If you didn’t make it to RailsConf this year…or couldn’t make it to my talk…I’ve got good news: the full video is now live.
Preparing for this talk was one of the most nostalgic (and sometimes absurd) research dives I’ve 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 weren’t so easy to find.
Rails hasn’t just thrown things away. It’s looped. It’s learned. It’s come back to old ideas and made them better.
In the talk, I trace that evolution…using 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 ActiveResource…which wasn’t 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).
Here’s a quick example: I once wrote an InvoiceObserver that did four different things silently…and when it broke, it took hours to even figure out where the logic lived. Magical until it wasn’t.
Why Look Back Now?
With RailsConf coming to a close, it felt like the right moment to reflect not just on the framework…but on how we evolve alongside it.
Rails doesn’t just chase trends. It revisits its own decisions and asks: “What still brings us joy?”
That’s a rare trait in software. And it’s why Rails still feels like home for so many of us.
“Rails doesn’t just move forward…it reflects. It loops. It asks: Where’s the friction? What can we make effortless again?”
If you’re newer to the framework, or just curious what Rails has quietly taught us over the years…I hope you find something here to smile at.
I’m grateful to my Ruby friends…some old, some new…who shared memories, weird bugs, screenshots, mailing list lore, and just the right amount of healthy skepticism while I was putting this together.
If you’ve ever written button_to_function or find_by_title_and_category_and_status, this one’s for you.
