Remote Ruby

Chris, Andrew, and David catch up on health, sleep deprivation, and the new Invincible season and Fallout. David shares some RubyConf CFP submissions news and this year’s broad conference themes. They discuss Andrew finishing difficult authentication work, touching on OAuth/SSO complexity and pricing, the idea of products built more for bots than humans, and where AI is proving useful, especially for debugging and research. The conversation eventually widens into a more skeptical look at the AI industry itself, touching on scraped code, deepfakes, surveillance, lobbying, and whether the promised productivity gains really match reality. Hit download now!LinksJudoscale- Remote Ruby listener giftInvincibleFalloutRobby Russell XSam Altman XGhosttyRuby 4.0.2 Released RubyConf: July 14-16, 2026, Las Vegas, NVRails World 2026- September 23-24, Austin, TX (Update)HoneybadgerHoneybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.JudoscaleMake your deployments bulletproof with autoscaling that just works.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Chris Oliver X/TwitterAndrew Mason X/TwitterJason Charnes X/Twitter

They dig into a multi-hour GitHub Actions CI debugging saga and explain artifact upload/download quirks and workflow run triggers. They debate agentic AI workflows, low-quality AI PRs, and rising infrastructure costs. Legacy authentication headaches and the mental toll of maintaining Vue 2 alongside Vue 3 come up. Neovim setups and ERB tooling improvements are also discussed.

Adam McCrea, founder of Judoscale and autoscaling/platform ops expert, reflects on waking to the Heroku news during a founders retreat. He discusses whether Heroku is in maintenance mode, migration tradeoffs like databases, self-hosting versus managed platforms, and why framework-aware autoscaling matters. Conversation also covers hosting pricing, Render and PaaS positioning, and building durable developer businesses in the AI era.

Jeff Dickey, creator of mise and tools for runtime/version management, secrets, and dev daemons. He recounts rewriting the Heroku CLI and why single-binary distribution and sandboxing matter. The chat covers shims vs PATH switching, tasks as a reliable alternative, Rust-first tooling, Pitchfork for dev daemons, fnox for encrypted secrets, and precompiled portable Rubies becoming mise’s default.

Cameron Dutro, software engineer and creator of LiveComponent who works on Rails, ViewComponent, and Hotwire integrations. He explains LiveComponent’s client-side state and targeted re-rendering for server-rendered components. They discuss serializing component state and models, the fast re-render loop from events to HTML morphs, and optional React integration for migration and interoperability.

Joe Masilotti, independent developer and Hotwire Native advocate who builds Bridge Components and PurchaseKit. He talks about how Bridge Components deliver native features via server-driven HTML. He discusses wrapping UIKit for SwiftUI compatibility and why native fidelity matters on iOS. He also covers the complexity of in-app purchases and how PurchaseKit normalizes Apple and Google webhooks.

They react to Claude Opus 4.6 and poke fun at AGI hype. A surprising Turbo Stream bug and Rails credentials decryption mystery lead to debugging stories. They talk about a new Ruby Gala fundraiser and who it honors. Conference hack days get critiqued and they propose turning them into structured workshops for better learning.

Kevin Newton, a language tooling engineer who built Prism, a pure-Ruby YAML parser, and a regex engine, talks about Ruby vs Python runtime trade-offs. He covers Prism’s goals and adoption, FreeThreadedPython and the GIL, error-tolerant parsing for IDEs, and building pure-Ruby parsers and regex VMs. The conversation mixes technical trade-offs with practical design stories.

Joe Peck, a 20-year Ruby, Rails, and Elixir developer who helps organize Blue Ridge Ruby. Jeremy Smith, a product-focused Rails developer and conference organizer active in the Ruby community. They discuss the conference’s single-track format, long breaks, community activities like hiking and board games, logistics lessons including accessibility and CFP tooling, and creative sponsorship and ticket strategies.

A lively chat about refactoring into SQL and Postgres to squeeze out performance wins. They compare developer tooling choices and why some teams standardize on Mise and Overmind. Conversation touches on CLI specs, encoding headaches and fixes, rich-text editor tech like Lexi, and web security concerns around OEmbed and SSRF protections.