Rocky Mountain Ruby 2026 Recap

Rocky Mountain Ruby 2026 🔗

This post is not intended as a review of any of the talks, but to highlight the variety of great work from all involved. I hope you’ll seek out the full videos of all the sessions that interest you once they are available.

Day 1 🔗

InstiLLMent of Successful Practices in an Agentic World 🔗

Thanks to everyone for joining me to start the program.

Confident On-Call: Building Incident Response Skills as a Ruby Engineer 🔗

Sonja Peterson provided an excellent case to demonstrate how on-call work can be improved through better rotation onboarding, active incident management, and intentional post-mortems.

Beyond Senior: Consider the staff path! 🔗

Joel Hawksley shared how Staff Engineer experiences differ widely, starting by sharing his progression and expanding to what he’s learned through interviews with other Staff colleagues.

Modeling Class Hierarchies in Active Record 🔗

Nicolas Erlichman provided the benefits and downsides to single table inheritance (STI), pure abstract classes, and delegated types.

Slowly We Rot: signs of a Rails app’s decay 🔗

Fernando Perales demonstrated how flakey tests, unoptimized factory usage, the wrong level of testing, and code pattern deviations can lead to rot in your application.

Commit for Good 🔗

Ben Reubenstein presented a case for engaging in skills-based volunteering. Beyond the obvious benefits to the organization, you get to try new things and meet new people.

Your own AI Agent in ~400 lines of Ruby 🔗

Drew Bragg utilized HTTP, JSON, and loops to build an AI agent - it’s just that simple!

Got AI ontological shock? No worries: UFOs, Theology, and Psychedelics with Ruby-Colored Reverence 🔗

Travis Turner compared AI’s impact on humans with other experiences like aliens, drugs, and religion.

Day 2 🔗

Herb in Rails 8.2: Your ERB views, now HTML-aware 🔗

Marco Roth presented two talks in his session (by accident). I was impressed by all the LSP features in Herb. I’m intrigued by the experimental Async component, but am curious how that may discourage separation of concerns.

High-Octane Onboarding: Ramping into a Rails Codebase with AI Agents 🔗

Andrea Fomera shared best practices for an onboarding experience guided by AI.

Optimize Your Mindset (Without Overclocking) 🔗

Christine Seeman presented a series of strategies for applying mindfulness, habit building, growth mindset, and deep work into your life.

Building an Agentic RAG in the Rails Way with RubyLLM 🔗

Giovanni Panasiti presented how to utilize RubyLLM in Rails apps.

Fewer Tests, More Confidence: A Rails Testing Philosophy for the AI Era 🔗

Ifat Ribon demonstrated how to test behavior (not implementation), keep tests deterministic, balance coverage with cost, and use good test design to promote good code design.

Lightning Talks 🔗

Congrats to Rachael Wright-Munn, Marc Heiligers, Miles Georgi, Connor Shea, Jim Remsik, Jason Brown, Marco Roth, Andy Rusterholz, and Katya Sarmiento on their talks.

Indispensable: What Human Programmers Can Learn from Human Computers 🔗

Alan Ridlehoover provided a history lesson about human computers at JPL Project Mercury and the applicability today.

Closing 🔗

This was my first time at Rocky Mountain Ruby. It was a comfortable space that provided an opportunity for deep connection. Thanks to the organizers and volunteers for coming together so that we could all come together during the event.