The Features We Loved, Lost, and Laughed At: My RailsConf 2025 Talk Is Now Online
If you didnât make it to RailsConf this yearâŚor couldnât make it to my talkâŚIâve got good news: the full video is now live.
đĽ Watch it here
Preparing for this talk was one of the most nostalgic (and sometimes absurd) research dives Iâve done in years. I pitched The Features We Loved, Lost, and Laughed At thinking it would be easy to uncover a long list of removed or weird Rails features to poke fun at.
Turns out? They werenât so easy to find.
Rails hasnât just thrown things away. Itâs looped. Itâs learned. Itâs come back to old ideas and made them better.
In the talk, I trace that evolutionâŚusing code examples and stories from the early days of ActiveRecord, form builders, observe_field
, semicolon routes, and even a few lesser-known misadventures involving matrix parameters.
I touch on features like Observers (invisible glue, invisible bugs) and ActiveResourceâŚwhich wasnât confusing so much as it was optimistic. It assumed the APIs you were consuming were designed with Rails-like conventions in mind. That was rarely the case.
I also explore what Rails has taught us about developer happiness, what it means to build with care, and what the community keeps refining (and laughing about).
Hereâs a quick example: I once wrote an InvoiceObserver
that did four different things silentlyâŚand when it broke, it took hours to even figure out where the logic lived. Magical until it wasnât.
Why Look Back Now?
With RailsConf coming to a close, it felt like the right moment to reflect not just on the frameworkâŚbut on how we evolve alongside it.
Rails doesnât just chase trends. It revisits its own decisions and asks: âWhat still brings us joy?â
Thatâs a rare trait in software. And itâs why Rails still feels like home for so many of us.
âRails doesnât just move forwardâŚit reflects. It loops. It asks: Whereâs the friction? What can we make effortless again?â
If youâre newer to the framework, or just curious what Rails has quietly taught us over the yearsâŚI hope you find something here to smile at.
Iâm grateful to my Ruby friendsâŚsome old, some newâŚwho shared memories, weird bugs, screenshots, mailing list lore, and just the right amount of healthy skepticism while I was putting this together.