San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference 2026

Choose your fighter

Garry Tan

Y Combinator

San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference '26

Year Two · Nov 10-12, 2026 · SF Jazz

A conference for engineers who read and write Ruby. Founders come here to meet them.

Get your ticket $450 · until Sep 30 Unlocks the Pier

Organized by

Everyone who comes gets a character

The Pier is an 8-bit San Francisco where every attendee, speaker and volunteer walks around as a pixel version of themselves. Your ticket is the character slot, so the game starts the moment you buy it and runs until we meet at SFJAZZ in November.

The Pier: an 8-bit San Francisco, with the SFJAZZ Center under the conference sign

Enter the Pier ▶︎

Quests

0 complete

Generate and publish your pixel card +10
Fill out your profile +10
Find yourself on the Pier +1
Talk to 5 people +20
Collect a gem +1

Came last year? A returning-attendee quest is already waiting. More land between now and November. Badges stack up on your card, the chatter runs in the SF Ruby Slack, and the last badges are earned face to face at SFJAZZ.

Every player gets a Cloud Card

Enter the Pier

Get your slot · $450

19 confirmed

The lineup

Speakers share experience building with Ruby at Fin, 37signals, Shopify, Gusto, Persona, Typesense, Order.co, Rebulk, Chat with Work, GoRails, Evil Martians, OpenC3, Primary Health, and Frontdoor Benefits.

See all 19 speakers

The program

What you will actually hear

Every speaker here was hand-picked. We screened GitHub for people actively building in Ruby open source and went after them, which is how a talk about the Ruby stack that flies satellites ended up on the schedule.

Agentic Rails, already in production

Four talks from people who have shipped it, on the question that decides what your job looks like for the next few years.

The people who wrote your Gemfile

A conference pays for itself when the author of the thing that is currently breaking is standing ten feet away. Three independent answers to the job-queue question will be in the same room, all willing to argue about it.

Your job queue
Your real-time layer
- Vladimir Dementyev wrote AnyCable, TestProf, and Layered Design for Rails
Your metrics
- Andrey Novikov wrote Yabeda, 10 million downloads of Ruby instrumentation
Your view layer
- Marco Roth builds Herb, the parser and language server ERB never had
Your runtime
- Peter Zhu commits to Ruby core, on the garbage collector, at Shopify

Every speaker and talk

Day 1–3

More than a room of talks

The other room is full of people shipping the same problem you are: the same queue, the same monolith, the same hiring plan. Startups and scaleups get two tracks, and the tracks weave: when one is on stage, the other is in an organized networking session, then they swap. Who you meet is on the schedule, so it never comes down to the coffee queue.

01
Everyone gets a mic

You are matched into at least two groups of 70 to 100 people who work on the same kind of thing you do. In each one you get 60 seconds on the mic to say who you are and what you are building, so the people who need to find you can.
02
Teams of 5+ get a longer slot

Bring five or more from your company and you get extended time, and slides, to introduce the team to the room. Hiring managers find that useful.
03
Founders' round with Y Combinator

A dedicated group for founders and founding teams, with Y Combinator in the room.

Your hosts

Amanda Kinney

Evil Martians
Svyatoslav Kryukov

Inertia Rails, Evil Martians
Y Combinator
Ken Decanio
Cameron Dutro

Cisco Meraki
Mike Dalton

Triumph

Each room has a host keeping the mic moving through 70 to 100 introductions, so every 60 seconds lands.

55 open Ruby and Rails roles from 39 companies are on our jobs board today, GitHub, Chime, Gusto, Persona and AngelList among them. In November those hiring managers are sitting in your networking group, and you get the mic.

See who is hiring

Bring your team Convince your manager

Tickets

Three days at SFJAZZ

All talks, all networking sessions, and the community day.

Early bird Sold out $350
Regular Until Sep 30 $450
Company-sponsored Invoiced, expensable, no deadline. Buying this tier is what keeps Regular at $450. $650

Get tickets

Bringing your team?

Everyone gets 60 seconds on the mic in their networking groups. Teams of 5 or more get extended time, and slides, to introduce the company. Group registration is open on Luma, and we invoice. Need sign-off first? There is a page for that.

How team registration works Convince your manager