DAVID HILL Happy Wednesday and welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Hill, and I spent most of this last week at RubyConf in Las Vegas. One of the things that I really enjoyed from Elise's time with the podcast were the hallway track episodes. I'm a big fan of the hallway track in general at conferences, and I thought these episodes did a great job of capturing snippets of what the conference was like. This episode is my attempt to follow in Elise's footsteps. I interviewed four attendees on the last day of the conference to see how they felt about the conference and to pick out what they enjoyed. All right. I'm here at RubyConf 2026. We're going to do some recordings for the hallway track of just kind of little mini interviews with some of the attendees to see how their conference experience has gone this year. And right now I am joined by Charles Nutter of JRuby fame. Good to see you. I've heard a lot about you over the years. It's nice to actually finally meet you and interact with you. Yeah, absolutely. CHARLES NUTTER Thank you. DAVID HILL So how's the conference been for you this year? CHARLES NUTTER Excellent. It's been great to see a lot of old classic Ruby friends from way back in the day, a lot of new folks here. I love to see the new hands of folks that have never been to RubyConf before and new Rubyists. And I'm really enjoying the talk selection and the hallway track has been excellent. DAVID HILL The hallway track is kind of one of those long -term favorite things. Once you get into it, it's really hard to get away from it. CHARLES NUTTER Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Just walking down the hall, I'll have two or three conversations before I get to my next location. DAVID HILL Nice. Have there been any talks or presentations that you've seen that really stuck with you so far? CHARLES NUTTER I was very intrigued by the Ractor discussion by the dude officially on the description. Went through a lot of the challenges of using Ractors for concurrency. Definitely a ways to go before it's ready to go for production use, but it's nice to have an overview like that. That's one that really jumped out for me. And Ractors seem to be coming up quite a bit in a lot of talks. Folks are interested in figuring out how to do concurrency in... Ruby. Of course, you can use JRuby and you have it now, but in CRuby, Ractors are developing very quickly. DAVID HILL Nice. That kind of transitions nicely into how are things going with JRuby? It's not something that I'm overly familiar with, so I'm kind of curious how things are going and developing in that space. Sure. CHARLES NUTTER JRuby is currently Ruby 4 .0 compatible. We are basically caught up on compatibility, which means we're working on a lot of the next level optimizations, performance stuff, concurrency work. We really just want people to be able to drop any Ruby application in and get better performance, better concurrency out of it without changing anything. And I've already talked to two or three people here that threw their app on JRuby while we were at the event and got it up and going and it looks good. DAVID HILL That feels like the exact experience that you want to be able to have. almost a drop -in replacement if you want it. CHARLES NUTTER Right, exactly. It's a lot of work to maintain that level of compatibility. I'm sure. But it really pays off when people are able to just take the code they know and just laterally move right over to JRuby and then get those benefits. DAVID HILL Very cool. And last question for this. We had an activity. the first night of the conference. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about that activity and how that went for you and why you sponsored it. CHARLES NUTTER Absolutely. My first time ever doing karaoke was attached to a Ruby event and it's become just a standard tradition at every Ruby conference. Everybody wants to figure out where the karaoke is going on. We on the JRuby team and Hedius Enterprises team decided we were the ones that were going to take the reins and make sure that karaoke happened on the first night. We managed to sponsor JRuby Karaoke. interestingly enough at j karaoke here in las vegas and we got a ton of folks came out and it was a great time so we're probably going to try to keep doing that at every event we do we'll make sure that karaoke happens somewhere i am so excited to hear that my first karaoke experience was two years ago at a ruby event and it sucked me in so bad and you may have noticed i had a hard time giving the microphone up while we were there so DAVID HILL am so excited to hear that my first karaoke experience was two years ago at a ruby event and it sucked me in so bad and you may have noticed i had a hard time giving the microphone up while we were there so I really love karaoke with Ruby Friends. Right. CHARLES NUTTER It really opens people up and you realize that we are a community that can hang out together. Whether we can sing well or not, we can get in the same room and just blast it out. DAVID HILL Because it's just fun either way. Absolutely. Absolutely. Great. Well, thank you so much for giving me a couple of minutes of your time, Charlie. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Good talking to you. Here we are with another attendee of RubyConf 2026, Miguel Marcondes Filio. Yes. I'm always a little bit nervous, even though I know Portuguese. I was like, oh, I could be crossing the wires with Spanish somewhere in here. So Miguel here was a speaker at RailsConf this year, right? You gave a workshop. MIGUEL FILHO Yeah. DAVID HILL What was that about? MIGUEL FILHO Evolve Monsters. I tried to build like a genetic algorithm, dancing with Ruby with a little bit of LLM just for fun. But I was trying to, because we have like weird Ruby topic this year. Yeah. I was trying to, like, think in something that could bring, in quotes, real AI. Right. Trying to grab the old topic. Not the old topics, but we are just always talking about LLMs, and we don't talk too much about the other kind of algorithms. Yeah, it's been a while since I've heard talks about that. Yeah, so I was thinking I don't have the full knowledge of evolutionary algorithm and everything, only from... Right. And I love like games and stuff. And I have this idea for a long time. So I was thinking like how I can build something weird with like old AI, MIGUEL FILHO maybe a game kind of thing. So it's evolving monster because we have like a monster that have attributes like a Pokemon game. Right. Yeah. And it will run through a five stage. race and through GA, through genetic algorithm, how we could know the best kind of monster to do so. And that was the idea about the workshop. Very cool. DAVID HILL cool. I haven't been able to see all the talks that I wanted to see. Running around and helping to run the conference is like, oh, I wish I had been able to sit down and see that. But I guess that's the price you pay for helping to organize the conference. Did you see any other talks or sessions that really stood out to you that you thought were interesting? MIGUEL FILHO Yeah. First time seeing Matt. It's a thing, right? Because he made the language and everything here. It's because he started. But he was there. We talk about like mangas in the hall. And in the end, we are so afraid about AI. Of course, the market. It's changing, but the conference and everything, it's also about people. So, okay, we are afraid about things changing, but at the same time, Matt was here. Everyone are kind in the community. Yeah, sorry, I flee a little bit about your question. If there are any other talks or sessions that you saw that you really enjoy. DAVID HILL that you saw that you really enjoy. MIGUEL FILHO Talks, yeah. My friends, my colleagues were here doing... I've started calling you guys the CodeMiner crew. DAVID HILL I've started calling you guys the CodeMiner crew. MIGUEL FILHO Yeah, CodeMiner crew. I like that quote. So Gabriel talked about LLMs and hand -on forests to buy houses and which algorithm. Oh, right. I caught the tail end of that one. Fight each other. DAVID HILL right. I MIGUEL FILHO other. And, of course, it's also quoted old, real AI stuff, right? So it's so good to have, like, different perspective because right now we are only talking about LLM. So I think he brought real interesting kind of view. Yeah. Yeah. I like his talk. Eddie chat about rectors and he went through because on the QA with Tenderlove and Mats, he was saying like, it's not ready, but Tenderlove works. on those things. And no, please, it's ready. Use it because we need kind of feedbacks. Right. DAVID HILL Yeah. MIGUEL FILHO Yeah. Because Ed did a really deep dive on how things are right now and what is missing from that. From the current implementation. From the current implementation about GC, the garbage collector, that it needs to froze all the parallel stuff for now, but they are already. Improving that. Nice. So those two talks that are from the CodeMiner crew, for sure. DAVID HILL From the current MIGUEL FILHO Reeling well into the Dave Thomas. Oh, yeah. Closing the event. We've got that coming up in a little while here. DAVID HILL here. Yeah. Outside of the talks, have you been to RubyConf before? MIGUEL FILHO No. DAVID HILL This is your first one. MIGUEL FILHO My first RubyConf. DAVID HILL First time in the U .S. First time in the U .S., first RubyConf, and also presenting at RubyConf. Yeah. That's a lot of firsts. My brain, MIGUEL FILHO My brain, it hurts a little bit. It's so many things. DAVID HILL Especially since English is also not your native language. It's not your first language. MIGUEL FILHO language. It's not your first language. Yeah, it's not my first language. So sometimes, yeah. DAVID HILL So you've got a lot going on right now. As a first time attendee at the conference, how have you liked it? MIGUEL FILHO I love it because Roop community, it's the best one. DAVID HILL It's pretty good. MIGUEL FILHO Yeah. I went through other events from other languages. They are good as well. But I don't know. I feel my heart. more warmer on the Ruby community. Everyone is so willing to help and open. Awesome. Loving it. Thank you for having me. DAVID HILL I'm glad I was able to meet you. I've met Eddie, I think it was two years ago now, with a couple of other people from CodeMiner. It's one of my favorite opportunities to see you guys again. I get to speak Portuguese a little bit. MIGUEL FILHO You can tell some jokes. Every time someone appears? Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling a joke in Portuguese to Eddie, DAVID HILL Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling a joke in Portuguese to Eddie, and he's never going to let me forget it. DAVID HILL I'm here with Cameron Dutro, who is a speaker here at RubyConf. And so how was the conference for you, Cameron? CAMERON DUTRO Yes, it was awesome. I'm really into meeting people, talking to people, the hallway track, of course. I do go to talks too, but those are recorded a little bit less important. And, you know, like in the beginning of my programming career and beginning of my Ruby journey, that wasn't as important to me, right? But I realized over time that that's... really the main benefit of conferences is interacting with people who eventually become your friends, right? Like there are so many people that I was literally just walking out of the last keynote just now and like saying, hi, what's up? How's it going? To like 30 people walking, you know, because I knew them all in some ways, personally, in some ways, not as personally, because I just maybe saw their talk, but that community building is just incredibly valuable. And I think especially in And I hate saying the age of AI, because I don't actually believe that we are in the age of AI, but whatever. Anyway, in this current world, we're calling it right in this world that we find ourselves in where we sort of came from social media and now we're sort of looking at AI now. DAVID HILL world, we're calling it CAMERON DUTRO sort of came from social media and now we're sort of looking at AI now. And I think that those two things are sort of dividing us more than they're uniting us. And so it's really nice to be able to come together as a group of people who sort of coalesced around this language. Right. And just share that with them. So I'm super grateful and very. full of inspiration after coming to the conference. So super awesome conference. Great. DAVID HILL Were there any talks in particular that stood out to you that you attended and really enjoyed? CAMERON DUTRO Weirdly, the two talks that I saw at the end of the day, well, okay. So Dave Thomas' talk was phenomenal. I love that because a lot of things he was saying, and I'm sure this will come out later. He was talking about - You're writing Ruby wrong. You're writing Ruby wrong, right? Like what you're using classes is wrong. And I found myself just nodding my head like, oh boy, that's totally right. That doesn't make any sense. Because he would show examples, DAVID HILL writing Ruby wrong. You're CAMERON DUTRO classes that he thought were used. It wasn't really a class what you were doing. You were just making what should have been a module or whatever. And that was really cool. The two talks before that, they're fresh in my mind. They were much more math heavy talks. And I'm not really a math person, but the way they were presented was accessible enough that it made sense to me. Weirdly, they were both talking about the Fibonacci sequence. And it turns out that there are some incredibly clever and efficient ways to compute the nth Fibonacci number. For obscenely large values. DAVID HILL obscenely large values. Exactly. CAMERON DUTRO values. Exactly. So like 45 million was the one that the end of the slides for the second to last talk, which kind of blew my mind. I also learned through that talk that Ruby has tail call optimized recursion if you enable it. And I'd never seen that before. And that's also pretty cool. Interesting. Yeah. DAVID HILL And then what was your talk about? CAMERON DUTRO Okay, I gave a talk on Garnet .js, which is an implementation of the YARV virtual machine in TypeScript. YARV being the VM that Ruby code runs on. So it takes your Ruby code, uses Prism to compile it into an abstract syntax tree, walks that tree to emit YARV instructions, and then executes those instructions. That's both what Garnet does and what Ruby does. Okay. And so the idea is it can run in the browser, can run in Node. DAVID HILL Nice. Yeah. But then you also, because you're a Muget. significant number of people that seem to do this you also gave a lightning talk yes i don't understand how that happened because maybe it's just there were not as many attendees in the past they don't have as much to choose from maybe i don't know yes live component i also gave a lightning talk on that live component is a state management system and a automatic sort of re -rendering engine for view component which is something i'm extremely interested in because i love view component when i'm able to use it yeah the way it CAMERON DUTRO i don't understand how that happened because maybe it's just there were not as many attendees in the past they don't have as much to choose from maybe i don't know yes live component i also gave a lightning talk on that live component is a state management system and a automatic sort of re -rendering engine for view component which DAVID HILL is something i'm extremely interested in because i love view component when i'm able to use it yeah the way it encapsulates the view logic and like the helpers specific to specific UI components. I love being able to use it when I'm able to. And so having a little bit more available to me in there, I'm really curious. I'm going to be taking a look at life component. CAMERON DUTRO That makes me so happy. So life component has been an outgrowth of a lot of other ideas that I've been kicking around for a long time. And it's kind of like a third or fourth incarnation of the thing I've been thinking about. I think that the Ruby front end has really been neglected for a long time. And Marco Roth, who I also was able to connect with this week, feels the same way. And that's why a lot of his efforts are focused on the front end too, like Herb and ReactionView. Those are like the only really big things that have come into the front end for Rails in a long time. DAVID HILL ReactionView. Those are like the only really big things that have come into the front end for Rails in a long time. CAMERON DUTRO Yes, that's right. And I think that we just are kind of lacking some imagination there. And I say that because you look at other language communities, you know, not all of them maybe are, I figured all of this out, but I look specifically to Phoenix live view. And I think Laravel has an example of that, or has a corollary to this as well, where updating the front end is done by changing state, right? So thinking of React, but not writing JavaScript, writing the language you prefer, like Elixir or PHP, or I suppose Ruby, that would be. My ideal state would be just to be able to control the browser, control state updates from one place instead of having to have a backend and a frontend. DAVID HILL That would be nice. I would like that, I think. Yeah, it's a good world to live in. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining me on this quick little chat about RubyConf, Cameron. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much. And now I'm joined by Nico Roulston. So you were a volunteer at RubyConf this year. How did that go for you? NICO ROULSTON I'm super glad I did it. I've watched for years at different conferences, different events, and just people give back to the Ruby community. And for myself, I sat there and went, this is a time in my life where I'm capable of taking the time off of work, coming out to give back to the community, and then just really being involved to make sure that this still happens. Because without the people volunteering, without people giving their time on the board, etc., this doesn't happen. And karaoke doesn't happen. which is the thing that should always continue to happen. Yeah, I talked to Charlie earlier and we had a segment where we talked about karaoke. Yes, segue. But it's the little things where Stefan, another one of our first timers, right? He volunteered. He was able to get up and talk. And all of a sudden, I know for a fact that he made a relationship that is going to continue on from here and it's going to keep him in the Ruby community. Nice. And I know. This because my wife went to RubyConf San Diego. I stayed with the kids. And she was a scholar. So she did her lightning talk. That was up there. Alan Riddle Hoover. Amazing. Amazing person. DAVID HILL That was NICO ROULSTON Saw her do this. And he reached out to her and was like, that was such an excellent talk. I would love to help you turn that into something bigger if you want. So they started a relationship. They started chatting back and forth. And Alan was doing a lot of talks. As he always does. He still does more. Yeah. But it was just this beautiful thing that a random stranger was so touched by what she said. It's pretty good. DAVID HILL does. He NICO ROULSTON Was so touched by that. Not that you're biased or anything. Not at all. I mean, he thought it was good too. DAVID HILL that. Not that you're biased NICO ROULSTON So long story short, that's what connects me and what I feel like I get when I come into Minnesota. Right. Right. Matz is nice, so we are nice. DAVID HILL are nice. NICO ROULSTON I even told Matz that. He laughed, and I'm like, well, it's your fault. I love it. I love it. We're all here because of you, DAVID HILL because of you, Matz. You did this to us. You did this, sir. So anything else about the conference that you particularly enjoyed? Any other activities that you participated in that were memorable? NICO ROULSTON Yeah. I think the ending keynote by Dave there was, as usual, excellent. I've seen him talk a few times now. I think. DAVID HILL I think. NICO ROULSTON He's not afraid to give his opinions. Like telling a room full of Ruby devs that you're doing it wrong. You're doing the entirety of this wrong. DAVID HILL Like telling NICO ROULSTON I bought his books. I think everybody should buy his books schlepping here. And there's sometimes I look at it and I'm like, you know what? I don't think that's right. You know, and he's the kind of guy you have a good conversation with. And I thought the opening by Matt's excellent. The con, some of the harness engineering ones that we went to excellent. But I don't want to focus just on the fact that like, oh, I went to talks. Right. Right. Because as some people don't know if they've never been to a conference, which I didn't know, is you will learn so much more by just sitting down with somebody at a table at lunch, the hallway track and the hallway afterwards, the questions that get asked. And the beautiful thing is, is nobody like turns a cold shoulder when you walk up. DAVID HILL I've had multiple times at this conference where there was a group of people just kind of in a loose circle chatting. And I kind of just walked up and kind of stood just outside the circle. And within a couple of seconds, the circle that adjusted shaped to include me in it. It's such a wonderful experience as someone with a certain amount of social anxiety and introverted tendencies. And it's like, it takes a lot of effort to force myself to go up and meet people. Yeah. As it's like, oh. This isn't as hard as my brain seems to think it is. 100%. Well, it is hard. It is hard. The community seems to have actively tried to make it easier. NICO ROULSTON is hard. DAVID HILL tried to make it easier. NICO ROULSTON I think so. It's one of the reasons why I've loved it so much. If you don't break down barriers for people, they're not going to feel welcome. Right. I don't remember every person's name. Somebody told me there was a lot. There's too many. There's way too many people. There's too many people here. DAVID HILL There's too many. There's way too many people. There's too many people NICO ROULSTON Even the important people. Nobody saw me do air quotes here. The important people, the ones who've been doing this for years, they influence the community. You sit down next to them at lunch. They don't say, oh, I'm important. Right. They say, hey, how are you? They broach the conversation. There's someone who says, like, leadership is top down. Culture is top down. Whoever's at the top is treating people a certain way. I have never met one person in the Ruby community. Ruby. Ruby, specifically Ruby. I'm calling it out. Ruby. Yep. That has not made me feel welcome no matter who they were. Right. DAVID HILL specifically Ruby. NICO ROULSTON Well, what they've done. I can expound on that forever. It makes me very happy. Awesome. So overall, positive experience? A plus. A plus. Awesome. DAVID HILL Thanks for listening, everyone. This has been the Ruby on Rails podcast. It was wonderful seeing so many old Ruby friends and making new ones at RubyConf last week. And a special thanks to JudoScale for sponsoring this episode.