all meet. Plus I genuinely—even as a conference organiser of over a decade—have no idea how she makes it so shiny and brilliant. I do know she breaks herself a little bit so we can all enjoy ourselves.

As always, some of the best parts of the conference were catching up with long-term friends. I’ve been doing this work-related socialisation thing for so long that it’s an aching hole in my year if I don’t see folks for a few days.

I don’t know how to list it really. Every conversation always seems too brief or sometimes doesn’t happen because you only see someone in passing despite all being in the same three rooms. But there’s always next year or another conference and now I have my Ruby Passport that I need to pack with stamps.

Look out for an embassy at Brighton Ruby next year.

Also, given that apparently 1999 was the peak of web development: I made a 88x31 badge.