Podcast · Tech & Science

Remote Ruby

by Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, David Hill · English · Tech & Science

Rubyists having conversations and interviewing others about Ruby and web development.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 52 min
Latest: 2 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

2 Oct 2026 · 33 min

Live At Rust, Uhh, Rails World 2026

Recorded live from Rails World 2026, Andrew, Chris, David, Jason Charnes, and eventually Andy Croll, unpack the strange mood surrounding this year’s conference. Much of the conversation centers on DHH’s keynote and the increasingly agent-driven future of software development: if AI can write, debug, and even understand the code for us, what happens to the value of frameworks, developer expertise, documentation, and even Ruby itself? They also dig into Hotwire, Active Search, Herb, Active Job ...

Play episode WhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E369 · 28 Sep 2026 · 55 min

Rails at Scale, Roundhouse Performance, and AI-Era Supply Chain Security

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 target languages. They also talk about using Claude for project pla...
E368 · 18 Sep 2026 · 52 min

Navigating the Labyrinth of Webhooks and APIs

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 the tools are surprisingly capable one minute and making baffling a...
E367 · 11 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

Episode 367 - Ryan Castillo

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 workflows, AI skills as the future of content, and when developers should o...
E366 · 4 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

Rails World Prep, Herb in Rails, Stacked PR Headaches and New Ruby Tooling

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’s approach to “flavored” Markdown, the never-ending frustrations of...
28 Aug 2026 · 33 min

MCP Implementations and Rails World Preparations

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 Rails World in Austin, highlighting talks on Active Search, Ractors, Herb...
E364 · 21 Aug 2026 · 54 min

Ernesto Tagwerker

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, and how developers can use AI to work more efficiently without g...
E363 · 14 Aug 2026 · 48 min

Shipping Podia’s New Shop, AI Code Woes, and a Major Rails libvips CVE

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 production to its knees. Along the way, they talk Redis 6, smarter Active Re...
E362 · 7 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

SF Ruby 2026 with Irina and Vladimir

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 problems. The conversation also explores open-source innovation, AI-assis...
E361 · 31 Jul 2026 · 42 min

Big Wins For RubyConf and Grandma

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 reshaping programming education, software development, and th...
E360 · 24 Jul 2026 · 52 min

A Deep Dive into GitHub Actions

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 more! Links Chris Oliver XAndrew Mason BlueskyDavid Hill Link...
E359 · 17 Jul 2026 · 53 min

Dont Steal Our Business Idea

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 episode wraps with the conversation going completely off the r...
E358 · 10 Jul 2026 · 40 min

The Great Falcon Defense and CI Innovations

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 conferences, GitHub, AI infrastructure costs, solar power, and even crows attacki...
E357 · 3 Jul 2026 · 59 min

Chris Is Back And Ready To Rant

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, RubyConf preparations, rising tech prices, and the massive anticip...
E356 · 26 Jun 2026 · 34 min

Blastoff Rails Recap and Ruby Central Revamp

Chris Oliver X/TwitterAndrew Mason X/TwitterJason Charnes X/Twitter
E355 · 19 Jun 2026 · 28 min

Navigating Subscription Overhauls and Payments

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 Rails internals rabbit hole around Action Mailer callbacks, m...
E259 · 12 Jun 2026 · 55 min

[The lost episode 259] All Right, Rant Time - Debugging

[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 from a live stream. They discuss Chris’s travel plans for RubyConf in Aust...
E354 · 5 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

Revise Auth and Podcasting Plans

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 The Ruby on Rails Podcast! Hit download now to hear more! Links ...
E353 · 29 May 2026 · 42 min

Rails World Tickets, New JavaScript Package Managers, and Security Worries

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 Rubydex, Claude/Codex chatter, and the increasingly strange future of AI agen...
E352 · 22 May 2026 · 54 min

Blue Ridge Ruby Insights & Experiences

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, subscription edge cases, and the growing complexity of payment integratio...
E351 · 15 May 2026 · 50 min

Stripe Changes, File Upload Quirks, Scaling Sidekiq

Chris and Andrew catch up after Andrew’s whirlwind “vacation-ish” road trip before diving into Stripe’s latest announcements, usage-based billing, merchant-of-record pricing, Rails file upload quirks, Active Storage image handling, Sidekiq queue strategy, and the future of RubyGems. They also discuss browser form behavior, preserving and deleting attachments, image variant performance, and how to think more clearly about background job priorities. Hit download now to hear more! Links Judoscal...
E350 · 8 May 2026 · 40 min

Direct Routes and Data Queries

On this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David kick things off with dentist trauma, gold star stickers, and fiber internet. The conversation centers on Rails direct routes, why they can be more powerful than helpers, the upcoming Rails World CFP and ticket rush, how AI is becoming more practical inside real engineering teams, a reminder to fill out the Rails survey, and Chris’s continued work expanding the Rails Getting Started Guide into a more realistic e-commerce tutorial with wi...
E349 · 1 May 2026 · 50 min

Behind the Scenes: Developing Podias New Version

Chris, Andrew, and David open with some classic confusion over what day it is then dive into Podia’s gradual rollout of a major new app version, including how the team is handling migration, feature flags, dogfooding, and eventual cleanup. From there, the discussion turns to underrated Rails routing features like direct routes and resolve routes, a newly merged Rails query command, observability improvements through Hatchbox’s AppSignal integration, and the ongoing pain of CSS build tooling i...
E348 · 24 Apr 2026 · 39 min

Ruby Central Restructuring

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 happe...
E347 · 17 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 23 min

Joined by John Athayde

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 ...
E346 · 10 Apr 2026 · 38 min

Governance, Security Flaws, and AI Tools

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 ...
E345 · 3 Apr 2026 · 59 min

Memcached Mayhem

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 u...
E344 · 27 Mar 2026 · 34 min

Conferences, AI Trends, and Sleepless Nights

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 ...
E343 · 20 Mar 2026 · 54 min

Unraveling GitHub Actions & Modern Auth Challenges

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...
S1 · E342 · 13 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

Heroku, Hosting, and the AI Era

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 o...

About Remote Ruby

Rubyists having conversations and interviewing others about Ruby and web development.

Remote Ruby is a English tech & science podcast from Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, David Hill. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, David Hill
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 52 min
Latest episode: 2 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1397042613
Website: remoteruby.com

RSS feed Apple Podcasts Website

More English tech & science 6

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.