RubyConf has joined RailsConf & RailsWorld as another exclusive discriminatory unexcellent conference

RubyConf has joined RailsConf & RailsWorld as another exclusive discriminatory unexcellent conference by discriminating against any speakers who submit talks that cover Frontend Ruby technologies or dethrone React/JavaScript in any way. In 2025, I won an award for a highly innovative and outside-the-box Ruby open-source project at an international Japanese tech competition that Matz, the creator of Ruby himself, presided on in addition to other judges. My project really impressed Matz, who is the reason for all the Ruby-related conferences existing in the first place, but in spite of that, both RailsConf and RailsWorld rejected my talk about my award-winning open-source project in 2025 despite the Ruby on Rails community sorely needing a Frontend Ruby solution that would fill a gap not handled by Hotwire; that is true Frontend Development in Ruby (to build frontend-local apps like a UML Diagrammer for example). Given that I am the most qualified person to talk about Frontend Development in Ruby on Rails using real Ruby in the Browser, and no other Frontend technologies rival my project in either productivity or simplicity/maintainability, the rejections came across as discrimination/exclusion and mediocrity/closed-mindedness/lack of appreciation for excellence. After all, if you reject an open-source project that won an award by Matz, your action is sending everyone the discouraging message that it doesn't matter how hard Software Engineers work to produce a unique innovation; they will stil be rejected because of discrimination and lack of appreciation for excellence if it comes from outside the core group behind Rails and some of their sponsors/friends. The reason this is also discrimination is because I was not rejected due to being unqualified (as I won an award after all) or due to the project not providing great value to the Ruby on Rails community (it impressed Matz) as the project saves Ruby on Rails Software Engineers who previously used JavaScript libraries like React.js/Angular/Vue/Svelte 6 months of Frontend work every year by switching to Frontend Ruby. I don't know many talks at RubyConf in general that can offer the same benefit. And, I am sure that nobody working for either RailsConf or RailsWorld has won a similar award to mine at the same international Japanese tech competition that was judged by Matz (and I have done it one other time previously too in fact). 

Fortunately, this year, my award-winning open-source project got accepted at RubyConf Austria 2026 (30-minute talk) and wroclove.rb 2026 (3-hour workshop). Those conferences are much better run than RailsConf and RailsWorld in welcoming innovation and being inclusive! wroclove.rb 2026 literally says on their website that they "want to confront ideas", in contrast to RailsConf and RailsWorld running away from ideas that don't come from the Rails core devs and some of their sponsors/friends (a form of discrimination). RubyConf Austria & wroclove.rb don't discriminate against Frontend Ruby projects and aren't offended by a talk that dethrones React/JavaScript, especially if already approved by Matz, the creator of Ruby. They welcome the excellence and hard work that went into creating my award-winning open-source Ruby project and winning an award from Matz. In other words, they encourage the Ruby community to be excellent and follow my example in innovation and thinking outside the box. In fact, I met Chad Fowler at RubyConf Austria 2026, and he attended my talk, then told me "good job" afterwards. For those who don't know, Chad Fowler founded RubyConf back in 2001. 

So, I submitted my award-winning open-source project's talk to RubyConf in 2026 thinking they might be less averse to Frontend Ruby, especially if the speaker won an award from Matz, given RubyConf is typically more open-minded about Ruby innovations outside of core Rails. Well, I got rejected despite being accepted by Matz, the creator of the language that conference was founded upon. I asked by email for the reasons for the rejection and for feedback to help improve myself in case they want me to do better before getting accepted (though to be frank, I won an award from the creator of Ruby himself, and there isn't anything that can top that). They never responded. 

I want to clarify that I have supported RubyConf in the past by giving talks/workshops at it and by donating my speaker stipends/hotel-pay (over $1000 or $2000 for all the conferences I spoke at) back to RubyCentral for the benefit of the Ruby community as a whole with everyone in it. So, it's not much to ask for a response as to why I encountered behavior that came across as discrimination when I have gone above and beyond in the past in supporting RubyConf and RubyCentral.

Eventually, I remembered that I have 2 RubyConf/RubyCentral people as LinkedIn connections, Jason Swett and Freedom Dumlao, so I contacted them asking the same question. I also pointed out to them that I am a former RubyConf speaker who donated his speaking stipends from the last 3 RubyConfs back to RubyCentral for the benefit of the Ruby community at large (that's over $1000). So, being treated with respect and non-discrimination is the least I could expect from RubyCentral.

Jason Swett chose the coward's plea and just never responded, which is how true discriminators handle discrimination when it's raised to them. The reason this incriminates him 100% is because if he truly wasn't involved in discrimination, he would have at least responded by saying he sympathizes with me perceiving discrimination and by indicating he is shocked that a project that won an award from Matz (when many other RubyConf talk projects didn't win any awards from Matz) got rejected at RubyConf. Honestly, Jason reminds me of employees that my employers fired in the past. Lack of presence and visibility is usually the sign of an unreliable employee who is never there for others. So, I advise against hiring Jason Swett (unless he responds to me and clears up my experienced discrimination).

Freedom Dumlao didn't respond to my first message, but at least responded to my 2nd follow-up message. He gets some points for that. Otherwise, his response was very weird and defensive. He claimed with a very unfriendly tone that I didn't know him even though him and I met at RubyConf 2024 and sat at the same eating table multiple times while having conversations that eventually led to connecting on LinkedIn. In fact, it sounded like he was trying to get out of responsibility by claiming I did not know him enough (a very unnice unfriendly thing to say from a Rubyist) even though the world is a meritocracy anyways, meaning people are known through their actions in day to day interactions, whether ethical or unethical. The way he said that came across as immature and irresponsible, not the way someone at RubyCentral should be talking. After all, a responsible person would have not focused on that, yet focused on my experience of discrimination and how strange it is that a project that was approved by Matz in a very difficult international competition and got a "good job" remark from Chad Fowler (the founder of RubyConf) got rejected at RubyConf, which would indicate RubyConf's staff are unqualified and do not appreciate excellence, in addition to having discriminatory biases, like the bias against Frontend Ruby and biases for React/JavaScript that cause offense if they are dethroned (shameful at a Ruby conference that is supposed to make Software Engineers feel safe about loving Ruby more than other languages). None of them have won similar awards from Matz, most likely in fact. A person in Freedom's position should have been sincerely concerned and should have noticed the problem and then promised a solution without making any excuses, just like how excellent organizations behave. Given that he didn't respond that way, even if I didn't know him, his reaction told me and everyone everything about him that we need to know about who he really is. He showed that he's part of the problem not the solution.

Regarding my donations to RubyCentral that exceed $1000, Freedom tried to deny the value of my donation by saying he donated more to RubyCentral, believe it or not! What a creepy disrespectful way to talk to someone who gave you money for free without being required to. Invalidating a donation is NOT a way to encourage people to continue donating, yet sends the message that donations are discouraged because in the end, they won't matter anyways as "someone else donated more than you". That was the most unhinged unprofessional encounter I've had from someone who is supposed to be a professional! Honestly, it doesn't matter how much he donated. My donations still have the same value in helping RubyCentral and the Ruby community regardless. Other people's donations definitely don't invalidate mine. 

Freedom also proceeded to claim that there was "no discrimination" because all their talks are reviewed anonymously. EXCEPT, my talk was NOT reviewed anonymously, because it mentions a public project on GitHub (which shows the author as soon as one visits it) and a public award (with the winner's name) that the project won from Matz at a public competition. 

I responded to inform him that my proposal submission wasn't anonymous as that was impossible with the talk being about a GitHub project and having won an award. And, I informed him that my donation is definitely NOT invalidated because he donated more. Freedom then chose the coward's plea and didn't respond. I advise against hiring Freedom Dumlao for any jobs or services as a result. He's the kind of selfish irresponsible excuse maker who is only about protecting his own hide while not caring about encouraging and maintaining excellence in a community, nor respecting people who donate to the community without being required to.

You see what I'm dealing with here!? Total trash! These are the kind of people running RubyCentral today! No matter it encountered issues last year with the Mike Perham vs DHH debacle, in addition to stopping RailsConf. The Ruby community is being run by total clowns who are discriminatory, unethical, and unprofessional!

I have ZERO interest in attending RubyConf 2026 as a result. After all, if they rejected a talk by one of the best open-source Ruby projects to come out in 2025 as to win an award by Matz, the creator of Ruby himself, then they probably rejected many other project talks that are top  quality because of the discriminatory biases and lack of qualification of RubyConf staff in 2026. For all we care, we got the dumbest, but most popular, talks in RubyConf 2026, but smart Software Engineers know that popularity is NOT quality. After all, PHP/WordPress is more popular than Rails, but definitely inferior in productivity and maintainability, which is why Ruby on Rails devs don't use those technologies in general. 

In conclusion, RubyConf in 2026 has become an exclusive discriminatory unexcellent conference, which is where people go to become dumber and/or meaner. 

If I had been working for RubyCentral, I would have provided guaranteed speaker slots for winners of international tech competitions to encourage excellence and innovation, and guaranteed speaker slots or tracks for owners of long-term "pillar" open-source projects in the Ruby community (e.g. Sidekiq, JRuby, Opal, etc...) to respect and support long-term open-source contributors of the Ruby community.

I have covered the topic of covert discrimination in the Ruby community before. What I encountered at the hands of the RubyConf folks is classic covert discrimination. Spread the word to help stop discrimination and unexcellence in the Ruby community! In the meantime, I'll make sure to only attend and speak at Ruby conferences that don't have unprofessional unexcellent discriminatory staff.

P.S. To prove that I'm reasonable and on the right side of this, I will acknowledge that nobody is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. What distinguishes good people from bad people though is that good people will admit their errors and apologize for their mistakes when they are pointed out to them whereas bad people will act aloof and commit more discrimination/exclusion by ignoring you when that happens. If any of the problematic people mentioned in the article change their mind and decide to respond like real men (not by hiding like cowards) to resolve my concerns about discrimination/exclusion/unexcellence for the benefit of the cheated Ruby community that missed out on all the Matz-loved value provided by an award-winning open-source Ruby project that impressed Matz, then I'll delete this blog post. 

Presentation Slides for RubyConf Austria 2026 Talk "Frontend Ruby on Rails with Glimmer DSL for Web"

My talk “Frontend Ruby on Rails with Glimmer DSL for Web” went well at RubyConf Austria 2026. Especially given that after the talk, Chad Fowler (the starter of RubyConf and famous book author of The Passionate Programmer, among other books) told me “good job”, and Obie Fernandez (a famous entrepreneur and book author of The Rails Way, among other books) told me he will try Glimmer DSL for Web because he doesn’t like React.js. 

Presentation Slides for “Frontend Ruby on Rails with Glimmer DSL for Web”:

https://bit.ly/glimmer-rubyconf-at-2026

I ran a poll at the beginning of my talk, and everyone agreed that they love Ruby and that Ruby is superior to JavaScript, plus the majority indicated that they’d like to write less JavaScript and more Ruby during their Rails web development work. Several attendees told me my talk was great after the talk. 

Charles Nutter had me help him with his JRuby workshop afterwards by showcasing my other Glimmer project, Glimmer DSL for SWT, which runs on JRuby. In about 1 minute, I scaffolded a Hello World desktop app from scratch and then packaged it as a native executable on the Mac. Attendees were impressed. So, I’ve participated in presenting 2 events at this conference. 

I am very grateful for having such a great experience at RubyConf Austria 2026 overall, especially given that it uniquely included several classical/neoclassical/jazz concerts in between talks that entertained us and relaxed us. Chad Fowler concluded the conference with a beautiful Jazz piano and sax performance. Shout out to Hans Schnedlitz, Muhamed Isabegovic, and Zuzanna Kusznir (plus everyone who helped out) for organizing and hosting such a special Ruby conference!!!

Glimmer DSL for Web 0.9.1 Hello, Modal!

Glimmer DSL for Web (Matz Approved Fukuoka Award Winning Frontend Framework for Rails) had a new release in version 0.9.1 that includes a new sample called Hello, Modal! to teach how to create modals in Glimmer DSL for Web in the Frontend of Ruby on Rails web applications. By the way, rendering modals has been supported since the beginning in Glimmer DSL for Web, but there were no samples that demonstrated it before. I added a modal in the proof-of-concept branch of the Glimmer Commerce workshop app that was developed at the wroclove.rb 2026 Ruby conference 3-hour workshop regarding "Building Rails SPAs in Frontend Ruby with Glimmer DSL for Web", so I figured I'd add an official sample to Glimmer DSL for Web too that teaches how to render modals.

You can play around with the sample in the Sample Selector Rails web app (click to visit GitHub repo):

https://sample-glimmer-dsl-web-rails7-app-black-sound-6793.fly.dev/

GitHub of Glimmer DSL for Web: https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-web

RubyGem of Glimmer DSL for Web: https://rubygems.org/gems/glimmer-dsl-web

GreetingPerson Model code (holds the name of the greeted person):

GreetingModal View component code:

(the style could have been placed anywhere by the way, but I chose to put it in the component; albeit it could have lived in CSS/SCSS files outside the component too)

HelloModal View component code (entry point to the sample):

Rendering modals is very simple; this is all that is needed to learn:

• ComponentClassName.render(**kwargs) # renders any component (e.g. modal component) anywhere on the page. kwargs is any custom attributes that the component supports. If kwargs include a `parent` argument though (a reserved argument name), then its value is a CSS selector for where to place the rendered component. If `parent` is unspecified, then the smart default is `body` by convention.
• markup_root.remove # this is invoked inside a component class to remove the modal element from the page, in other words, closes the modal (e.g. upon clicking a close button or performing some operation)

Happy Glimmering!!!

P.S. To learn more about Glimmer DSL for Web, come see me speak at RubyConf Austria 2026 about "Frontend Ruby on Rails with Glimmer DSL for Web". You can ask me any questions in person at the conference about how to do Frontend Development in Ruby much more effectively than in JavaScript. 

P.S.2 Glimmer DSL for Web is a 100% free and open-source Ruby gem. I make $0 off of it as I only built it through many nights and weekends to solve my work Frontend maintainability and productivity problems that were caused by using React.js and to help the Ruby on Rails community as a whole  evolve towards better Frontend solutions. This Ruby gem finally enables Rails Software Engineers to use Ruby in the Frontend and Backend while being able to share Ruby logic between both sides of a web application to save time and provide more responsive web UIs. That eliminates all usecases for React/Angular/Ember/Vue/Svelte as Glimmer DSL for Web provides a much more productive, maintainable, and elegant Ruby solution that doubles productivity at least (sometimes enabling devs to go 10x) compared to using React.js. If you like Ruby, you'll love Ruby in the Frontend via Glimmer DSL for Web. It won an award by Matz himself, the creator of the Ruby programming language. 

DB GUI 0.4.0 Remember SQL Command History (useful w/ Ruby on Rails DBs)

DB GUI is a Database querying desktop app built in Ruby. It supports PostgreSQL to start. Version 0.4.0 added support for remembering SQL command history. I needed that feature at my job to be able to easily re-run certain SQL queries in our Rails web application, so I added it very quickly, thanks to the awesomeness of Ruby!

GitHub: https://github.com/AndyObtiva/db-gui

RubyGem: https://rubygems.org/gems/db-gui

Here is an animated gif demonstrating how the app works (by the way, you only need to configure the database settings once; afterwards, the app remembers the db config every time you start it, and now also remembers your SQL command history):

You can always open the app code if you are curious how it was built in Ruby (below is a link to the app's entry point View component):

https://github.com/AndyObtiva/db-gui/blob/master/app/db_gui/view/db_gui_application.rb

P.S. I am aware there are countless DB desktop apps out there. I have used many in the past. This project started as a fun learning exercise in Ruby, but now I maintain it to provide examples for others of how to build desktop apps in Ruby, and I like the challenge of extending it. 

Ruby Memes 2026-05-03: The Popularist

The Popularist (see the meme below first) ceases to question things, stops thinking for themself, and throws all their principles out of the window as soon as a bad technology becomes popular, due to The Popularist lacking the courage and backbone needed to say no when many devs head in the wrong direction.

Do you know Software Engineers who behave like "The Popularist", making it impossible to trust them with guarding the quality of your team's software? Popularity isn't quality after all. For example, many more devs use PHP, and yet Ruby on Rails devs choose their stack as a higher quality solution for productivity and maintainability. Intelligence and quality are scarce, so in fact, popularity is an indictment, as it means something is low quality enough to be used by the least common denominator majority who are not as intelligent as the top 10%. By the way in case it isn't obvious, React.js is NOT a good technology (learn more by clicking this link). 

Ruby Gem Discovery: HighLine

I recently stumbled upon a Ruby gem called HighLine that simplifies basic command line input/output via an `ask` method and supports validation, conversion, and multi-choices:

https://github.com/JEG2/highline

Here is an IRB session going through HighLine examples from the project README:

What took 1.5 months to build in React JS code took 1.5 days in Glimmer DSL for Web Ruby code

When I reimplemented a React component as the first Glimmer DSL for Web Component in my job's Fintech Rails web app, I thought I did what would have taken 1 week in React in 1.5 days in Glimmer, which seemed like a great improvement in productivity at the time (333.33% the productivity if we count 1 week of React as 5 business days). I recently inspected the Git timeline of the original React component, and discovered that it actually took 1.5 months to develop initially!!! That's compared to 1.5 days to develop in Glimmer DSL for Web! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!!!?!!! Glimmer's productivity benefits over React are turning out to be bigger than what I initially expected!!! 

If you haven't started exploring the innovations of Frontend Ruby in your Rails Frontend Development stack, you're missing out big time while losing a huge competitive advantage to devs who are exploring those innovations. There is a huge gap in productivity between devs who write their Frontends 2016-style in JavaScript (e.g. React) and those who have moved on to greener pastures like Frontend Ruby, which provides exponential productivity improvements. Thousands of Ruby on Rails devs are wasting their time by using React.js in 2026 when Glimmer DSL for Web provides exponential productivity improvements. You owe it to yourself to put in the time to learn Glimmer DSL for Web, which is honestly highly interesting, intriguing, and exciting to learn for anyone who fancy themselves as Rubyists. No wonder it won an award by Matz, the creator of the Ruby programming language, at the Fukuoka Prefecture Future IT Initiative 2025 international tech competition in Japan.

I can help Ruby on Rails devs figure out how to solve any React.js Frontend problem in much simpler Ruby code using Glimmer DSL for Web. Just hit me up at the Glimmer Gitter chat:

https://gitter.im/AndyObtiva/glimmer?utm_source=badge&utm_medium=badge&utm_campaign=pr-badge&utm_content=badge

If you are skeptical about Glimmer DSL for Web being simpler than React.js, contact me and let me show you a better and simpler way in Frontend Ruby. Code doesn't lie! Glimmer components are often 1/2 or even 1/10 the size of React components. Everyone knows that Ruby code is simpler, more readable, and more expressive than JavaScript code. And, the benefits compound when tackling Frontend Development problems with the superiority of the Ruby programming language.  

Also, I am able to have AI generate 100% working Glimmer Web Components automatically, let alone AI consumes less credits when generating Ruby code compared to other languages. So, Glimmer DSL for Web is definitely a great choice in the AI age too!

The easiest way to get started with Glimmer DSL for Web is to jump into the exercises of my recent wroclove.rb 2026 Ruby conference workshop "Building Rails SPAs in Frontend Ruby with Glimmer DSL for Web".