As the opening keynote on Day 2 of Rails World 2025, I had the chance to host a panel with three people who’ve been shaping the direction of both Ruby and Rails from deep within the internals.
-
Aaron Patterson (
@tenderlove) -
Hiroshi Shibata (
@hsbt) -
Jean Boussier (
@byroot)
We covered a lot in an hour:
- What they’ve been working on behind the scenes
- Which areas of Ruby and Rails could use more community support
- The evolving release process for the language
- Why Hiroshi’s focused on improving the experience for developers on Windows
- How security fixes are coordinated across multiple versions
- Performance work related to YJIT and ZJIT
- JSON parsing performance and compatibility
- What keeps them motivated to continue maintaining the ecosystem
There’s even a moment where Aaron and Jean get into a friendly disagreement about performance and priorities. If you enjoy technical nuance and sharp perspectives, you’ll appreciate that exchange.
And yes… I asked Aaron about his favorite Regular Expression. His response did not disappoint.
It was a fun, thoughtful, and occasionally surprising conversation — and a reminder that Ruby and Rails continue to evolve in the hands of people who care deeply about their future.
If you weren’t in Amsterdam or want to revisit it, the full panel is now available:
Also worth pairing with this interview with Jean on the On Rails podcast, where we dig into IO-bound workloads, misconceptions, and what it’s like maintaining Rails at scale.
A solid pairing if you’re curious where the ecosystem is headed next.
