Eduardo and Camila Souza discusss how their two-person consultancy is building Rails products, from a Pivotal Tracker alternative to software for chambers of commerce. They share how AI accelerates their work, why they insist on maintaining code they can understand, and what it takes to turn useful software into a business.
JP Camara joins the show to discuss bringing batch processing to Solid Queue, including coordinating groups of background jobs, tracking their progress, and supporting Rails’ transaction behavior. He also introduces YRBY for real-time collaborative editing in Rails and shares how AI and RubyLLM are helping him build new features and sustain his open source work.
Jessica Kerr and Avdi Grimm join me to explore how AI is changing developer identity, shifting engineering work toward defining outcomes, guiding agents, and building effective feedback loops. We discuss practical approaches to code review, technical debt, and measuring agent performance, alongside the importance of learning, shared design vocabulary, and making more room for human connection.
Buzzsprout co-founder and CEO Tom Rossi joins me at Rails World to discuss AI, the rapidly changing role of software developers, and why identifying the right problems to solve is becoming more important than simply writing code. We explore how AI is changing software development at Buzzsprout, what it means to think like a maker instead of just a coder, and why great products depend on understanding what actually creates value for customers.
Marco Roth joins the show at Rails World to discuss Herb’s arrival in Rails 8.2 and how it lays the foundation for a more powerful Rails view layer. We talk about ReactionView, explore bringing fine-grained reactivity to existing ERB templates, and explain why better developer tooling may become even more important in an era of AI-generated code.
Recorded at Rails World, David sits down with Obie Fernandez to discuss how AI and agentic development are changing the nature of software engineering, and why Rails may be uniquely suited for what comes next. They explore convention over configuration, the need for better guardrails around AI-generated code, and how the craft of programming may be moving from writing source code to defining the higher-level constraints that shape it.
Javier Cervantes, co-creator of the Ruby User Forum, joins me to discuss the limitations of Slack, Discord, and fragmented social media, the importance of connecting developers and open-source maintainers, and why talking with other people still matters in an increasingly AI-driven world.
Chris Oliver and Collin Jilbert discuss how rapidly improving AI coding tools are reshaping the business behind GoRails, Jumpstart, and Hatchbox. They explore the decline of traditional developer education, the surprising ways AI has improved their own development workflow, and why those changes ultimately forced some difficult decisions about Hatchbox’s future.
Jeremy Smith shares about his upcoming Practical Hotwire presentation and the massive amount of work that went into building it. They dig into common Hotwire pitfalls, Jeremy’s “Hot Ones”-inspired presentation format, and his spicy argument that Rails developers may be better off favoring Turbo Streams over Turbo Frames.
Jim Remsik of Flagrant joins the show to talk about the second year of XORuby and its mission to make in-person Ruby events smaller, more affordable, and more accessible.
Rachel Wright-Munn and Andy Andrea join me to talk about turning Rails generators into MCP tools, the RubyConf conversation that sparked the idea, and how the resulting tooling is already transforming contributions to Ruby Events.
Andy Kroll joins me to talk about the changing Ruby conference landscape, how AI has altered the way developers work, and why traditional technical interviews may no longer make sense.
Rails Foundation Executive Director Amanda Perino joins the show to preview Rails World 2026 in Austin. Amanda shares what attendees can expect from the conference, how the Rails Foundation is adapting its work in response to AI, and how Rails World is balancing AI-focused sessions with the rest of the Rails ecosystem.
Making new Ruby Friends is one of my favorite parts of attending conferences. Neha Abraham joins me to chat about RubyConf, Mental Health, Data Aggregation, and being my Nemesis
With AI seeming to generate more code every day, we need better tools to verify that it hasn't broken something. Maybe mutation testing can help us get there. Markus Schirp chats with us about the mutant gem and mutation testing.