Fall is shaping up to be a busy season for thoughtbot. Over the next two months, thoughtbotters are speaking, attending, and hosting events across six cities on two continents. If you’re nearby, come find us.
XO Ruby Vancouver, August 15, Vancouver, Canada
XO Ruby Vancouver kicks things off. Fernando Perales will be speaking on “The Ruby Guide to Responsible LLM Integration,” a talk about the production challenges of wiring large language models into Ruby applications: malformed input, data leaks, prompt injection, outages, and rate limits, and the patterns that keep things stable once real users start hitting them.
EuRuKo 2026, September 16-18, Brno, Czech Republic
EuRuKo, the European Ruby Conference, returns for another year, this time in Brno. Sarah Lima and Rémy Hannequin are co-presenting It’s about Time, a hands-on workshop on why timekeeping in Ruby is trickier than it looks: time zones, daylight saving quirks, leap seconds, and the bugs they cause in persistence, background jobs, and tests. EuRuKo has one of the best community atmospheres on the Ruby calendar, and it’s always worth the trip.
Rails World 2026, September 23-24, Austin, Texas
Rails World lands in Austin this year, and two thoughtbotters are speaking. Tess Griffin is presenting Sharding Is Hard: Let’s Make It Easier!, on when vertical scaling stops being enough, how to pick a shard key, and how to keep transactions consistent across shards. Joël Quenneville is presenting Harness Engineering on Rails, on treating AI agents less like chatbots to prompt and more like reactive systems that improve code by iterating on standards, tests, and linters instead of one mistake at a time. Rails World has become the biggest event on the Rails calendar, and we’re glad to be part of it again.
Rocky Mountain Ruby, September 28-29, Boulder, Colorado
Right on the heels of Rails World, Rocky Mountain Ruby brings a single-track, two-day conference to Boulder. Fernando Perales is speaking on “Slowly We Rot: signs of a Rails app’s decay,” a talk about the patterns of decline he’s seen again and again after 13 years consulting on Rails apps: how a quiet TODO comment turns into code nobody wants to touch, why the rot compounds, and what to do about it before a rewrite starts to look like the only option.
Amsterdam Tech Leaders, October 6, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Next up is something a little different: a Tech Leaders meetup in Amsterdam on October 6, hosted by thoughtbot. It’s part of the same community series that’s been growing in London, Bristol, and Austin: casual, in-person conversations for engineering leaders. More details are coming soon.
London Chief Product Officer Conference 2026, October 29, London, UK
We’re also headed to the London Chief Product Officer Conference 2026, where [Bethan Ashley]bethan ashley is hosting and moderating a round table on product leadership. It’s a chance to dig into the questions CPOs are wrestling with alongside peers, in a smaller, conversation-driven format.
Tech Leaders meetups, ongoing
Alongside these conference stops, thoughtbot runs a recurring Tech Leaders meetup series: casual, in-person conversations for engineering leaders, hosted every few weeks in whichever city we can gather a room. Coming up: a Tech Leaders Meetup in London on August 18, Austin Tech Leaders on August 20, and Boston Tech Leaders x Webflow Conf ‘26 on September 2. Past editions have popped up in London, Bristol, Manchester, and Austin, including a Tech Leaders x SXSW 2026 stop back in March. Follow the calendar to see what’s next near you.
That’s six conference stops across two continents this fall, plus an ongoing run of Tech Leaders meetups. If you’re at any of these events, find us. We’d love to say hi.