Seattle
August 8, 2026
Seattle has a rhythm all its own, perched between Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains where world-class coffee culture meets the heart of the Silicon Forest. Making the city an ideal location for XO Ruby Seattle; created for locals from Seattle, Portland, Spokane, and surrounding areas aiming to learn, connect, and build community.
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.
Registration
Welcome
Fish Bowl Game
Break
Lead
Karl Oscar Weber
Karl talks about the past, present, and future. He talks about community, leadership, and building a better future. He also talks about Ruby a lot. Not a technical talk.
Mirrors Don't Have Opinions
KJ Loving
Every system we build reflects something back at us. Our strengths, our blind spots, the things we never thought to question. We'll look at what the mirror actually shows, how it turns up in everything we ship, and how to make the reflection something worth looking at.
Lunch
Git Power Tools
Ryan Davis
Come see tips and tricks from an experienced Rubyist who shows off his tooling, development process, and strategies for debugging large changes to million+ line codebases. Learn how to use git to your advantage to identify and isolate bugs down to the exact line. In the context of AI, these tools and strategies are only getting more vital. Come see how to extract order from the chaos.
Break
Getting Chummy with Ruby and Rails
Jair Trejo
For 20 years I kept Ruby at arm's length. Then I joined Gusto and dove into massive Rails monoliths beside engineers learning it on the fly. A survival guide and love letter to that onboarding: the friction, the delights, and finding happiness in Ruby.
Observability for the rest of us
Jed Schneider
APM and observability vendors sell a big promise: sub-second recall across millions of datapoints about the behavior, performance, and availability of your mission-critical applications. That promise carries a substantial cost—in dollars, vendor relationships, training, and attention. But what happens if we drop the soft real-time requirement?
Break
Perfectly safe
Gary Tou
HCB is an open-source Rails platform that has moved $100M+ for 6,500 nonprofits, much of it written by teenage first-timers. A field report on making mistakes cheap by construction, plus staging review so the maintainer is the last set of eyes.
Closing
Jair Trejo
Currently a Staff Engineer at Gusto. Previously L6 at Amazon, Senior at Meta & LinkedIn. I write code that solves human problems, from "How does a knight move?" to "How do we keep Facebook safe?"
KJ Loving
KJ Loving is a Ruby developer, mentor, and community builder helping make tech more human, accessible, and welcoming for people coming from nontraditional paths. She found her way into software through Code the Dream after years in aquatics, water safety, and community-based care work, with mentorship shaping not only how she learned to code, but how she now shows up for others finding their way into tech.
Today, KJ is a junior developer at Code the Dream, where they build software and mentor emerging developers finding their way into the industry. She is passionate about Ruby, practical mentorship, and creating communities where people can ask questions, build confidence, and find their place in tech.
Karl Oscar Weber
Karl Oscar Weber is a Utah based designer, programmer, and rabble rouser, that's been in love with the Web for over 20 years. His interests include Graffiti, Graphic Design, Programming Language Design, Ruby, Economics, Sociology, and the imperative rebellion against fascism. He has been described as: "A real one." Found everywhere as kowfm, and sometimes as karloscarweber.
Jed Schneider
Jed Schneider is a Senior Software Consultant at Test Double who specializes in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Clojure, CoffeeScript, and behavior-driven development. He’s known for helping teams strengthen their testing practices and for working on software systems with a strong focus on quality and maintainability.
Ryan Davis
Ryan Davis has been using Ruby since 2000 and is a founding member of the Seattle Ruby Brigade, the ass-kickingest ruby brigade (per-capita). His background includes QA, automation, language and tool development, object databases, and smalltalk. In ruby/rails, he has worked on developer productivity, profiling and optimization, and developer tools such as minitest, ruby_parser, ruby2ruby, hoe, RubyInline, and much more..
Gary Tou
Gary Tou is an Engineering Manager at Hack Club who uses Ruby on Rails to help reinvent nonprofit fiscal sponsorship and build financial tools for nonprofit organizations. He’s also active in the Ruby community, including speaking at RubyConf 2024 and contributing to Ruby events.
Ederer Hall
2931 1st Ave S, Seattle, WA 98134
Venue
Ederer Hall is an industrial event space in Seattle's SODO district. Housed in the 1919 Ederer Engineering Building — once a crane manufacturing plant — with exposed steel beams, reclaimed wood floors, high ceilings, and a working 20-ton overhead crane, the space has character to spare.
Transportation
Whether you drive or use public transit, Ederer Hall provides flexible and convenient transportation options. The venue is accessible via the Link light rail 1 Line, SODO Station is about a 10–12 minute walk away, and Metro bus stops along 1st and 4th Avenues S are a few minutes' walk. If you're driving, there is ample free and paid parking nearby, plus a parking lot adjacent to the venue.
Nearby
- SODO Track - 2 mile mural art corridor
- T-Mobile Park
- Lumen Field