Conference season is back in the tech space, and to kick things off we sent three of our technical team to see what was happening at Rails World 25!

Earlier in September, Team Yozu returned to Amsterdam for Rails World 2025, two years after attending the inaugural event in 2023. Hosted once again at the historic Beurs van Berlage, the two-day conference brought together the Rails community for talks, demos, workshops, and valuable networking opportunities.

Representing Yozu this year were Lead Developers Chris Moore and Ste Harrison, along with CTO Justyn Clark.

For all three, it was an opportunity to see how the conference and the Rails ecosystem had evolved since that very first gathering.

A Quick Word About Rails

Ruby on Rails is a framework we have been using for over a decade, and it is at the heart of our craft when creating powerful applications for our clients. Prominent Rails users include Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb, with a notable mention to Basecamp, which was founded by the creator of Ruby on Rails itself.

We feel part of the Rails community, and fantastic events like Rails World brings together enthusiasts, experts and practitioners from across the globe.

Keynotes

The programme was packed with technical talks, keynotes, and workshops covering the latest developments in Rails, performance improvements, scalability challenges, and front-end integration using Hotwire and Turbo.

Notable speakers included Rails core contributors such as David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), Aaron Patterson, Adrianna Chang, and Hartley McGuire, alongside many others who shared their expertise and passion for the framework.

Reflecting on the experience, Ste summed it up perfectly:

“The whole event, from the organisation to the sessions, the people (and the coffee!) was next level. I got something useful from every session and can’t wait for the recordings to come out for the ones in the parallel track.”

For Yozu, attending Rails World 25 was far more than a chance to sit in on talks. It was an opportunity to gain firsthand knowledge of the latest features and best practices, connect with fellow developers from around the world, and find inspiration for our own projects.

Chris highlighted how engaging the technical content and community connections were:

“I really enjoyed it. It was great hearing about all the new things being developed and released in the near future, particularly the Hotwire Native talks. We spoke to a lot of interesting people as well — there were a lot of agencies from around the world similar to us, which was cool to see.”

The nice people from the Ruby on Rails have kindly shared some insights from the event on their YouTube channel.

Takeaways

Our team left Amsterdam with plenty of ideas, connections, and technical insights to bring back to Yozu. Here are some of the highlights:

Community

Rails Foundation & Avo
We spoke with Amanda from the Rails Foundation and Adrian from Avo, who had created a fun new Ruby passport activity. Amanda was especially interested in the Yozu-supported event MerseyRails, noting that it is the only Rails-specific meetup she was aware of. Following up with both will be vital as we continue to strengthen Yozu’s ties to the global Rails community.
Networking with Agencies
Chris particularly enjoyed meeting agencies from around the world that work in ways similar to Yozu. These conversations not only broadened our perspective but also reinforced the strength and diversity of the Rails ecosystem.
Conversations Beyond the Stage
Speaking with Rosa Gutierrez (37 Signals) about her work on bringing offline mode to Hotwire and with Marco Roth about his Rails view layer improvements was a great reminder that the conference is just as much about personal connections as it is about the sessions themselves.

Technical Insights

Multi-Tenant Rails: Everybody Gets a Database!
This session showcased the benefits of Rails as a batteries-included framework. Features that might otherwise take months to build — spanning databases, caches, background jobs, file storage, WebSockets, emails, and testing — are arriving in Rails 8.1 in a single integrated package. Multi-tenancy will make it easier to ensure data isolation and deliver true “web scale” performance.
SQLite Replication with Beamer
Pairing neatly with the multi-tenant session, this demonstrated multi-server replication for faster database reads using a geo proxy. Importantly, it’s not limited to SQLite. Justyn also spoke with Kevin McConnell (37 Signals) about use cases such as dynamically scaling instances, which could prove relevant to our own systems.
Resumable Jobs with Active Job Continuations
A standout for its simplicity, this new API enables the definition of distinct, resumable steps in long-running jobs. It eliminates much of the manual orchestration developers have typically had to handle, reducing complexity and risk.
From Chaos to Clarity: Structured Event Reporting in Rails
This addition to Rails logging, already being used at Shopify, could have real applications for Yozu’s projects. It was a strong example of Rails embracing clarity and structure at scale.
Active Record 8: Resilient by Default
While less immediately actionable, this talk reinforced one of Rails’ enduring strengths — the stability and reliability of a framework that has been refined for over 20 years and is trusted by some of the biggest platforms on the web.
Hotwire Native Keynote
A crowd favourite, this closing keynote of day one showed the power of Hotwire Native for building mobile apps with speed and feature parity across platforms. The presenter, who literally wrote the book on Hotwire Native, demonstrated how teams can even ship updates without waiting for app store approval.
Ruby Stability at Scale
This talk sparked internal discussions about improving our own systems for upgrades and maintenance. It was impressive to learn how critical applications run edge versions of Ruby before wide release, ensuring stability across the ecosystem.
Make Rails AI-Ready by Design with the Model Context Protocol
Pawel Strzalkowski’s presentation cut through the hype around AI. His gem, which integrates with Rails generators, offers a quick and practical way to get started with genuinely useful AI features in Rails applications.
Bringing Offline Mode to Hotwire with Service Workers
Rosa Gutierrez shared a journey filled with setbacks and eventual success. Her iterative approach — starting with the smallest possible step, like a custom offline error page — was a lesson in avoiding overwhelm and building progress gradually.
Rails View Layer Improvements
Marco Roth announced a major release of new developer and debugging tools for the Rails front end, available now via his gem. He hopes to merge it into Rails core, although he noted some politics might complicate that — Rails drama is alive and well!
Lessons from Migrating a Legacy Frontend to Hotwire
This session offered practical guidance on adopting Hotwire incrementally within legacy systems. The accompanying book Mastering Hotwire came highly recommended as a deep dive into the framework’s internals.
Aaron Patterson’s Closing Keynote
True to form, Aaron closed the conference with a bizarre yet brilliant blend of roasting DHH and delivering deeply technical insights on low-level performance optimisations. Nobody else in the room needed to fully understand the details, but everyone will benefit from his work.

Final Thoughts

Returning from Amsterdam all the wiser for attending Rails World 25, Ste, Chris and Justyn shared what they had learnt with the rest of the Yozu team. We always encourage internal knowledge-sharing, which helps to spread insights across the company and always sparks discussions about new tools and practices that will flow into the work we do on our own Rails projects.

Looking back, Rails World 2025 provided us with far more than just technical insights. It reminded us why we love working with Rails: the people, the creativity, and the sense of shared purpose that drives the community forward.

Amsterdam is always an unforgettable backdrop to an event that left the team feeling energised, inspired, and excited for the next Rails World event!

Return to Amsterdam – Rails World 25