Monday, September 15, 2025

Rails World 2025 Recap - All talks now online!

Posted by Amanda Perino

The dust has settled on Rails World 2025, and we owe a huge thank-you to everyone who came to Amsterdam and made it unforgettable.

But first and more importantly: All the talks are now online! Catch up on ones you missed on the Rails World 2025 YouTube playlist.

Recap

814 Rails devs from 62 countries gathered in Amsterdam for more than two days of the latest news in Rails, technical talks, networking, and a fantastic closing party.

Here’s a quick run down of the highlights:

Keynotes

DHH opened by challenging tech’s obsession with complexity, announcing Rails 8.1 beta and a wave of new features—including Markdown Rendering, Active Job Continuations, Action Text Lexxy, Beamer, Active Record Tenating, and Kamal Geo Proxy. He even booted a fresh Framework laptop, installed Omarchy OS, and launched a Rails app in under six minutes. Watch here.

Joe Masilotti closed day one with a keynote about Hotwire Native, showing how Rails devs can now build web, iOS, and Android apps without duplicating business logic. Watch here.

Day two kicked off with Aaron Patterson, Hiroshi Shibata, and Jean Boussier from the Ruby maintainer team in conversation with Robby Russell, sharing recent work on Ruby, pain points and lessons learned, and what they would like to see for and from the Ruby and Rails ecosystem in the future. Watch here.

And finally, Aaron Patterson wrapped things up by diving into Shopify’s work on Ractors, the new ZJIT compiler, and pro tips for writing JIT-friendly code. Watch here.

Rails at Scale Summit

A brand-new addition, the Rails at Scale Summit (sponsored by Shopify) brought together engineers from 36 companies, all facing similar challenges of running high-performance, high-traffic Rails systems. They met for a one-day, single-track event focused on sharing insights, best practices, and hard-earned lessons from operating Rails at scale.

The summit was intentionally limited to 100 participants to encourage candid, small-group conversations, with a schedule that left plenty of room for informal networking so that attendees could connect with others who might already have solved the problems they were facing.

Feedback was really positive, so we are considering hosting it again.

Fun stuff

After a few years of Rails World, we wanted to add a bit of fun and whimsy to this year’s event. So beyond the talks, Rails World had a few other playful experiences this year.

At the Ruby Embassy, powered by Avo and RubyEvents, attendees navigated tongue-in-cheek bureaucracy to get their Ruby Passports stamped, complete with red tape, diplomatic formality and…a light saber??? (The Ruby Passport and Embassy is a thread that can connect all of the many events in our space, so other event organizers - get in touch for more info!)

The Ruby Phone installation invited attendees to share the love with those who couldn’t be in Amsterdam by recording a video message, leaving a note on the “answering machine,” or striking up a surprise conversation via two connected phones in the Sponsor Lounge.

Rubyness gave attendees a memorable and very-Amsterdam way to get to the event venue: by the Baltic Ruby Bingo Boat. Huntress hosted the Lightning Track where 16 speakers gave short, punchy lightning talks, and Shopify closed things out in style with a party at Amsterdam’s Straat Museum, where music, art, food, and dancing capped off the event.

All in all, it was a fun week and we’re already processing feedback from attendees, speakers, and sponsors on how to make next year even better for you.

Speaking of next year…

Save the date - Rails World 2026 will take place in Austin in late September. More info shared soon. Hope to see you there!

As always, none of this would have been possible without the generous support of Rails World sponsors and Rails Foundation members.

  • Platinum Sponsor: AppSignal

  • Rails at Scale Summit sponsor: Shopify

  • Gold Sponsors: Augment Code, Basecamp, Shopify, Framework, GitHub, Jetbrains

  • Silver Sponsors: Crunchy Data, GitLab, Intercom, makandra, Salesforce Heroku, Sentry, WyeWorks

  • Lunch Sponsor: Codeminer42

  • Podcast Program Sponsor: Buzzsprout

  • Lighting Track Sponsor: Huntress

  • Ruby Embassy & Ruby Passport: Avo

  • Boat Taxis: Rubyness/Baltic Ruby

  • Rails World App Sponsor: Telos Labs

  • Coffee Cart Sponsor: Cedarcode

  • Music Sponsor: Aha!

  • Wifi Sponsor: Typesense

  • Financial Support Sponsor: ODDS, Rompslomp, TRMNL, IQLab, AndPad

If you have any questions or feedback, the Rails Foundation inbox is always open. Otherwise, ciao for now.

-Amanda