I totally understand how programming conferences end up being held in a drab Sheraton hotel somewhere to save money. It's expensive to outfit a cool venue with the gear and operations needed to pull off a great experience for speakers, sponsors, and attendees. And while the cost of doing something more inspiring than a carpet-clad conference hotel is clear, the pay off is often fuzzy until you do. But Rails World 2024 in Toronto just made that value crystal clear. Holy smackeroli, what an incredible show!!
We had over a thousand people gathered from 57 countries in one of the coolest conference venues I've ever had the pleasure of talking to programmers in. Amanda Perino, the executive director of the Rails Foundation, and the mastermind behind Rails World, gambled on an inside/outside venue in Toronto in September, and it paid off big. Talking Rails between the trees, in the open air, and basking in the sun made for a unique and mesmerizing couple of days in Canada.
The fact that we managed to time the first beta release of Rails 8 with the conference certainly helped too. The bold leap from #NOBUILD to #NOPAAS, the release of an entire trifecta of Solid adapters (powered by SQLite by default!), and the release of Kamal 2.0 (with it's brand new purpose-built proxy!) made for perhaps the most exciting shipping season in well over a decade for Rails.
It's clear that after spending a few years in the wilderness with webpacker and whatnot, Rails has found a new stride and a new confidence to pursue its counter melody to the rest of the industry. While everyone seems resigned to slice the expertise of web development into ever thinner specialties, Rails is doubling down on the one-developer framework, the full stack, and the compression of complexity.
And while venture capitalists are moving in on developer tech from all sides, Rails is reaffirming its commitment to open source generics, and deployment strategies that don't require paying big premiums for wrappers around AWS. (You should never need a PaaS subscription to go live with Rails!).
But while both of those ingredients, a fantastic venue and a stacked shipping schedule, helped set us up for a good time, the fact that THE VIBES have so definitively turned around in the Rails ecosystem, as well as the rest of the programming world, certainly contributed too. We've now long since put those awkward first years of the decade behind us, and we're just back to having a great time celebrating competency and conceptual compression together.
And what a celebration! While I really enjoyed delivering the opening keynote, it was the session with Tobi and Matz that truly warmed my heart. I haven't had a chance to really talk with Matz for many years, to truly thank him for the incredible gift of Ruby that he just keeps delivering to us. So to do so in a session moderated by Tobi was beyond special. So too was offering Matz the Rails Lifetime Award, which apparently was the first award Matz has ever received himself. Just look at this:
Last year's recipient, Tobi, also did his part and more to make us all feel incredibly welcome on Shopify's home turf of Toronto. From the pre-game event, to the support for the conference, to the insane after party. Shopify's patronage towards Ruby and Rails is the stuff of a living legend, and the results, from their superb work on YJIT, to their strong presence on Rails Core, to their support of the Rails Foundation and Rails World. We couldn't have asked for a better host or benefactor!
Now I know all of this sounds a bit sappy at this point. Thanks going here, thanks going there, but that really is the key sentiment that I left Toronto with. Just an immense gratitude towards all the companies, contributors, and individuals working together in the Rails ecosystem for a better tomorrow. The web does not have to be as complicated as we've let it become, and here's a corner of the programming world pushing back in unison.
I mean, I've been working on The Web Problem with Ruby through Rails for well over twenty years now, but I'm as fired up as ever to push the frontier forward. And it's largely because the effort is sustained by such a broad and charitable ecosystem.
With Rails World such a roaring success -- I mean it sold out in a mere twenty minutes and still managed to surpass the hype!! -- it might look obvious in retrospect that it was always going to be like this. But it wasn't obvious at all at the outset. It took a real leap of faith from Cookpad, Doximity, Fleetio, GitHub, Intercom, Procore, and Shopify to join with 37signals in creating The Rails Foundation, without which none of this would have happened.
Because the mission for The Rails Foundation is to broaden the appeal of Rails, excite existing and new programmers in our ecosystem, and help educate them all on the latest advances with the framework. That's what the budget is for, and spending a considerable chunk of it on subsidizing Rails World serves that mission in full.
In the coming days and weeks, we'll be releasing all the sessions from Rails World on the Rails YouTube channel. I know there was enough FOMO to float a blimp online from those who didn't manage to snatch a ticket in those ludicrously short twenty minutes it took before the conference sold out, but at least all the keynotes and sessions are made available as quickly as we can edit and upload them. You won't be getting the vibes of the hallway track, but maybe you'll have a chance to remedy that next year, when Rails World returns to Amsterdam for the 2025 show!
In the mean time, just one last thank you to everyone who attended, brought their good vibes, and helped ensure that we can all feel energized and inspired about Ruby on Rails for another year and beyond! ✌️❤️
