Two months ago we laughed, learned, and ate Detroit style pizza together at the penultimate RailsConf. As always, the thoughtbotters in attendance enjoyed our time connecting with the Rails community and sharing what we know. As a fully remote company, it is also a unique opportunity for us to spend time with each other in person to catch up and, when the mood strikes, juggle.
Most importantly, we left inspired to continue to make noise about what we’ve held to be true for the past 20 years: Ruby on Rails is the best, most robust framework for building great products, and it’s supported by one of the best tech communities.
Gearing up to the conference I told you what we had planned. Let’s see how it went!
thoughtbot talks at RailsConf 2024
So writing tests feels painful. What now? Presented by Stephanie Minn, Developer and co-host of The Bike Shed. Stephanie will not only sell you on how quality testing will improve your life but also the new app concept Petreon where you can give her dog treats. It’ll make sense when you watch!
Dungeons & Dragons & Rails presented by Joël Quenneville, Principal Developer and co-host of The Bike Shed. Come for Joël’s impeccable Glittersense gnome impersonation, stay for Hotwire guidance through the whimsical lens of D&D. Joël talks are always a must-see!
Glimpses of Humanity: My Game-Building AI Pair presented by Louis Antonopoulos, Development Team Lead. Introduced by fellow thoughtbotter and esteemed RailsConf organizer Aji Slater, this talk may just debunk some of your AI fears. Embrace communication and empathy and give this talk a listen.
From RSpec to Jest: JavaScript testing for Rails devs presented by Stefanni Brasil, Senior Developer. Hard to believe it, but this will be marked as Stefanni’s historic first time presenting in the main agenda. Learn how to transfer your Rails testing skills to the Javascript world.
Open source pairing on Hack Day
The Hack Day pair-with-thoughtbot concept driven by Aji was a great success.
As Stefanni Brasil highlighted:
At thoughtbot, we started running a monthly Maintainers sync and we have a document listing what kind of help folks need in our Open Source projects. So I just pulled out that doc and people could choose what they wanted to help with:
- capybara-accessibility_audit: Allow marking tests Pending when they fail audits
- administrate: Fix “search with a filter with arguments” spec
- Superglue: Add erb-lint exception for ERB templates and Initialize TypeScript.
This strategy was so successful that we decided to make that document public. You can find out items from the list and learn more about how to contribute to Open Source with us here.
We enjoyed working alongside developers, some of whom were making their first open source contributions. One such developer ended up giving a lightning talk about his experience pairing on capybara accessibility audit gem and gave thoughtbot’s Sean Doyle a shoutout:
Sponsoring and attending the Women and Non-binary Ruby dinner
We were proud co-sponsors of the wnb.rb dinner. WNB.rb is a virtual community for women and non-binary Rubyists. They host meetups, interview prep groups, book clubs, CFP working groups and more. The dinner provided a wonderful space for this community to come together and connect.
Superglue is talk of the town
There has been a lot of excitement in the Rails community about thoughtbot’s Superglue project and this held true at RailsConf. A lot of companies with Rails + React stacks are reaching for Superglue for ease of maintaining their code and there was a lot of discussion in the conference hallways. Superglue even got a shoutout in the keynote on the topic of projects with a lot of commercial potential. Stay tuned for more Superglue updates from founder Johny Ho and other key contributors!
Preparing to bid RailsConf farewell
This year the organizers announced that 2025 will be the last RailsConf and it makes us a bit nostalgic.
Our team has been going since the beginning. In 2008, a large contingent of the early thoughtbot team, including founder and CEO Chad Pytel, attended and distributed funny shirts your friends won’t understand. Chad gave the talk “Advanced Active Record Techniques: Best Practice Refactoring”. It was the first of many talks he and other thoughtbot alum would give at the conference over the last 16 years.
Thank you to the organizers that made this and every year a flame under the cauldron that is this community we love.
