Remote Ruby

This BREAKING NEWS episode is a candid reaction to Ruby Central’s latest shakeup, with Chris, Andrew, and David unpacking leadership departures, financial strain, the cancelled gala, and what all of it says about the organization’s direction. The conversation moves beyond the headlines into bigger questions about trust, transparency, community values, conference strategy, RubyGems sustainability,...

Chris and David welcome guest John Athayde, who runs the branding and UX consultancy, Meticulous. They dive into John’s unusual path through the Rails world as a designer, front-end developer, consultant, author, and UX thinker. The conversation moves from early Rails history and The Rails View into a broader discussion about why designers need to understand implementation, how AI is changing prod...

This episode of Remote Ruby opens with stories of exhaustion from a sleepless week. Then, Chris, Andrew, and David spend most of the episode unpacking two big themes: trust and governance in open source, and the growing mess of software security and AI-assisted development. They dig into the new Ruby Central write-up on the RubyGems/Bundler fracture and question whether it actually clarifies the p...

On this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David bounce from Ruby and Rails security updates into the messy realities of caching, UI architecture, and browser support. They break down the latest Zlib-related Ruby CVE, Dalli updates, Rails security and bugfix releases, and what maintenance windows mean in practice. Then, they swap stories about Redis, Memcached, observations about GitHub’s reliability ami...

Chris, Andrew, and David catch up on health, sleep deprivation, and the new Invincible season and Fallout . David shares some RubyConf CFP submissions news and this year’s broad conference themes. They discuss Andrew finishing difficult authentication work, touching on OAuth/SSO complexity and pricing, the idea of products built more for bots than humans, and where AI is proving useful, especially...

On this episode, Andrew’s buried in messy authentication work spread across legacy code, Chris recounts a frustrating GitHub Actions debugging session, and David explains the mental drain of working across both Vue 2 and Vue 3 in the same application. They talk about using workflow run triggers, scheduled builds, and GitHub’s new Agentic Copilot workflows such as CI Doctor, Automatic Code Simplifi...

Chris and David welcome back Adam McCrea from Judoscale, to discuss the uncertainty around Heroku after Salesforce’s announcement that it would stop taking new enterprise customers. Adam shares how the news landed in real time during a founder’s retreat, and the conversation expands into what Heroku’s apparent “maintenance mode” means for developers, pricing, autoscaling, platform alternatives, an...

Chris, Andrew, and David welcome special guest Jeff Dickey (jdx), creator of mise, discussing his background rewriting the Heroku CLI from Ruby to Node due to Ruby distribution/sandboxing issues.  The conversation digs into why language CLIs are hard to distribute, the tradeoffs between shims vs PATH-based version switching, why tasks can be the “clean” solution, and Jeff’s Rust-first tooling phil...

Cameron Dutro returns to the show to introduce LiveComponent, a new library that adds client-side state and targeted re-rendering to Rails ViewComponent using Hotwire + Stimulus with minimal JavaScript. Chris, Andrew, and Cameron dig into why he built it, how it serializes component state and models, how updates flow from events to fast server-rendered HTML morphs, where it shines compared to plai...

Andrew and David hold down the fort without Chris and catch up on what they’ve been watching and reading, before welcoming back Joe Masilotti, the show’s most listened to guest from last year. They talk about Hotwire Native’s momentum, why “Bridge Components” are the unlock for truly native features, Joe’s push toward SwiftUI compatibility, the messy reality of in-app purchases, and how his “Purch...

On this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David dive into the newly released Claude Opus 4.6 and share their frustrations and solutions for debugging a turbo stream issue in Rails. They discuss a range of debugging challenges they've faced, including Rails credentials decryption errors and handling unexpected URL parameters in Pagy. The conversation shifts to the Ruby Gala, a fundrai...

In this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David kick off with humorous stories about coding experiences across different languages, and then they welcome back guest Kevin Newton who shares his journey from Shopify to Meta. Then, Kevin discusses the intricacies of Ruby and Python, particularly the challenges and trade-offs in their runtime implementations. The conversation then shifts to the development...

In this episode, Blue Ridge Ruby organizers Jeremy Smith and Joe Peck join Andrew, Chris, and David to talk about the conference returning in 2026. They explain why it’s different (single-track, long breaks, and memorable community activities), what they’ve learned from running it, and how folks can help (speaking, sponsoring, and attending). The discussion also highlights the importance of commun...

In this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David dive into details about refactoring with SQL, updates on new Ruby versions, and share their views on various developer tools including Mise, Overmind, and Foreman. They also touch on standardizing tools within their teams, the benefits of using Mise for Postgres, and the efficiency of task scripts. The conversation also covers encoding issues, Basecamp Fiz...

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David have conversations from New Year's resolutions and monitor specifications, to the sustainability challenges of open source projects like Tailwind CSS. They discuss the pros and cons of various hardware, upgrading to Ruby 4.0, recent issues in software projects, and the evolving landscape of AI's impact on productivity tools. They a...

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David humorously discuss the rapid increase of 'wrapped' features in various apps, recount personal experiences with food apps, and then dive into their favorite conference moments of the year. They also explore the concept of UI affordances and its importance in web design and give a preview of upcoming conferences in 2026, and a brief...

Chris, Andrew, and David are back together, and the conversation starts out with TV talk, Fallout hype, why some shows overstay their welcome ( Prison Break ), and the “season one magic” problem ( Reacher ). Then there’s a big shoutout to Marco’s Rails Luminary win, and a deep dive into AI rabbit holes: self-hosting LLMs, Mac minis, and the looming reality of both token costs and RAM shortages. Th...

In this episode, Chris and David Hill catch up on wild winter temperature swings, then dive into what Chris has been refactoring in Jumpstart to reduce merge pain, cut dependencies, and make upgrades smoother. The conversation branches into AI-assisted coding pitfalls and where AI shines, new web security headers that could simplify CSRF handling, and a promising new “old school Heroku on steroids...

Chris and Andrew kick things off with some weather whiplash and snowblower talk before introducing a new guest on the show, long-time Rubyist David Hill. They chat about fast food and favorite shows, David’s accidental path into Ruby and Rails, and various projects he’s worked on, including an AED management application. The discussion also touches on the new open-source release of Basecamp's...

Andrew kicks off at 8 a.m. with six Docker containers running, and he and Chris dive into what modern Rails development looks like inside dev containers—covering Rails’ own images and features, using Mise and Playwright instead of Selenium, and why OrbStack has replaced Docker Desktop on their Macs. They talk through the trade-offs of running services in containers, the quirks of Kamal’s new local...

Andrew returns from SF Ruby with a lot more than conference swag! He brings a clear snapshot of where Ruby, Rails, and AI are headed right now. In this episode, he and Chris walk through the most impactful talks from SF Ruby, share highlights of engaging discussions with other developers and friends, reminisces about nostalgic tech items, and explores insightful conversations on the future of Rail...

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris and Andrew have a lively conversation with Brendan Buckingham and Ryan Frisch from the Rails Business Podcast. They discuss their experiences and journeys with Ruby on Rails, starting from their early encounters with the technology to hosting a specialized Rails podcast. Critical technical topics are covered, including managing Stripe API data integrity, upgra...

In this episode, guest Nate Berkopec joins Chris and Andrew to discuss the current state and cultural controversies surrounding Ruby Gems, Bundler, and open-source projects in general. The conversation dives into the split within the Ruby community, the complexities of maintaining key projects, and the challenges of funding and sustaining open-source work. Nate shares his experiences with Puma and...

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris and Andrew catch up with Chris discussing the arrival of a new baby and the challenges of balancing work and parenting. Then, they dive into the complexities of dealing with OpenSSL 3.6 issues on their development environments, exploring various debugging attempts and ultimately finding a workaround. The conversation also touches on the ongoing drama within th...

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris is on paternity leave celebrating the birth of his son, so Andrew brings in Drew Bragg and Rachael Wright-Munn (aka ChaelCodes), to discuss recent controversies surrounding Ruby Central and its alleged takeover of Ruby Gems and Bundler. They dive into the timeline of events, conflicting narratives, communication failures, and the underlying security concerns....