Remote Ruby

Andrew and Chris are back with a packed episode covering everything from Rails World anticipation and Rails 8.2 to security, Ractors, AI-assisted development, and some ambitious new Ruby tooling. They dig into RubyGems recent spam-publishing incident and Trusted Publishing, look at Shopify’s push toward Ractor-safe Rails, and explore Roundhouse, a project experimenting with compiling Rails applications into entirely different...

Chris, Andrew, and David are back with a conversation that starts with Rails World plans. They break down APIs, webhooks, and persistent connections, using everything from thermostats to Stripe to explain how systems communicate and recover when things go wrong. From there, Chris shares what caught his eye in PlanetScale’s new Postgres sharding work, before the conversation shifts heavily toward AI-assisted programming, where...

Ryan Castillo returns to the show to catch everyone up on what’s changed since his last appearance…and a lot has changed. Ryan explains why he and his co-founder moved on from their web application firewall Wafris and built Knowatoa, a platform focused on helping companies understand how their brands appear in AI-powered search. From there, the conversation expands into GEO and AI search visibility, multi-agent coding ...

This week, Chris, Andrew, and David dig into a packed mix of Rails news, developer tooling, and the increasingly complicated role AI is playing in everyday coding. They talk about Herb making its way into Rails, the realities of Rails upgrades and stacked PRs, new approaches to Git hosting and object storage, and how Rails is being evaluated in the age of AI agents. They also get into improvements coming to Action Text, Podia&rsquo...

Andrew and David catch up on everything from wild weather and the upcoming Rails World conference to Andrew’s latest deep dive into MCPs (Model Context Protocols). Andrew shares what he’s learned while building an MCP for a Rails side project, including choosing the official Ruby MCP SDK, discovering the limitations of resources versus tools, and wrestling with OAuth and Doorkeeper authorization. They also look ahead to...

Ernesto Tagwerker joins Chris, Andrew, and David, to talk about how AI is changing Rails development, consulting, and the way teams approach upgrades and maintenance. They discuss using Claude Code for Rails upgrades, the risks of relying too heavily on AI-generated tests and code, and why strong development standards are becoming even more important. The conversation also explores code quality, open AI models, team consistency, an...

In this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David dig into their latest experiences building with Claude, from massive diffs and unnecessary view specs to the challenge of catching subtle mistakes in AI-generated code. Andrew shares what went into launching Podia’s new Shop experience, Chris breaks down a serious Rails Active Storage security vulnerability, and David earns a developer rite of passage by accidentally bringing producti...

Irina Nazarova and Vladimir Dementyev from Evil Martians return to preview the second annual SF Ruby Startup Conference and share what they learned from bringing the event to life for the first time. They discuss the conference’s new focus on ambitious builders, the importance of creating meaningful connections for attendees, and why Ruby on Rails remains a powerful foundation for startups tackling difficult, real-world probl...

Chris, Andrew, and David begin with summer heat, home cooling problems, and an IPv6 issue preventing Andrew from playing Battlefield 6. The conversation quickly heads down a Raspberry Pi rabbit hole, with projects ranging from smart-home automation and MagicMirror dashboards to local AI transcription. David then recaps RubyConf in Las Vegas before the group discusses design patterns, the changing conference landscape, and how AI is...

This week, Andrew and Chris swap stories from the front lines of Ruby development, from wrangling GitHub Actions and speeding up CI to keeping old Ruby versions alive on brand-new servers. They also unpack a tricky Sidekiq deployment issue, explore the promise of compiling Ruby apps into standalone executables, and reflect on how AI is making once-impossible infrastructure problems a little easier to solve. Hit download now to hear...

Chris, Andrew, and David dig into the practical realities of modern development, from building faster server images with Packer and untangling database schema problems to deciding when refactoring, code coverage, and quality tools are actually useful. They also share where AI coding assistants are saving real time, where they still create confusion, and why good judgment remains just as important as the tools themselves.  The ...

In this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David kick things off with a very Remote Ruby style detour through Costco, Blue Apron, leftovers, Blackstone grills, and cast iron pans. Then, Andrew explains his Stripe subscription migration scare and major GitHub Actions workflow improvements that sped up Podia’s CI by 20–30%. They dive into Apple’s new on-device AI tooling, container alternatives on macOS, and the state of c...

Chris returns from Greece and catches up with Andrew and David on travel, conferences, movies, and the latest developments in the Rails community. They dig into the newly announced Rails World lineup, the possibilities of Active Search, alternatives to Elasticsearch, extending Action Text and Lexi, a tricky ruby-vips dependency update, and mise’s rapidly expanding machine bootstrap tools. They wrap up with open source funding...

Chris, Andrew, and David catch up after a missed week of recording and quickly dive into the kind of deeply practical Rails work that only comes from real production pain. Andrew shares the massive subscription and billing migration happening at Podia, including Stripe edge cases, legacy plan preservation, and stress-test tooling built from live scenarios. Chris then goes deep on a Hatchbox email cancellation flow that turns into a...

[This episode from February 2024 was never published and recently discovered]

In today’s episode, Andrew kicks things off with a rant about tackling developer experience tasks at Podia, wrestling with GitHub actions, and Heroku deployment woes. Then the conversation takes a turn to the importance of debugging, the power of bash scripting, and the challenges of naming in programming, with Chris mentioning DHH’s insights f...

Chris and David cover a lot of ground in this episode, starting with Chris’s experience teaching a Rails workshop for Frontend Masters in Minneapolis. Along the way, they dive deep into Rails authentication, Devise, Authlogic migrations, Chris’s ReviseAuth gem, password security, session handling, and the hard tradeoffs of maintaining open source tools. The episode wraps with big podcasting news: David is taking over Th...

Chris, Andrew, and David kick things off with a detour through Dungeon Crawler Carl, Rails World tickets, and conference travel before diving into developer tooling, package manager security, and the latest Ruby ecosystem updates. The conversation covers everything from Hotwire-style UI patterns and pnpm/Corepack setup to Jeff Dickey’s new package manager, the RubyGems malicious package attack, Ruby 4.0.4, Shopify’s Rub...

In this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David are back together with David starting out giving a recap of Blue Ridge Ruby and his renewed motivation to contribute to open source. The group discusses the value of smaller single-track conferences to hallway conversations, and lightning talks. The conversation then shifts into real-world Rails and Stripe lessons, including workshop prep, validation decisions, webhook recovery, subscriptio...