# San Francisco Ruby Conference 2026 > Nov 10-12, 2026 at SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco. Two days of Ruby talks for small teams and big teams, Day 1 AI-heavy and Day 2 AI-light, then a community day. Tickets from $350. Organized by [Evil Martians](https://evilmartians.com). Year two of the conference, run by SF Ruby (https://sfruby.com), the community for Ruby developers and founders in San Francisco. While Small teams are in a talk, Big teams are in a conversation group, then they swap. Keynotes are for everyone. - Tickets: https://luma.com/sfrubyconf2026?utm_source=sfruby-index-md&utm_medium=site&utm_campaign=conf2026 - The schedule on the site: https://sfruby.com/#schedule - Sponsor: https://sfruby.com/sponsor-2026.md - Questions: conference@sfruby.com ## Tickets - **Regular**: $450. Both days and the community day. Until Sep 30. - **Single day**: $350. Day 1 AI-heavy OR Day 2 AI-light. Until Sep 30. - **Company-sponsored**: $650. Invoiced, expensable, no deadline. Buying this tier is what keeps Regular at $450. - Late bird: $500. From Oct 1. - Early bird: $350. Sold out. Buy on Luma: https://luma.com/sfrubyconf2026?utm_source=sfruby-index-md-tickets&utm_medium=site&utm_campaign=conf2026 Teams of five and more get 10% off and a segment on stage: https://sfruby.com/team. Need company sign-off to attend? The email to send is at https://sfruby.com/manager.md. ## Schedule ### Day 1: AI-heavy Tuesday, November 10, 2026. Agents in production, AI in legacy codebases, and the Ruby tooling for both. - 9:15-9:45 am, Keynote, everyone - **Why start a new company on Rails (and AI) today**, Irina Nazarova (Evil Martians) - 9:45 am: Break - 10:05-11:35 am, Big teams - 10:05 am: **Ruby for AI and AI for Ruby**, Vladimir Dementyev (Evil Martians) - 10:35 am: **The System Nobody Understood (Including AI)**, Madison Sites (Order.co) - 11:05 am: **Realtime collaboration on Rails with yrby and Lexxy**, JP Camara (Wealthbox) - Meanwhile, Small teams: conversation group "Startups and startup-minded engineers: getting to know each other", with Amanda Kinney - 11:35 am: Lunch - 1:15-2:45 pm, Small teams - 1:15 pm: **Building the same app twice: same problems, different decade**, Ben Sheldon (Frontdoor Benefits) - 1:45 pm: **Agents Scale, Humans Don't: Hiring Without Slowing Down**, Svyatoslav Kryukov (Evil Martians) - 2:15 pm: **RubyLLM 2.0: The AI Framework Ruby Deserves**, Carmine Paolino (RubyLLM) - Meanwhile, Big teams: conversation group "Big teams: share your strategies for agentic coding", with Mike Dalton - 2:45 pm: Break - 3:05-4:05 pm, Big teams - 3:05 pm: **Assign to Claude: Making an Agent a First-Class Teammate in Your SaaS**, CJ Avilla (Anthropic) - 3:35 pm: **The Multiplayer AI Manifesto**, Sergey Karayev (Superconductor) - Meanwhile, Small teams: conversation group "Find your people: a matching game", with Amanda Kinney - 4:05 pm: Break - 4:15-4:45 pm, Keynote, everyone - **Who Watches the Agents? Closing the Rails Loop from Code to Customers**, Ryan Sherlock (Fin) ### Day 2: AI-light Wednesday, November 11, 2026. Queues, concurrency, real-time, open source, and the businesses built on them. - 9:00-9:30 am, Keynote, everyone - **Solid Queue: two years on Rails**, Rosa Gutiérrez (37signals) - 9:30 am: Break - 9:50-11:20 am, Small teams - 9:50 am: **Building a Developer-friendly PaaS for Kubernetes on Ruby**, Celina Lopez (Primary Health) - 10:20 am: **How We Bootstrapped an Open Source Search Engine to $10M+ ARR with 15 People and Ruby on Rails**, Jason Bosco (Typesense) - 10:50 am: **Reactive Rails Views, No Rewrite Required**, Marco Roth (Herb) - Meanwhile, Big teams: conversation group "Big teams and engineers: getting to know each other", with Amanda Kinney - 11:20 am: Lunch - 1:00-2:30 pm, Big teams - 1:00 pm: **Keeping Your Head on Straight in Concurrent & Complex Ruby Applications**, Alex Coomans (Persona) - 1:30 pm: **Background processing at Gusto: The Parts Where People Look Puzzled**, Phillip Campbell (Gusto) - 2:00 pm: **Open Source is the Most Fragile and Most Resilient Ecosystem**, Peter Zhu (Shopify) - Meanwhile, Small teams: conversation group "Startups and VCs: getting to know each other", host to be confirmed - 2:30 pm: Break - 2:50-3:50 pm, Small teams - 2:50 pm: **Building a new startup on Rails and Starlink**, Cole Robertson (Rebulk) - 3:20 pm: **Satellite command and control with Ruby and COSMOS**, Jason Thomas (OpenC3) - Meanwhile, Big teams: conversation group "Big teams: when to choose Sidekiq, Solid Queue, GoodJob and more", with Ken Decanio and Cameron Dutro - 3:50 pm: Break - 4:00-4:30 pm, Keynote, everyone - **Rails: The Founder's Unfair Advantage**, Chris Oliver (GoRails) ### Day 3: Community day Thursday, November 12, 2026. Bring your own event: a walk, a bike ride, an ocean swim, a hackathon or anything else you want to do together with Ruby friends! - Send an email: mailto:conference@sfruby.com?subject=Community%20day%20idea - Post the idea on Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/sf-ruby/shared_invite/zt-3mi22dwb9-MGN_s0j_jNrt7hb4rvqkHg ## Speakers ### Irina Nazarova (keynote) [Evil Martians](https://evilmartians.com/). CEO Talk: **Why start a new company on Rails (and AI) today** Let's celebrate the new and ambitious companies choosing Ruby and Rails today. We'll hear their stories, learn from their wins, and find out what's missing: what we as the Ruby community need to build to help them grow into the big Ruby success stories of the future. Based on interviews with founders. Founded a Ruby startup in the last 2-3 years? Let's talk: https://cal.com/inazarova/feedback CEO at Evil Martians, co-founder at AnyCable, and organizer of the SF Ruby community. Based in Japantown, and supervised by an opinionated calico cat Murka. Links: https://x.com/inazarova, https://github.com/irinanazarova, https://www.linkedin.com/in/nonconstant/, https://irinanazarova.substack.com/ ### Vladimir Dementyev [Evil Martians](https://evilmartians.com/). Principal Backend Engineer Talk: **Ruby for AI and AI for Ruby** Author of AnyCable, TestProf and Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications. Links: https://x.com/palkan_tula ### Madison Sites [Order.co](https://www.order.co/). Staff Software Engineer Talk: **The System Nobody Understood (Including AI)** Every scaled Rails app has a stretch of backcountry nobody dares hike into: the part no one fully understands, so you patch it for years, until you can't. Ours had a critical bridge out there. The map showed it, the report said passable; I hiked in and it was all but gone. Our dashboards, our tenured engineers, and our AI were all confidently wrong. This is how we learned to trust only the ground. Madison Sites is based in Lake Tahoe and has been a professional Ruby developer for over 10 years. She believes that removing dead code is the sixth love language. When she's not building things with cool people on the internet, you can find her very much offline, hiking on or maintaining a trail. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madisonsites ### JP Camara [Wealthbox](https://www.wealthbox.com/) Talk: **Realtime collaboration on Rails with yrby and Lexxy** Author of the Ruby concurrency series, the long-form deep dive into threads and the GVL that is becoming a book. ### Ben Sheldon [Frontdoor Benefits](https://www.openfrontdoor.com/). Co-Founder and CTO Talk: **Building the same app twice: same problems, different decade** Ten years ago I helped build and scale a welfare benefits app to aid more than 1 million people a year. Now, I'm doing it all again from the beginning. I'll compare the original 2016 product roadmap to what's possible in 2026, including feature appetites, team composition and enablement, and very, very different build-vs-buy decisions for an even more monolithic product. Ben Sheldon is the author of GoodJob, an Active Job backend. A Rails developer for over 10 years, he has worked at GitHub, OkCupid Labs, and Code for America. Ben is currently co-founder and CTO of Frontdoor Benefits. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensheldon/ ### Svyatoslav Kryukov [Evil Martians](https://evilmartians.com/). Senior Backend Engineer Talk: **Agents Scale, Humans Don't: Hiring Without Slowing Down** One founder plus thirty agents ships more than a team of ten. Hire a second engineer and everything slows down. Why? You didn't add an engineer, you added a second team. We'll look at the fixes that fail, then at those I believe work well with Rails, and finally at what a founder must give up to get faster. Dedicated to bridging Rails and the JavaScript ecosystem. A core maintainer of Inertia Rails, and the creator of Typelizer (automatic TypeScript types from Ruby) and TurboMount (component-based widgets for Hotwire). Writes about Rails and frontend on the Evil Martians blog. Links: https://x.com/skryukov_dev ### Carmine Paolino [Chat with Work](https://chatwithwork.com/), [RubyLLM](https://rubyllm.com/). Founder and CEO Talk: **RubyLLM 2.0: The AI Framework Ruby Deserves** RubyLLM made Ruby an AI language: one beautiful API for every provider, 11+ million downloads. 2.0 makes it a full framework: the agentic loop as public API, durable approval-gated agents, the most precise cost ledger in AI, caching, batches, fallbacks, citations, cancellation, server tools, speech, video, OCR, reranking, and a generator that writes provider gems. Ruby is where you ship AI. Carmine Paolino builds the tools he wants to use: RubyLLM, how Rubyists do AI, plus archspec, kamal-backup, a cluster headache tracker, and TonePush, a reverse-engineered editor for his guitar gear. He founded Chat with Work and organizes Berlin.rb. In a previous life, a decade of ML in Python. Links: https://paolino.me, https://x.com/paolino ### CJ Avilla [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/). Member of Technical Staff Talk: **Assign to Claude: Making an Agent a First-Class Teammate in Your SaaS** Most AI features are a chat box bolted onto the product. The good ones are woven through it: an agent you assign a card to, that triages the ticket before you read it, that spots a bad deploy and opens the incident itself. We'll build all three live in one Rails app on Claude Managed Agents (MCP, custom tools, memory, human approvals) and leave you a map of the agent-shaped holes in your product. CJ Avilla is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic and former Stripe Developer Advocate. Links: https://x.com/cjav_dev, https://www.youtube.com/@cjav_dev ### Sergey Karayev [Superconductor](https://www.superconductor.com/). Co-founder Talk: **The Multiplayer AI Manifesto** AI has made individuals faster, but teams are not seeing proportional productivity gains. One reason is that today's AI tools are fundamentally single-player. Drawing on our team's experience, we present five principles for truly multiplayer AI and offer practical guidance for building or choosing a solution. Sergey Karayev is building Superconductor, the multiplayer AI platform for your team and agents. He has been working with Ruby on Rails for over 20 years. He has a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and previously built a successful ed tech startup. Links: https://x.com/sergeykarayev ### Ryan Sherlock (keynote) [Fin (ex Intercom)](https://fin.ai/). Senior Director of Engineering Talk: **Who Watches the Agents? Closing the Rails Loop from Code to Customers** At Fin, over 95% of pull requests are Agent-driven and most are approved without human review. This talk follows changes through our fifteen-year-old, three-million-line Rails monolith, from automated review and selective testing to production monitoring and rollback. Safe speed comes from layers of evidence, bounded authority, and fast recovery, not one perfect reviewer. Ryan Sherlock is Senior Director of Engineering at Fin, leading infrastructure and core technologies. He works on reliability, developer productivity, and the three-million-line Rails monolith that powers Fin at scale. Links: https://x.com/ryan_sherlock, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansherlock/ ### Rosa Gutiérrez (keynote) [37signals](https://37signals.com/). Principal programmer Talk: **Solid Queue: two years on Rails** Solid Queue 1.0 was released in September 2024 as the default Active Job backend in Rails. 2.0 is ready, but the world is completely different now! Let's explore the path to that new version and the new features, as well as how maintaining an open-source project has changed since Solid Queue was started. Rosa has worked with Ruby for over 13 years. She loves maths, theoretical computer science, learning languages for both humans and computers, and her dog Mochi. Links: https://bsky.app/profile/rosa.codes ### Celina Lopez [Primary Health](https://www.primary.health/). Technical Lead Talk: **Building a Developer-friendly PaaS for Kubernetes on Ruby** Self taught software engineer with more than 5+ years of experience. Built software which helped vaccinate/test more than 7 million people in the US. Currently contributing to an open-source platform that simplifies application deployment using Kubernetes. Links: https://github.com/celina-lopez ### Jason Bosco [Typesense](https://typesense.org/). CEO & Co-Founder Talk: **How We Bootstrapped an Open Source Search Engine to $10M+ ARR with 15 People and Ruby on Rails** Bootstrapped an open-source search engine on Rails. It answers 10B+ searches a month. Links: https://x.com/jasonbosco ### Marco Roth [Herb](https://herb-tools.dev/) Talk: **Reactive Rails Views, No Rewrite Required** What if your existing Rails views could become reactive without rewriting them? In this talk, we'll explore how ReActionView brings fine-grained reactivity to HTML+ERB while staying compatible with Action View. We'll look at how existing templates can become reactive, how updates are tracked and rendered, and what this could mean for the future of the Rails view layer. Marco is a passionate full-stack developer and a dedicated open-source contributor. He has open-sourced, maintained, and contributed to numerous libraries in the Ruby ecosystem and was awarded the Rails Luminary Award in 2025. Links: https://x.com/marcoroth_ ### Alex Coomans [Persona](https://withpersona.com/). Software Engineer at Persona - Infrastructure Team Talk: **Keeping Your Head on Straight in Concurrent & Complex Ruby Applications** Ruby applications depend on execution-scoped state, but Threads, Fibers, requests, and jobs can lose it, leak it, or restore it incorrectly. This talk introduces Persona’s Context abstraction for safely inheriting and overriding that state, shows how we built dynamic configuration systems on top of it, and offers patterns you can apply in your own Ruby applications. Alex is a long time Rubyist with a love for intricate and mind-boggling puzzles. At Persona, he's focused on enabling product teams by developing & maintaining robust, scalable infrastructure - ranging across Rails, Kubernetes, Cloud IaC - and everything in between. Links: https://github.com/drcapulet, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexcoomans/ ### Phillip Campbell [Gusto](https://gusto.com/). Senior Engineering Manager Talk: **Background processing at Gusto: The Parts Where People Look Puzzled** An update/extension/reformulation of my talk from Rocky Mountain Ruby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY_yKeZYzko Phillip Campbell is an engineering leader at Gusto, where he leads the teams responsible for Rails architecture and background processing. He’s passionate about developer productivity at scale and focuses on building systems that help engineers stay fast, effective and happy in complex environments. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phillc1/ ### Peter Zhu [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com/). Ruby Core Committer & Staff Software Engineer Talk: **Open Source is the Most Fragile and Most Resilient Ecosystem** The open source software that powers our businesses is maintained primarily by volunteers but funded by too few companies. This talk reframes open source support as not charity, but rather a critical part of the business’ infrastructure. We will be discussing why your company needs a team to manage your open source stack, how to manage this team, and the benefits they could provide. Peter is a Ruby core committer and a Staff Software Engineer at Shopify. He works on improving the performance of Ruby and has worked on various projects including Modular GC, Ractors, and Variable Width Allocation. He is currently based in Tokyo, Japan. Links: https://x.com/peterzhu2118, https://bsky.app/profile/peterzhu.ca, https://ruby.social/@peterzhu2118, https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterzhu2118 ### Cole Robertson [Rebulk](https://www.rebulk.com/) Talk: **Building a new startup on Rails and Starlink** YC S25. Measures bulk inventory nobody can barcode, with LiDAR and computer vision. ### Jason Thomas [OpenC3](https://openc3.com/). CTO Talk: **Satellite command and control with Ruby and COSMOS** COSMOS began at Ball Aerospace to scratch an itch: can I make an easy to use and configure command and control system? This talk traces that journey — from an internal tool at a big aerospace company, to open source in an industry where almost nothing is open, to OpenC3, the company we founded to steward COSMOS. Ends with how we built line-by-line Ruby script execution. Jason graduated from Iowa State University and spent 20 years at Ball Aerospace, where he was instrumental in building COSMOS. In 2022 he co-founded OpenC3 with Ryan Melton to commercialize COSMOS, where he now serves as CTO, building the next generation of COSMOS features. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmthomas/ ### Chris Oliver (keynote) [GoRails](https://gorails.com/), [Hatchbox](https://hatchbox.io/). Founder Talk: **Rails: The Founder's Unfair Advantage** Chris is a Rails Luminary, entrepreneur and content creator. He makes weekly Ruby on Rails screencasts at GoRails.com, a Ruby on Rails SaaS template called Jumpstart Pro and a hosting service called Hatchbox.io. Links: https://x.com/excid3, https://linkedin.com/in/excid3 ## Sponsors - **Ruby Tier**: [Typesense](https://typesense.org/), [WorkOS](https://workos.com/), [Fin](https://fin.ai/) - **Coffee Sponsor**: [AppSignal](https://www.appsignal.com/) - **Ruby Passport Booth**: [Persona](https://withpersona.com/) - **Emerald**: [Beyond Finance](https://www.beyondfinance.com/), [Order.co](https://www.order.co/), [SumIt](https://getsumit.com/), [TRMNL](https://trmnl.com/), [Chatwoot](https://www.chatwoot.com/) - **Travel Sponsor**: [37signals](https://37signals.com/), [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com/), [Hatchbox](https://hatchbox.io/), [Rebulk](https://rebulk.com/) - **Media Sponsor**: [DevITjobs](https://devitjobs.com/jobs/Ruby/all/all) Join them: https://sfruby.com/sponsor-2026.md ## Companies attending Companies with two or more ticket holders, volunteers included. Updated on every deploy. Handshake · Hack Club · IFTTT · ClickFunnels · Gusto · Instrumentl · Typesense · Cactus · Fixate Industries · New Leaders · Shopify · Workshop Software · HopSkipDrive · thoughtbot Organizers: Evil Martians ## The Pier Everyone who comes gets a character. [The Pier](https://clouds.sfruby.com) is an 8-bit San Francisco where attendees, speakers and volunteers walk around as pixel versions of themselves. Buy a ticket, get a character. New quests come out until November, and the last badges are earned in person at SFJAZZ. ## Venue and getting there [SFJAZZ Center](https://www.sfjazz.org/), 201 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94102, at Fell, in Hayes Valley. Entrance on Franklin. Day 1 runs 9:15 am to 4:45 pm, Day 2 runs 9:00 am to 4:30 pm. Directions: [Google Maps](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/?api=1&destination=SFJAZZ+Center,+201+Franklin+St,+San+Francisco,+CA+94102), [Apple Maps](https://maps.apple.com/?daddr=201+Franklin+St,+San+Francisco,+CA+94102). Public transit: - **Muni Metro**: Any line to Van Ness station, then 8 minutes on foot up Van Ness to Fell. $2.85 with Clipper, $3 cash. - **BART**: Civic Center station, then 12 minutes on foot along Grove, past City Hall. About 30 min and $11 from SFO. - **Buses**: 49 Van Ness/Mission to McAllister. 6 Hayes/Parnassus to Hayes & Gough. 5 Fulton to McAllister & Gough. 3 to 5 min walk. - **Caltrain**: Caltrain ends at 4th & King. From there the N Judah, a Muni light rail, runs to Van Ness station. About 20 min, then the walk. - **Bike**: Bay Wheels docks at Grove & Gough and Market & Franklin. 3 min walk. Parking: - **[Performing Arts Garage](https://www.sfmta.com/garages-lots/performing-arts-garage)**, 360 Grove St. Two blocks, 4 min walk. In by 9 am, out by 7 pm: $21 flat; Hourly: $3 to $5; 12 hours: $26. Weekdays 6 am to 10 pm, Nov 11 included. 6'9" clearance. EV charging. - **[Civic Center Garage](https://www.sfmta.com/garages-lots/civic-center-garage)**, 355 McAllister St, under Civic Center Plaza. 10 min walk. In by 8:30 am, out by 7 pm: $23 flat; Hourly, midday: $7; 24 hours: $38. Weekdays 6 am to 10 pm. Closed Nov 11, Veterans Day. Street meters are two-hour limits until 6 pm, Veterans Day included. Rideshare drop-off: Franklin St at Fell. Rates from SFMTA, September 2026. Nov 11 is Veterans Day: Muni and BART run a weekday schedule. ## Organizers and volunteers Aleksandr Berdiugin · Alexander Tishchenko · Amanda Kinney · Anton Lovchikov · Anton Senkovskiy · Aurelie Verrot · Camila Mirabal · Gary Tou · Hector Miramontes · Irina Nazarova · Joshue Osuna · Juli Tera · Ken Decanio · lindsey anne · Madeline Hou · Steven T Ancheta · Victoria Melnikova · Vova Dementyev · Yang Chung ## SF Ruby all year round SF Ruby meets every month: free meetups, a jobs board, and Ruby news. - [Meetup](https://sfruby.com/meetup.md): the next dates, recordings, and the companies that host it. - [Jobs](https://sfruby.com/jobs.md): Ruby and Rails roles at SF-area startups, audited monthly. - [Startups](https://sfruby.com/startups.md): companies building on Ruby. - [Videos](https://sfruby.com/videos.md): conference talks and meetup recordings. - [News](https://sfruby.com/news.md): funding, launches, and hiring at Ruby companies. - [About](https://sfruby.com/about.md): what SF Ruby is and how to get in touch. - Last year: [2025 schedule](https://sfruby.com/schedule-2025), [2025 speakers](https://sfruby.com/speakers-2025), [2025 sponsors](https://sfruby.com/sponsors-2025). Next meetups: - **SF Ruby Meetup, September @ Datadog**: Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 5:00 pm at Datadog, 50 Fremont St, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA. [RSVP](https://luma.com/s2gs6jxb)