Last week, I attended RailsConf 2025, which was one of the highlights of my career. An occasion to meet people, learn, and celebrate the conference for the last time.

In this article, I will share some of the key takeaways from the conference. It was fun and inspiring. I hope to transmit some of that to you.

Fireside Chat With DHH

Throughout the entire first day of the conference, DHH was present, talking to people, answering questions, and sharing tips on VIM and Hyprland. It was a great opportunity to meet him and learn from his experience.

DHH came to speak about the current state and the future of web development as a whole and how Rails fits into that picture. He emphasized the importance of simplicity and developer happiness, which are core principles of Rails.

In essence, he argued that complexity in JavaScript and CSS was compressed, and both are way simpler to understand and use nowadays. He concludes that there’s no need to be a purist who only wants to write Ruby code.

He also took some time to criticize the current state of infrastructure, particularly the over-reliance on cloud services and slow build times. He couldn’t be more right.

Quite recently, I have been experiencing the pain of slow builds and deployments where a one-line change was taking nearly an hour to get deployed.

Rails also simplified this with Kamal, which allows for quick deployments and rollbacks, making it easier to manage infrastructure without the complexity of traditional cloud.

Hack Spaces

The second day of the conference was dedicated to hack spaces, where attendees could work on projects, collaborate, and learn from project maintainers like Chris Oliver, Marco Roth, Rosa Gutierrez, and others.

During this day, I was talking to a lot of people about their projects, how they use Rails, and what challenges they face. It was a great opportunity to learn from others and share my own experiences.

Aji’s Opening Keynote

The last day of the conference couldn’t be more inspiring. Aji delivered an open keynote where they walked through all RailsConf keynotes, highlighting the key takeaways and insights from each talk. They mentioned the importance of diversity and inclusion in the tech community and how RailsConf has been a platform for underrepresented voices in the community.

I looked into AJi’s LinkedIn headline, and it says “Software storyteller”. It makes so much sense. I would be speaking in a few hours. I was a bit nervous, but after Aji’s talk, I felt inspired. At that point, I was convinced that nothing could go wrong.

The Future Of: PWAs on Rails

Talking about the conference and not highlighting my talk would be a mistake. Since I arrived in Philadelphia, I was well-treated by everybody from Ruby Central. Also, the committee was very supportive and helpful.

I loved to be on stage. Many people attended the talk. I expected, and wished, to see people there, but I was very surprised by how many were there.

To make everything special, among friends I met there were also two of my references in the Rails community: Rosa Gutierrez and Cody Norman.

Rosa Gutierrez implemented Solid Queue and was a committee member of RailsConf 2025. She is a great person and a fantastic developer. I had the pleasure of meeting her in person and talking about her work and experiences.

Cody Norman was a speaker at RailsConf 2024. This guy talked about ActionMailbox. In such a specific topic, he delivered a joyful talk.

Having Cody in the crowd was special because he’s one of my references in talk submissions and speaking. His CFP submission, available at Speakerline.io, and his article, The Road To RailsConf 2024, were very inspiring.

Marco Roth’s Talk on HERB

Another highlight of the conference was Marco Roth’s talk on HERB.

🌿 Herb — a fast, modern, and HTML-aware ERB parser, designed from the ground up for developer tooling.

I had heard about HERB before, but I don’t think I had paid attention to it until attending this talk. For me, HERB was just a new templating engine. But it’s not. As the doc says, it is about tooling.

It’s such an amazing collection of tools that, for me, are promising and can be a game changer for the Rails community. I always missed a good formatter for ERB.

There are so many tools. Marco has been working a lot!

Tenderlove’s Closing Keynote

Since I became aware of Tenderlove’s work, I have been a fan. Same for his talks. He is a great speaker, and in my interaction with him, he seemed to be a great person as well.

His talks are funny and engaging. This wasn’t different. He walked through his history as a keynote speaker at RailsConf.

As he was recalling his journey, the crowd could notice at least two things: he speaks a lot about performance, and he is always doing some cool experiments.

In one of these experiments, he managed to save an SQLite database inside a Ruby file. In another, got PHP working inside of Ruby.

One would ask: why? Why would you want to do that? Aaron’s answer is simple and exciting: because it was fun!

I love this answer. I think programming is one of the few activities in which one can have fun doing useless experiments.

I call them “useless” because they don’t have a practical application, at first glance, but they are fun to do. Aaron thinks we need more people programming for fun, and I couldn’t agree more.

He links this to the AI moment we are living, with a very good provocation:

If LLMs already existed, would Rails have been created? Would we have the same level of innovation and creativity in the community?

Think about. In those Java days, editing XML files was painful. LLMS would have handled that since they don’t get tired of repetitive tasks. There would be no need for innovation, creativity, or fun.

AIs cannot program for fun.

Conclusion

It was such a privilege to attend RailsConf 2025. I learned a lot, met amazing people, and had a lot of fun. A huge thanks to Ruby Central, the committee, and Codeminer42 for encouraging and supporting me to attend this conference.

A new chapter starts in the Ruby on Rails community. I hope we can have fun programming and innovating together.

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