Montréal
October 17, 2026
Montréal never quite fits a simple description. Wrapped around Mount Royal, it’s a city where two languages trade jokes on a terrasse, bagels come out of wood-fired ovens at 2 a.m., and summer seems built around festivals. From Mile End to the Plateau, and from Ottawa to Québec City, and just a short drive from the Vermont border and upstate New York, it draws in innovators, adventurers, and makers who are happy to keep up with the pace. Come for the energy, the late nights, the dépanneur wine, and the particular kind of mischief that makes Montréal feel like nowhere else.
XO Ruby is a single-day, single-track conference designed to draw folks in from the city and the region. An approachable $100 ticket price coupled with no need for a hotel or airfare means you can connect with your community without breaking the bank.
Coming Soon
Marc-André Cournoyer
Marc-André Cournoyer started programming as a kid on a Commodore 64 and has spent more than three decades building software, including creating the Thin Ruby web server and working as a Principal Engineer at Shopify, he realized he was getting tired of spending most of his waking hours staring at rectangles of light. So he started experimenting with a different kind of workspace: an AI-integrated office for makers, built around agents, voice, physical controls, and fewer screens. These days, he’s building his own version of that future in Montréal.
Garrett Dimon
He's been in and out of entrepreneurship his whole career. Garrett was once told "nobody hires a founder", but when he joined John Nunemaker in running Flipper Cloud, and acquiring and running Fireside, two Rails apps, the diverse skills of a founder was just the right fit for that setup. He comes to us from Crested Butte CO, and is involved in his small mountain community.
Kasper Timm Hansen
Kasper was on the Rails core team from 2016-2022, is the top 14th contributor, authored major features and reviewed & merged thousands of contributor pull requests. These days Kasper’s focus is on excellent Domain Modeling for Rails apps — including inventing the riffing technique to do so. Kasper works at the Spinel Cooperative and still pushes Rails forward with gems like Oaken, ActiveRecord::AssociatedObject & ActiveJob::Performs.
Miles Georgi
Three projects in a row, Miles had to wrangle some complex domains. He was tech lead on those three projects, and they were all different: different domains, different teams, and even different tech stacks. The only commonality was high domain-complexity, and that inspired him to start constructing a framework, based on some new philosophies, using the only language he felt was up to the task: Ruby!
David Cornu
David’s misspent youth clicking all the buttons in Microsoft Frontpage and copy-pasting PHP snippets from dubious sources somehow led to a 15+ year career in software engineering and leadership at companies like Shopify and Wealthsimple. He currently works on the developer experience at turbopuffer.
MEM - Centre des mémoires montréalaises
1210 boul. Saint-Laurent, Montréal, Québec H2X 2S5
Venue
We'll be meeting at the MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises, Montréal's own memorabilia museum, in its spacious Cabaret room. Right in the heart of Montréal's Quartier des spectacles on boulevard Saint-Laurent, the MEM is steps away from good food (try La Belle Province for Poutine), the Montréal night life, the Complexe Desjardins and Old Montréal is within walking distance too.
Transportation
MEM is a corner-of-Sainte-Catherine-and-Saint-Laurent walk from the Saint-Laurent metro station on the Green Line, putting it within easy reach for anyone coming by transit. Drivers will find paid street parking and garages scattered throughout the surrounding Quartier des spectacles blocks.
Nearby
- Old Montréal is a 15-minute walk away
- Monument-National (a few doors down on the same block of boulevard Saint-Laurent)
- Place des Arts
- Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC)