Speakers

Carmine Paolino

Chat with Work

Founder and CEO

AI engineer and open source contributor, Carmine has built large-scale systems at OLX, Capgemini, and the Alan Turing Institute. He's the creator of RubyLLM, bringing modern AI tooling to Ruby, and has co-founded startups like Freshflow, and Chat with Work. Carmine loves Ruby, deep learning, and producing electronic music in Berlin.

Marco Roth

Independent

Consultant

Full-stack Ruby on Rails developer and open source enthusiast, Marco is a core contributor to Hotwire and StimulusReflex. He's passionate about pushing the boundaries of real-time, server-rendered apps with HTML-over-the-wire, and maintains several key libraries in the Hotwire and Rails ecosystem.

Obie Fernandez

Kickass Consulting

Consultant/Fractional CTO

Obie Fernandez is a Ruby and Rails pioneer, and best-selling author of The Rails Way. With three decades in software and a string of successful startups—including Hashrocket and Andela—he's helped shape the Rails community from the start. Obie now leads AI and developer experience initiatives at Shopify, and still finds time to DJ and make music in Mexico City.

Vladimir (Vova) Dementyev

Evil Martians

Head of Backend

A mathematician who found his happiness in programming Ruby and Erlang, contributing to open source and being an Evil Martian. Author of AnyCable and "Layered Design for Ruby on Rails applications", as well as TestProf, Action Policy and many yet unknown ukulele melodies.

Adrian Marin

Avo

Founder

Adrian is a product-minded engineer, open-source maintainer, the author of Avo and Marksmith for Rails, and co-host of Friendly.rb conference and Friendly.show podcast.

Alan Ridlehoover

Cisco

Senior Engineering Manager

Passionate Rubyist. Empathetic leader. Fallible human. Swell photographer. Rusty drummer. Loving husband & twins dad. Owner of too many hats, given I only have the one head.

Albert Pai

bolt.new

CTO

Co-founder and CTO of StackBlitz, where he pioneered WebContainers, that serves as the foundation for their AI-powered coding agent, Bolt.new. Albert chose Ruby on Rails as backend for Stackblitz. Before revolutionizing in-browser development, Pai was the co-founder and CTO of the acquired online learning platform Thinkster. Albert is based in San Francisco.

André Arko

Spinel

Founder

André thinks Ruby is pretty neat. He's been using Ruby since 2003, Rails since 2004, and on the Bundler team since 2009, and wrote _The Ruby Way_ (3rd Ed.) in 2015. These days, he's a principal engineer for hire at cloudcity.io while building rv.dev.

Ben Sheldon

Frontdoor Benefits

Co-founder and CTO

Ben 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.

Brandon Shar

ezCater

Staff Software Engineer

Brandon is a full-stack developer currently leading AI product engineering at ezCater. He's the co-author of Inertia Rails and Inertia Django and is passionate about product-focused development, batteries included frameworks, and changeable code. Currently hooked on MCP servers, AI-coding tools, and runDisney races.

Brandon Weaver

Amazon One Medical

Senior Software Engineer

Brandon is an artist turned programmer who teaches Ruby with a series of colorful cartoon lemurs going on storybook adventures. This time though? He's going deep on AI and Rails.

Brian Knoles

Bellawatt

CTO

Brian leads development at Bellawatt, a software consultancy that works with energy companies. He's a co-author of Inertia Rails and loves using Rails and React together. He's known to say "I wonder..." a lot, and he often spends the daily walks with his inexhaustible dog lost in thought.

Colleen Schnettler

Simple File Upload, SaaS Marketing Gym

Founder

Colleen is a Rails developer, AI consultant, and startup founder. She runs Simple File Upload and built HelloQuery, and now coaches technical founders on all things business and marketing. Talking startup strategy is her favorite thing ever (hence the coaching), and she’s always down to swap ideas or troubleshoot your latest GTM puzzle.

Dave Thomas

Pragmatic Programmers, LLC

Legend

Dave Thomas is likely the oldest living Ruby developer. Note from organizers: Dave is a legend, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Thomas_(programmer)

Enrique Carlos Mogollán

Handshake

Software Engineer

Enrique enjoys writing software, reading, traveling and it's a big fan of spicy food.

Eugene Kenny

Intercom

Rails Committer & Staff Product Engineer

Eugene Kenny is a Rails committer, and a Staff Product Engineer at Intercom, where he helps steward Intercom's two million line Rails monolith in production. He's led critical upgrades and platform improvements, from major Rails upgrades to database architecture and CI/CD pipelines. As an active contributor to Rails, he brings lessons from operating at scale back to the framework itself.

Evgeny Li

Bemi AI

Co-founder and CEO

Evgeny created popular open-source Ruby and Rails projects used by companies like GitLab, Netflix, and AngelList. A passionate speaker, he's presented at RailsConf, on Ruby Rogues, and at local meetups. After a decade of Ruby experience at various companies, he decided to build his own startup.

Fito von Zastrow

Cisco

Staff Software Engineer

Fito is a Staff Software Engineer @ Cisco's Network Platform. He is a SF Bay Area transplant from Asunción, Paraguay. He enjoys hiking, watching soccer, video games, and pair-programming.

Irina Nazarova

Evil Martians

CEO

CEO at Evil Martians, co-founder of AnyCable and organizer of the SF Ruby meetup and conference, Irina's passion is to support and champion startups on Rails. A fan of Ruby, open source, and long walks in San Francisco.

Jeremy Evans

Ubicloud

Principal Engineer

Jeremy Evans is a Ruby committer who focuses on fixing bugs in Ruby. He the lead developer of Sequel, Roda, Rodauth, and many other Ruby libraries. He is the author of "Polished Ruby Programming".

José Valim

Tidewave

Founder

José Valim is the creator of the Elixir programming language and Chief Adoption Officer at Dashbit, the company behind Tidewave and Livebook. A former Rails Core team member, José authored Crafting Rails Applications, received a Ruby Hero award, and contributed to several open source projects.

JP Camara

Wealthbox

Principal Engineer

Ruby committer. Blog writer. Concurrency enthusiast. Principal Engineer at Wealthbox CRM.

Justin Bowen

Active Agent

Founder

Justin is the creator of Active Agent, the first truly Rails-native AI framework, where Agents are Controllers. Since 2015, he's been building real-world AI products in agriculture, healthcare, HR tech, and more, with a specialization in computer vision. His work with Active Agent combines his extensive experience in Python and Next.js, bringing it to Rails with the goal of making Ruby the language of choice for new startups in the AI age.

Kasper Timm Hansen

kaspth.com

Rails consultant

Kasper is a staff-level Rails consultant, who runs Rails source deep-dives for teams helping them level up faster. He was on the Rails core team from 2016 to 2022 and the top 11th contributor when he left. He shipped several major features, and reviewed & merged over a thousand contributor PRs.

Mike Perham

Contributed Systems

CEO

Mike is the author and maintainer of Sidekiq, the leading background job framework for Ruby. He's developed open source software for Ruby since 2005 and lives in Portland, OR.

Naijeria Toweett

Mama Tech Limited

Founder & CEO

Naijeria entered the Ruby world at Friendly.rb 2023. Since then, she's grown from newcomer to community builder—now serving on the Ruby Central board and helping lead WNB.rb Africa Chapter. She's a product manager turned product engineer, focused on inclusive, user-centered tech.

Noel Rappin

Chime Financial

Staff Software Engineer

Noel is the co-author of Programming Ruby 3.3 and other technical books in the Ruby Community. He's dedicated to making Ruby joyful and productive for developers, and is known for building community and championing better tools and practices. You can find Noel online at noelrappin.com.

Paweł Strzałkowski

Visuality

CTO

CTO, consultant and full-stack developer since the 90s. Author of many articles showing a creative approach to using Rails. Currently excited about AI's potential and cross-tech discoveries. Frequent speaker at conferences/meetups and a big supporter of the European Ruby scene. Builds games for fun.

Rachael Wright-Munn

Looking for Work

Software Engineer

Rachael has been livestreaming open-source contributions and programming games on Twitch since 2019. This journey led her to voice-acting in indie programming game, One Dreamer, building an app for meeting friends at conferences, MeetAnother.day, and contributing to Rails, forem, GitLab, Ruby For Good, and many other projects.

Ryan O'Donnell

Cleary

At Cleary Ryan is redefining how enterprise HR teams harness AI to drive employee engagement and digital culture, drawing on his experiences building internal tools at Twitter and co-founding Peer (acquired by Twitter), as well as his lifelong passion for competitive strategy honed playing StarCraft and Magic: The Gathering, which he credits for his fast-shipping.

Sam Poder

Hack Club

Software Engineer

Sam is a software engineer at Hack Club and a third-year Computer Science & Linguistics student at UC Berkeley. He enjoys making things, hackathons and going on random adventures (often using public transit).

Sarah Mei

Sarah is a software engineer, writer, and technical advisor with over two decades of experience building & leading development teams. Formerly Head of Eng at BackerKit, she now focuses on the intersection of AI & software development, exploring how emerging tools are reshaping how we build.

Stephan Hagemann

Gusto

Head of Developer Productivity

Stephan Hagemann leads the charge on modularization and building robust systems that stand the test of time. Author of "Component-based Rails Applications" and "Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails", Stephan is pushing Ruby to new levels of performance and maintainability through thoughtful package structures and architectures.

Svyatoslav (Svyat) Kryukov

Evil Martians

Senior Backend Engineer

Svyat is passionate about bridging backend and frontend worlds in Ruby. He's the creator of Skooma for strong interfaces and TurboMount for bringing modern widgets to Hotwire, and a key contributor to Inertia Rails. When he's not coding, Svyat is a true coffee geek, always searching for the perfect pour over setup.

Takashi Kokubun

Shopify

Staff Developer

Takashi Kokubun is a Ruby committer and a member of Shopify's Ruby Infrastructure team. He's currently working on ZJIT, the next generation of YJIT. He has been working on JIT compilers for Ruby since 2017.

Tia Anderson

Tia is a Ruby on Rails developer, RailsConf 2025 Scholar, and creator of Peace of Mind—a journaling and gardening app powered by CRUD and calm. She’s on a mission to build tools that heal, not just hustle. When not coding, you’ll find her in the garden… or journaling about it.

Tom Wheeler

Temporal Technologies

Principal Developer Advocate

Alternating between software engineering and technical education roles, Tom Wheeler's career spans nearly 30 years in the financial, healthcare, defense, and tech industries. Prior to joining Temporal in 2022, he created training courses at Cloudera, developed aerospace engineering software at Object Computing, helped design and implement a distributed system for high-volume data processing at WebMD, and wrote some of the earliest web applications at brokerage firm A.G. Edwards.

Alex Kalderimis

Bolt.new

Senior Software Engineer

Alex Kalderimis builds at Bolt.new—backend, workflows, developer tools. Senior engineer, focused on SaaS and automation. Career spans open-source contribution, platform architecture, and making life easier for engineering teams.

Andy Wang

Finta

Founder

ndy Wang is the Founder and CEO of Finta, a YC-backed accounting software startup for startups that provides bookkeeping, tax services, and real-time financial insights. He graduated from the University of Waterloo with a double major in Computer Science and Financial Management (CFM) and is also a licensed tax preparer. Before starting Finta, he gained experience in capital markets and the finance functions of other startups.

Arjun Singh

Superconductor

Founder

Arjun is the cofounder and CEO of Superconductor, which lets you control AI coding agents from your browser, phone, GitHub, or Slack, with live app previews of each agent's changes. He's been working with Rails since 2006, and previously founded Gradescope, which is a (Rails-based) AI grading platform used by millions of professors and students worldwide, and was acquired by Turnitin in 2018.

Auston Bunsen

AccessGrid

Founder and CEO

I'm a web developer and entrepreneur. I've been fortunate enough to work on things used by millions of people over the last 16 years of my career with products like, QuickNode.com, 1Sale.com, Reviewed.com, and other personal projects. I am the founder of AccessGrid.com - the API for opening doors.

Avinash Joshi

Cactus

Founder

Avinash Joshi is a co-founder and CTO at Cactus, building a 24/7 call center platform for home service companies. Before Cactus, he led engineering at Turing Labs, helped launch SaaS products, and drove innovation in enterprise software. Avinash's roots are in open source—he evangelized Sun’s tools and contributed to OpenSolaris. He holds a master’s in computer science from UT Dallas and was part of Y Combinator’s X25 cohort.

Bart de Water

Thatch

Founding Engineer

Bart de Water builds at Thatch—software for smarter, more flexible health benefits. Before Thatch, he scaled Shopify Payments, contributing core engineering from Montréal and leading product reliability for merchants worldwide. At Thatch, Bart drives platform architecture and analytics, focusing on approachable UX and cost transparency for US employers. Dutch by birth, Canadian by choice, he ships code, drinks coffee, and make healthcare work for teams.

Brad Gessler

Terminalwire

Founder

Brad Gessler founded Poll Everywhere and scaled it from a side project to a platform handling billions of responses. As CTO, he led a 35-person Rails team and now shares lessons on building clean, scalable frontends that teams actually enjoy working with.

Brian Moseley

Sixfold

Founder

Brian Moseley is co-founder and CTO at Sixfold, building generative AI for insurance underwriting in New York. He spent five years at American Express as head of developer experience, shaping the way thousands of engineers ship code at scale. Previously, Brian co-founded Hoodline, helped launch platforms at Copious and Outside.in, and led engineering teams at startups and large enterprises alike. Known for translating complex business problems into practical systems, his focus is on high-impact software for regulated industries—now bringing that to AI-powered insurance.

Chamod Gamage

AngelList

Software Engineer

Chamod Gamage is a software engineer at AngelList focused on building infrastructure and user experiences for fund accounting and financial reporting powering over $100B in venture assets. Previously, he built payment event processing systems at Modern Treasury, developed financial tools for startups at On Deck, and led technical projects at UW Blueprint for nonprofit and social impact products. His work spans automating venture fund operations, architecting data systems that support large-scale financial workflows, and building developer tooling. He holds a degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo. Based in San Francisco.

Dan Farina

Ubicloud

Founder

Dan Farina is co-founder at Ubicloud, building the open source cloud for bare metal, VMs, and managed Postgres. He previously architected Heroku Postgres, built distributed systems at Citus Data, and contributed to Microsoft Azure. Dan’s career centers on making core infrastructure simple, resilient, and accessible to all developers—with a focus on transparency, real-world performance, and strong open source roots. Based in San Francisco.

David Paluy

Suppli

CTO

David Paluy is an experienced entrepreneur, CTO, and expert in B2B financial products. He has built with Rails since version 1.8 David is CTO at Suppli, a payments platform startup for construction material suppliers, based in Austin, TX.

James Kerr

Tend Cash

Founder

James Kerr is founder at Tend.cash—a new way to manage money, no budgets required. He’s defined financial clarity for thousands, built software that keeps cash simple, and led teams across fintech and SaaS. Always focused on making personal finance radically simpler. Based in San Francisco.

Kieran Klaassen

Cora Computer

Founder

Kieran Klaassen is founder of Cora—a new kind of AI-powered inbox. Over a decade in product and engineering, he’s led teams at Vinebase, built DraftKit, and shipped SaaS for independent creators and businesses. Early LLM adopter, composer, advisor. Always about marrying software with story and scale. Based in Los Angeles.

Kody Kendall

llamapress

Founder

Kody Kendall is founder and CEO at LlamaPress AI—AI tools for web development, built in San Francisco. He leads product and engineering, focusing on agents that generate, preview, and ship production web pages and rails apps with large language models. Previously built Field Rocket, holds a CS degree and a Master's in Business Creation from the University of Utah. Big on open source, bootstrapping, and making AI practical for indie builders and teams.

Matt Duszynski

NexHealth

Head of Sync

Matt has been building with Ruby and Rails for over a decade, and is currently leading the Synchronizer engineering team at NexHealth. A Houston native and recent San Francisco transplant, he and his wife are enjoying the west coast with their two cats.

Nagendra Hassan Dhanakeerthi

AI Squared

CTO

Nagendra is a Rubyist turned entrepreneur, passionate about building AI and data platforms. A 2X founder, he created Multiwoven, an open-source Reverse ETL project on Rails acquired by AI Squared, where he now leads engineering. He enjoys exploring tech and good coffee.

Peter Philips

Recognize

Founder and CTO

An end-to-end engineering powerhouse. Before Recognize, Peter founded TechForProgress. More recently, he authored “The Ruby Workshop”. Peter solves problems that improve people's lives and the world around them.

Ryan Sherlock

Fin by Intercom

Engineering Lead

Ryan Sherlock is Director of Engineering at Intercom, leading the teams behind its core technologies and AI-first customer service platform. He’s scaled Intercom’s infrastructure through roles from product engineer to senior director—building, sharding, and modernizing systems from MySQL to Elasticsearch. With a background in distributed systems and hands-on code, Ryan’s focus is always on reliability, enablement, and empowering teams to ship faster at scale. Based in Dublin.

Sam Lambert

PlanetScale

Founder

Sam Lambert is the CEO at PlanetScale, building the world’s most scalable database platform for Vitess, MySQL, and Postgres. Previously Sam was Vice President of Engineering at GitHub, where he was responsible for scaling the company and culture to the world’s largest platform for developers with over 100 million users. He is passionate about developer experience and delivering high quality software at scale.

Wyatt Ades

Stepful

Engineering Manager

First engineer at Stepful, an online education platform for healthcare workers. Doubling worker salaries.

Zach Kamran

Simple AI

CTO

Zach Kamran is the Founder and CTO of Simple AI a company building Voice AI for enterprises. Before Simple AI he was Head of Product for the Bookface team and a Product Engineer at Y Combinator.