Rails World 2025
7 September 2025
Rails World 2025, in Amsterdam, NL is a wrap! What an experience it’s been.
I haven’t attended many conferences since before COVID. But this felt like a rekindling of everything I remembered from being in the Ruby conference and user group circuit in South Africa until 2017.
My visa meant I could only arrive on the morning of the first day of the conference, and missed the pre-conference registration and drinks. But the 3:30AM wakeup for a 6AM flight from Newcastle to Schiphol, and the mad rush to get from the arrivals gate to Beurs van Berlage was absolutely worth it.
DHH was on typical passionate, enthusiastic form for his keynote. Citing “Pax Railsana” as we’re truly in the golden age of Rails, where we’re able to solve the whole problem of web development. A slightly tangential demo of his Omarchy Linux distribution was greatly enjoyed by the audience, who are by definition already swayed to some degree by DHH’s aesthetic sensibilities.
ActiveRecord::Tentanted got me the most excited. In essence, it takes the idea of sharding to the point where every tenant in a multi-tenant system gets an entire isolated database. It’s an idea I toyed with in about 2017 or 2018, but abandoned because of the sheer number of edges I ran into with the likes of migrations, schema version management between databases, identifying which database to read for background workers, connection pooling, and what to do with the data that should be shared between accounts. I’m excited to see where this new gem goes, and if I can help contribute to it.
Aaron Patterson’s signature pun-filled, trolling keynote closed out the conference. 30_001 assertions, a ton of laughs, and a dive into ZJIT later, and we were all left truly excited for the future of both Ruby, and of Rails. All of us owe Shopify a massive debt of gratitude for the work they put in to building world class tooling for Ruby.
I could wax lyrical about the quality of the talks, and they were truly fantastic, but the best part of attending a conference like Rails World in person is meeting people. I reconnected with old colleagues from South Africa, and international Ruby friends I hadn’t seen in a decade since I was involved in the Rubyfuza conference in Cape Town. As well as new acquaintances I had only recently met at the Brighton Ruby conference earlier in 2025.
The sponsors were on top form too. Framework was there demoing their laptops and desktop. Rails staples such as Intercom, GitHub, GitLab, Basecamp, Sentry were all there supporting the conference and community. Thanks in particular to Cedarcode who sponsored barista coffee for the conference!
Shopify put on the after party at the ridiculously fun STRAAT Museum, with “Off The Rails” Pale Ale, drinks, food and music. Being in a room with a few hundred friends, where you could walk up to anyone and strike up a conversation and find common ground is an experience I won’t forget in a hurry.
Amanda Perino and the crew at the Rails Foundation who put together the conference deserve a massive round of applause, and I hope they’re all able to relax after a job well done. The attention to detail in organisation was spectacular, from the choice of the venue, to having a cloakroom (and luggage store for those of us who could only arrive on the day), to having apple juice served in wine glasses and top quality barista coffee. Thank you 👏.
I can’t wait for the next one in Austin, TX. See you there 🍻
