Remote Ruby

This BREAKING NEWS episode is a candid reaction to Ruby Central’s latest shakeup, with Chris, Andrew, and David unpacking leadership departures, financial strain, the cancelled gala, and what all of it says about the organization’s direction. The conversation moves beyond the headlines into bigger questions about trust, transparency, community values, conference strategy, RubyGems sustainability, and whether Ruby Central can rebuild credibility by involving more of the community in what happens next. Hit download now to hear more! 

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Chris and David welcome guest John Athayde, who runs the branding and UX consultancy, Meticulous. They dive into John’s unusual path through the Rails world as a designer, front-end developer, consultant, author, and UX thinker. The conversation moves from early Rails history and The Rails View into a broader discussion about why designers need to understand implementation, how AI is changing product and UI work, where component-based design is headed, and why browser support is still one of the messiest parts of modern web development. Hit download now to hear more!

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This episode of Remote Ruby opens with stories of exhaustion from a sleepless week. Then, Chris, Andrew, and David spend most of the episode unpacking two big themes: trust and governance in open source, and the growing mess of software security and AI-assisted development. They dig into the new Ruby Central write-up on the RubyGems/Bundler fracture and question whether it actually clarifies the path forward, then pivot into the Axios npm compromise, supply-chain risk, and how fragile modern package ecosystems can feel. Then, they go into a wide-ranging discussion on AI coding, bloated production apps, image-performance headaches, CSS...

On this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David bounce from Ruby and Rails security updates into the messy realities of caching, UI architecture, and browser support. They break down the latest Zlib-related Ruby CVE, Dalli updates, Rails security and bugfix releases, and what maintenance windows mean in practice. Then, they swap stories about Redis, Memcached, observations about GitHub’s reliability amid massive Claude attributed code activity, and the kinds of performance problems that only show up at scale. The episode closes with a thoughtful Rails frontend discussion covering nested layouts, active sidebar links, CSS-powered empty states, pagination behavior, popovers, anchor po...

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!

On this episode, Andrew’s buried in messy authentication work spread across legacy code, Chris recounts a frustrating GitHub Actions debugging session, and David explains the mental drain of working across both Vue 2 and Vue 3 in the same application. They talk about using workflow run triggers, scheduled builds, and GitHub’s new Agentic Copilot workflows such as CI Doctor, Automatic Code Simplifier, and issue/PR management, while lamenting low-quality AI-generated PRs and paid AI code review tools. Andrew makes a special announcement about Blastoff Rails, they compare LazyVim, lazy.nvim, and Kickstart Neovim, we hear about Ruby 3.4.9 and its bug...

Chris and David welcome back Adam McCrea from Judoscale, to discuss the uncertainty around Heroku after Salesforce’s announcement that it would stop taking new enterprise customers. Adam shares how the news landed in real time during a founder’s retreat, and the conversation expands into what Heroku’s apparent “maintenance mode” means for developers, pricing, autoscaling, platform alternatives, and the broader challenge of building durable developer businesses in the AI era. They also touch on Judoscale’s upcoming “platform tour” and the value of smaller Ruby conferences. Hit download now to hear more! 

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Chris, Andrew, and David welcome special guest Jeff Dickey (jdx), creator of mise, discussing his background rewriting the Heroku CLI from Ruby to Node due to Ruby distribution/sandboxing issues.  The conversation digs into why language CLIs are hard to distribute, the tradeoffs between shims vs PATH-based version switching, why tasks can be the “clean” solution, and Jeff’s Rust-first tooling philosophy. They also dive into his other projects: usage (CLI docs/completions), Pitchfork (dev daemon runner that starts/stops services by directory), and fnox/Fort Knox (secrets management with encrypted files or remote stores like 1Password), and a big upc...

Cameron Dutro returns to the show to introduce LiveComponent, a new library that adds client-side state and targeted re-rendering to Rails ViewComponent using Hotwire + Stimulus with minimal JavaScript. Chris, Andrew, and Cameron dig into why he built it, how it serializes component state and models, how updates flow from events to fast server-rendered HTML morphs, where it shines compared to plain Turbo/Stimulus, and how optional React support can help with migration and interoperability. Hit download now to hear more! 

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Andrew and David hold down the fort without Chris and catch up on what they’ve been watching and reading, before welcoming back Joe Masilotti, the show’s most listened to guest from last year. They talk about Hotwire Native’s momentum, why “Bridge Components” are the unlock for truly native features, Joe’s push toward SwiftUI compatibility, the messy reality of in-app purchases, and how his “PurchaseKit” aims to simplify the whole Apple/Google webhook maze. We also hear about Joe’s new podcast with Colleen, the hosts’ AI tool usage (Claude, Augment, Codex), and Joe’s intent to submit a CFP to spe...

On this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David dive into the newly released Claude Opus 4.6 and share their frustrations and solutions for debugging a turbo stream issue in Rails. They discuss a range of debugging challenges they've faced, including Rails credentials decryption errors and handling unexpected URL parameters in Pagy. The conversation shifts to the Ruby Gala, a fundraising event tied to RubyConf, highlighting its purpose, structure, and some notable people being honored. They reflect on their experiences with Hack Days at conferences, the challenges they pose, and suggest transforming them into structured workshops to maximize learning...

In this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David kick off with humorous stories about coding experiences across different languages, and then they welcome back guest Kevin Newton who shares his journey from Shopify to Meta. Then, Kevin discusses the intricacies of Ruby and Python, particularly the challenges and trade-offs in their runtime implementations. The conversation then shifts to the development and adoption of the Prism parser in Ruby, highlighting its impact on various projects. Lastly, Kevin shares insights on his work with a pure Ruby YAML parser and a regex engine, emphasizing the complexities and joys of coding and parsing...

In this episode, Blue Ridge Ruby organizers Jeremy Smith and Joe Peck join Andrew, Chris, and David to talk about the conference returning in 2026. They explain why it’s different (single-track, long breaks, and memorable community activities), what they’ve learned from running it, and how folks can help (speaking, sponsoring, and attending). The discussion also highlights the importance of community and in-person interactions in the tech industry, offering insights into how these events support professional growth and long-term sustainability in software development. Hit download now to hear more!