Ruby on Rails is having a Renaissance! There is a renewed energy around the framework and its versatility and we don’t want your team to get left behind.
At thoughtbot Open Summit, we’re bringing together developers and open source leaders to build on this momentum and lead the way – together.
And it’s not just about Rails. Developers are exploring alternative frameworks like Hanami, new AI tools, and the power of working in the open.
thoughtbot Open Summit 2025 is the place where all this momentum comes together.
On October 31st, we invite you and your dev team to join us for a free, virtual event that’s nothing like a typical online conference full of one-way talks.
thoughtbot Open Summit is hands-on. You’ll pair with maintainers, solve real problems, and learn directly from the people building the tools your team already depends on (and the ones you’ll want to use next!)
This year’s theme is “Leading the Way,” celebrating the makers, maintainers, and contributors who keep Rails and open source moving forward.
Whether you’re a developer looking to deepen your skills or a team lead focused on growing your team’s connection to the open source community, this is your chance to be in the (virtual) room where progress happens.
Full schedule (All times in UTC)
“Ok, but what time is this where I live?” Here’s your UTC converter.
9:00 am UTC — Gather and get Inspired The day will kick off in the thoughtbot Discord, where attendees will meet the team and session leaders, connect with one another, and get ready for a full day of collaborating on open source.
9:30 am — Opening Keynote
Rémy Hannequin, Senior Developer, and Jared Turner, Senior Product Manager, will kick off thoughtbot Open Summit with a keynote exploring how open source and successful products continuously strengthen each other in a self-reinforcing flywheel. They will also trace thoughtbot’s 20+ years of open source leadership, from classics like factory_bot, Administrate, and Clearance to newer tools like Superglue, Belt, and Top Secret.
Hands-on and heads together
10:00 am — Hanami
Tim Riley, creator of the Hanami framework, will join Sarah Lima, Development Team Lead, to showcase a Ruby-based alternative to Rails and how Hanami complements existing Rails architectures.
11:00 am — Belt
Senior Developers Rakesh Arun and Tomi Alu will lead a live coding session on Belt, the React Native toolkit that helps teams start new mobile projects quickly and consistently.
12:00 pm — Administrate 1.0
Attendees will get to be part of thoughtbot history as maintainers Nick Charlton and Pablo Brasero ship Administrate 1.0 LIVE. They will also dig into the code, share lessons from complex client use cases, and take feature requests from the audience.
1:00 pm — RegEx Workshop
Svenja Schäfer, Development Team Lead, will help attendees sharpen their pattern-matching skills in this interactive workshop on Regular Expressions.
Collaborate and grow
3:00 pm — factory_bot
Senior Developers Neil Carvalho and Jose Blanco will take you behind the scenes of factory_bot, showing how to extend it with custom strategies for your own testing setup.
4:00 pm — Open Source Panel
Join Rémy Hannequin, Nick Charlton, Johny Ho, and Elaina Natario for a candid conversation moderated by me, Lindsey Christensen, about the challenges and opportunities in the next era of open source.
5:00 pm — Superglue 2.0
Development Team Lead Johny Ho and Senior Developer Sally Hall will demonstrate how Superglue helps Rails teams build highly interactive React applications without losing Rails’ simplicity and structure.
What’s next: AI + Rails
6:00 pm — Building AI Features in Rails with Active Agent
Justin Bowen, creator of Active Agent, is joined by Chad Pytel for a live, hands-on workshop on building AI features directly inside your Rails apps.
Attendees will learn how to use prompting to manage context and render messages, implement tool calls to connect AI features to their Ruby code, leverage MCP services, generate structured outputs from unstructured data, and more.
Closing the day
7:00 pm — Closing Keynote
Aji Slater will close out the day with an inspiring talk on the golden ages of innovation and how today’s open source community is leading the next one.
Join us
thoughtbot Open Summit 2025: Leading the Way
October 31, 2025 | Starting at 9 am UTC
Join developers, open source maintainers, and engineering leaders for a full day dedicated to improving the tools we all rely on.
This year’s Summit will bring together people who care deeply about building better software and strengthening the open source ecosystem that makes it possible.
Sign up now to secure your free ticket: https://thoughtbot.com/events/open-summit