Recap: Rails World 2025
Team makandra visited the Rails World conference! Once again with a large team – and for the first time – with a booth to support the conference and engage in conversation with as many people as possible.
Here we share our impressions and insights from Amsterdam.
Rails World was once again a highlight for the Ruby on Rails community in 2025. This time, the conference took place in Amsterdam from September 4 to 5 and brought together over 750 Rails developers from 62 countries. While Rails World 2024 sold out in a record-breaking 20 minutes, this time it took only two minutes for all tickets to be snapped up.
The Beurs van Berlage in the heart of Amsterdam, just a few minutes from the main train station and close to Amsterdam's most beautiful canal district, once again provided a great environment for discussing the latest developments in the Ruby on Rails framework. Seven colleagues were there, including Henning, Fabian, Michael, and Bruno, who share their experiences in this article.
The Rails Conference of the Rails Foundation
Rails World is an international conference that focuses on Ruby on Rails and brings together developers and Rails enthusiasts. The event offers talks, a platform for networking and many more fun ways to engage. Once again this year, participants didn't miss out on any valuable information, as all talks were recorded and published on the Rails YouTube channel shortly after the event. For the community, Rails World was a great opportunity to learn about trends and discover new features directly from Rails experts like Aaron Patterson and Jean Boussier – and from the framework’s creator, David Heinemeier Hansson himself.
Why Rails World?
Some of our team members are true Rails World veterans – they have attended every edition so far. But this year was still a first for us: makandra had its own booth for the first time! That changed a lot of things – especially how we started conversations with others.
The atmosphere was typical of the Rails community: open, friendly, and relaxed. Whether with long-time Rails developers, curious beginners, other service providers, or even the inventor of the Rails framework himself, we had countless interesting conversations. It was also particularly nice to talk to customers, former project partners, and, of course, new faces who were interested in our work.
Some already know us from makandra cards, and some were surprised to hear that we not only maintain a knowledge base for web development and offer Rails LTS support for older Rails versions, but primarily implement and operate sophisticated web projects for well-known companies, medium-sized businesses, and startups.
Lovingly organized by the Rails Foundation
A huge thank you goes to Amanda Perino and the Rails Foundation team: as last year, everything was superbly organized – from registration to the closing party.
I thought the location was really well chosen and the organization of the whole Rails World was really strong. As a sponsor, we had the perfect conditions to talk to lots of people and showcase ourselves. I've often had different experiences in the past.
The atmosphere was pleasant throughout, the event ran smoothly, and the setting was beautiful: the Beurs van Berlage, right in the center of Amsterdam, was the perfect venue for Rails World.
More highlights: talks, community, and good vibes
In addition to all the networking, there was of course a lot to learn professionally. The presentations were consistently high quality and offered both in-depth technical knowledge and exciting insights into the future of Rails. There were also some lovely gimmicks, such as the Ruby Passport in the Ruby Embassy, with deliberately absurd security checks – a wonderful allusion to bureaucratic border experiences.
From a technical perspective, I found the announcement about work on SQLite replication most interesting. I have always found SQLite exciting because of its potential performance benefits as an in-process database without a server. The lack of replication has always been a barrier to its productive use, but that may now change.
My talk highlight was the presentation on ReActionView and Herb. Not much has changed in terms of views since I started working with Rails, but the talk made me aware of some pain points that I hadn't noticed before. All the better that a potential solution was presented right away! And as always: Lots of interesting conversations with fascinating people – it was just great.
I found the talk on multi-tenant Rails most exciting. We have already implemented one or two apps with multiple clients ourselves, so I found it particularly interesting that this is to be integrated directly into Rails in the future – even though the use case in the talk was slightly different from our previous projects. Another highlight for me was the Ruby Passport and the wit and attention to detail with which the Ruby Embassy was implemented.
And then there was the closing party at the STRAAT Museum, organized by Shopify. All we can say is: it was huge! Surrounded by impressive street art, with drinks and music, it was the perfect way to end the conference together.
And where are we headed next year?
After Amsterdam comes Austin: Rails World 2026 will take place in Texas! We are curious to see how many of us will make the trip across the pond – but after this successful edition in Amsterdam, motivation is definitely high.