Let's get together in the big easy

Designing for dark mode requires a thoughtful approach to color, depth, and perception. Learn why your out-of-the-box dark theme and Tailwind's ".dark" class might not be cutting it. We'll dig into color terminology like hue and saturation, debunk common misconceptions about dark mode, discuss accessibility and color, and explore how to convey elevation through light sources and shadow. Learn practical design tips about working with color that you can apply to any project.

Navigating the growing Ruby AI landscape can be challenging. This "Builder's Guide" offers an overview of the leading Ruby AI gems in 2025. We'll explore a handful of ruby libraries, investigating their unique strengths and features. Learn which framework best fits your project for integrating LLMs, agent-based automations, and other AI features, empowering you to make informed decisions for your engineering team.

If we could rebuild FireHydrant from scratch, what would we do differently? Which architectural bets paid off, and which became obstacles? This talk examines Laddertruck, the Rails codebase powering incident management for hundreds of thousands of outages annually. We’ll explore our engineering journey—technical debt that slowed us down, assets that accelerated growth, and the architectural decisions that later enabled seamless AI integration. Drawing from years of building a startup’s core platform, this session distills hard-won lessons into practical guidance for teams starting greenfield projects, helping you sidestep common pitfalls and make stronger architectural choices from day one.

The venerable README file has a long history going back to at least the 1970s. Nowadays, when all code lives on Github it is basically a standard. README files are great and we all encourage more use of them except...can we do better? In this session we'll explore some other supported README formats and make a recommendation that yes, indeed, we can.

Why do standards like HIPAA, PCI, SOC2, and FedRAMP matter, and what value do they bring to developers? Drawing on years of experience in highly regulated industries, this session shows how Ruby and open-source tools make it easier than ever to build secure applications and protect user data—something every developer should care about.

Developers follow mantras like 'fat model, skinny controller' and get into debates about service objects, form objects, and POROs. These debates happen because we see slightly different definitions of 'models' across patterns and frameworks, leaving us confused about what models actually are. In this talk, we'll step outside software to rediscover what models really represent. When we bring that insight back to code, some of these arguments fall apart entirely while others become simple organization decisions. You'll walk away with a mental model that makes decisions about code architecture and organization easier.