Speakers
19 confirmed for the San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference: the people who build the gems you run in production, and the founders running Ruby businesses. Every one of them was hand-picked, most of them found by screening GitHub for people actively building in Ruby open source.
The lineup
13 talks confirmed so far. Titles and abstracts land here as speakers submit them.
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Keynote
Ryan Sherlock
Senior Director of Engineering
“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.
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Keynote
Irina Nazarova
CEO
“Startups on Rails in 2026”
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: 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.
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Keynote
Garry Tan
President & CEO
Built Bookface, YC's internal platform, on Rails. Now runs the place.
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Carmine Paolino
Founder and CEO
“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.
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Rosa Gutiérrez
Principal programmer
“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.
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Jason Thomas
CTO
“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.
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Phillip Campbell
Senior Engineering Manager
“Background processing at Gusto: The Parts Where People Look Puzzled”
An update/extension/reformulation of my talk from Rocky Mountain Ruby 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.
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Peter Zhu
Ruby Core Committer & Staff Software Engineer
“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.
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Ben Sheldon
Co-Founder and CTO
“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.
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Alex Coomans
Software Engineer at Persona - Infrastructure Team
“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.
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Madison Sites
Staff Software Engineer
“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.
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CJ Avilla
Member of Technical Staff
“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.
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Marco Roth
“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.
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Cole Robertson
YC S25. Measures bulk inventory nobody can barcode, with LiDAR and computer vision.
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Vladimir Dementyev
Principal Backend Engineer
Author of AnyCable, TestProf and Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications.
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Andrey Novikov
Author of Yabeda, the Ruby instrumentation framework with over 10 million downloads.
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Celina Lopez
Technical Lead
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.
More still landing
The lineup grows through the summer. Tickets rise as it does.