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RubyConf 2026
Red Rock Casino Resort, Las Vegas NV, July 14–16

Table of Contents

Logistics

  • When: July 14–16, 2026
  • Where: Red Rock Casino Resort, Las Vegas, NV (Main Stage: Red Rock; breakouts: Red Rock A&D, G&H)
  • Organizer: Ruby Central
  • Format: three-day, three-track (main stage + two breakouts)
  • Design: Flagrant

Sources

Overview

Ruby Central's flagship annual conference. The 2026 program is heavily shaped by two forces: the 4.0 language cut (core Set, Ractor maturation, MMTk-based GC) and the AI-assisted-coding wave (agents on legacy Rails, harness engineering, mutation testing against LLM-generated code). Framing carries a strong "who are we now that agents can code?" undertone — Jessica Kerr's Tuesday keynote, Alan Ridlehoover's talk about human computers, Scott Werner's talk on the naming problem for "agent".

Day 2 (Wednesday) is Community Day — panel with Matz + Jessica Kerr, maintainer roundtable, gem security workshop, workshops for DragonRuby / iOS-from-Rails / Hanami / genetic algorithms + LLMs.

Schedule

Tuesday, July 14

  • 09:00 — Welcome to RubyConf Las Vegas
  • 09:15 — Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto — Opening Keynote
  • 10:30 — Main: Marco Roth — The Anatomy of an ERB Rendering Engine
    • B1: Michael Toppa — AI-assisted coding: practical lessons
    • B2: Chris Fung — Stop Fighting Ruby I18n: Message Format Is All You Need
  • 11:15 — Main: Jeremy Evans — Implementing Core Set
    • B1: David Gillis — Ready: 12x Faster Ruby CLIs Through Spectacular Overengineering
    • B2: Jon Rizzo & Dave Currie — Teaching Ruby to Rank: A Search Pipeline Story
  • 12:00 — Main: Neha Abraham — Powerful Data: Making Rails Apps Faster with Aggregation
    • B1: Nery Campusano — Each All the Way Down: How Ruby Enumerators Power Streaming in gRPC Ruby
    • B2: Ifat Ribon — Yes, &…: Ruby's Secret Talent for Improvisation
  • 14:00 — Main: Keith Bennett — Command-Line Applications in Ruby: Design Patterns and Best Practices
    • B1: Dalma Boros — Makeover Monday: How a Weekly Ritual Transformed Our Codebase and Culture
    • B2: Aaron Patterson — Faster FFI For Ruby
  • 14:45 — Main: Ziggy the Hamster — Weird and Wacky Machines Running Ruby
    • B1: Cameron Dutro — Garnet.js: Implementing the YARV Virtual Machine
    • B2: Tess Griffin — Learning Empathy From Pokémon Blue
  • 15:30 — Main: Scott Werner — Talking Shit About AI Agents
    • B1: Gabriel Quaresma — Why a 1990s ML Algorithm Destroys LLMs at Predicting House Prices
    • B2: Charles Nutter — Expand your Ruby Potential with JRuby
  • 16:15 — Main: Edy Silva — Ractors in Ruby 4.0: Message Passing Without the Pain
    • B1: Andy Andrea — The little schema that could (…but should it?)
    • B2: Gannon McGibbon — Overengineering Ruby with Native Extensions
  • 17:00 — Jessica Kerr — Who are we Now?
  • 18:00 — Happy Hour

Wednesday, July 15 — Community Day

  • 09:00 — Community Day Intro
  • 09:15 — Allison Pike (Once a Maintainer) — Once a Maintainer (live roundtable; guests incl. Richard Schneeman, Jeremy Evans, Colby Swandale)
  • 10:30 — Main: Colby Swandale, Marty Haught, Andrew Nesbitt, Patrick Linnane — From Scan to Fix: A Maintainer's Guide to Gem Security
    • B1: Amir Rajan — DragonRuby Game Toolkit - Soup to Nuts (workshop)
    • B2: Joe Masilotti — Build an iPhone app with Ruby and YAML (workshop)
  • 13:00 — Future of Ruby Panel — Rich Kilmer (moderator), Matz, Jessica Kerr, [others TBD]
  • 14:00 — Main: Carolyn Cole — Converting from Rails to Hanami
    • B1: Miguel Marcondes Filho — Evolving Monsters: Build an AI Game Engine with Ruby and Genetic Algorithms
    • B2: Noel Rappin — Workshop: The Dynamic Ruby Toolkit
  • 16:15 — Ruby Runway Finals
  • 17:25 — Lightning Talks
  • 20:30 — Game Night

Thursday, July 16

  • 09:00 — Day 3 Opening
  • 09:15 — Obie Fernandez — Opening Keynote
  • 10:30 — Main: Brandon Weaver — We Who Remember Magic
    • B1: Madison Sites — Legacy Rails and the AI That Couldn't
    • B2: Miles Georgi — Come Discuss Ractors and Concurrency with 'The Dude'!
  • 11:15 — Main: Alexander Baygeldin — Fair by design: orchestrating background jobs in Ruby
    • B1: Mike Dalton — Welcome to Authentication Hell
    • B2: Peter Zhu — Building the Next-Generation Garbage Collector in Ruby
  • 12:00 — Main: Sam Ruby — There Is No Server
    • B1: Fito von Zastrow — Defying Gravity: Teaching AI to Write Better Ruby
    • B2: Hilary Stohs-Krause — How to Accessibility if You're Mostly Back-End
  • 14:00 — Q&A with Matz — hosted by Aaron Patterson
  • 14:45 — Main: Alicia Rojas — Convention Over Hallucination: Harness Engineering for AI-Powered Rails
    • B1: Kyle d'Oliveira — Fibonacci Funhouse
    • B2: Markus Schirp — Pattern Parrots and the Semantic Knot: Mutation Testing in the Agentic World
  • 15:30 — Main: Alan Ridlehoover — Indispensable: What Human Programmers Can Learn from Human Computers
    • B1: Joé Dupuis — Artisanal Computing: Handcrafted Ruby Execution for the Modern Age
    • B2: Phil Crissman — Elements of Programming, In Ruby
  • 16:15 — Dave Thomas — Closing Keynote
  • 17:15 — Closing Reception

Talks worth pulling later

The threads most adjacent to the current corpus:

  • Kerr — Who are we Now? — the identity-of-the-programmer question under agentic tooling; adjacent to the site's agent-context and agentic-systems threads.
  • Werner — Talking Shit About AI Agents — the naming problem for "agent" is directly on the site's terminology work.
  • Rojas — Convention Over Hallucination — harness engineering for Rails + LLM code generation; adjacent to the annotation-methodology and prompt-conventions notes.
  • Schirp — Pattern Parrots and the Semantic Knot — mutation testing against LLM-generated code; pairs with the property-based testing thread.
  • Ridlehoover — Indispensable/human computers — human-in-the-loop framing under agent tooling.
  • Zhu — MMTk GC in Ruby — memory-management-toolkit; useful reference for the runtime notes.
  • Patterson — Faster FFI/ Silva — Ractors — Ruby 4.0 runtime line.

Adjacencies to current work

  • Agent-tooling talks (Rojas, Schirp, Sites, von Zastrow, Kerr, Werner) align with the site's agentic-systems / annotation-methodology thread — cross-link once slides are out.
  • The Hanami / Rails / Sam Ruby "There Is No Server" arc is adjacent to the site's own no-framework Ruby posture.

Open questions / TODO

  • [ ] Watch recordings; capture Kerr, Werner, Rojas, Schirp talks first.
  • [ ] Cross-link to any agentic-systems notes once slides are up.
  • [ ] Confirm Future of Ruby Panel roster once full lineup is posted.
  • [ ] Add to Q3 2026 in site/events/index.org Upcoming/2026 lists.