Tagged “rails”

Meticulous founder John Athayde recently joined Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, and David Hill on the Remote Ruby podcast to recap Rails World 2026 and discuss the changing landscape of Ruby, Rails, and software development. The conversation covers new developments in the Rails ecosystem, including Spinel, Roundhouse, and improvements in performance, before turning to one of the conference's biggest themes: the impact of AI on the future of programming.

The discussion explores what happens to software craftsmanship when writing code is no longer the primary job of a developer. John and the hosts consider how AI is changing the relationship between design, development, and creativity, why testing and continuous integration are becoming increasingly important, and whether opinionated frameworks like Rails become even more valuable as AI-assisted development matures. They also reflect on the value of conferences and the importance of community in an industry undergoing rapid change.

Back in April, John opened Blue Ridge Ruby 2026 with a talk that had very little to do with the things you usually see on a Ruby conference stage. No benchmarks, no framework upgrades, no live coding. Instead, photographs of trees. Forests. His own land. The talk, Learning from Permaculture: Sustainable Software Development, drew on twelve-plus years of farming with permaculture and twenty-plus years of designing and building software to ask a simple question: what does the garden know about building things that last?

The recording is now live on RubyEvents, and we wanted to mark the occasion, in part because of how the room received it and in part because of the company it kept.

Permaculture starts from a few principles that sound almost too simple to be useful: observe before you act, produce no waste, value the margins. Anyone who has inherited a large codebase knows the…