In this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David are back together with David starting out giving a recap of Blue Ridge Ruby and his renewed motivation to contribute to open source. The group discusses the value of smaller single-track conferences to hallway conversations, and lightning talks. The conversation then shifts into real-world Rails and Stripe lessons, including workshop prep, validation decisions, webhook recovery, subscription edge cases, and the growing complexity of payment integrations. Hit download now to hear more! 

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• Getting Started with Rails with Chris Oliver (Frontend Masters Live Interactive Workshop)
• Ruby Conferences 2026

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

Chris and Andrew catch up after Andrew’s whirlwind “vacation-ish” road trip before diving into Stripe’s latest announcements, usage-based billing, merchant-of-record pricing, Rails file upload quirks, Active Storage image handling, Sidekiq queue strategy, and the future of RubyGems. They also discuss browser form behavior, preserving and deleting attachments, image variant performance, and how to think more clearly about background job priorities. Hit download now to hear more!

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• Dungeon Crawler Carl
• Everything we announced at Sessions 2026 (Stripe Blog)
• Scaling Sidekiq at Gusto (Medium)
• Scaling-Sidekiq -GitHub
• Nate Berkopec post on LinkedIn-Running Containers

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

On this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David kick things off with dentist trauma, gold star stickers, and fiber internet. The conversation centers on Rails direct routes, why they can be more powerful than helpers, the upcoming Rails World CFP and ticket rush, how AI is becoming more practical inside real engineering teams, a reminder to fill out the Rails survey, and Chris’s continued work expanding the Rails Getting Started Guide into a more realistic e-commerce tutorial with wishlists, reviews, ratings, and product images. Hit download now to hear more!

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• How to use Direct Routes in Rails (GoRails)
• On Rails Podcast- Brian Scanlan: Building AI-First at Intercom
• 2026 Ruby on Rails Community Survey (Planet Argon)
• Rails World -Sept 23-24, 2026, Austin, TX

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

Chris, Andrew, and David open with some classic confusion over what day it is then dive into Podia’s gradual rollout of a major new app version, including how the team is handling migration, feature flags, dogfooding, and eventual cleanup. From there, the discussion turns to underrated Rails routing features like direct routes and resolve routes, a newly merged Rails query command, observability improvements through Hatchbox’s AppSignal integration, and the ongoing pain of CSS build tooling in Rails apps. They also touch on conference season and their upcoming talks. Press download now to hear more! 

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• Direct Routes
• Instance Public methods-direct (name, options = {}, &block)
• Instance Public methods-resolve (*args, &block)
• GitHub-Query command for read-only database queries #57156
• App Signal for Hatchbox
• Blastoff Rails-June 11-12, 2026, Albuquerque, NM
• Frontend Masters Workshop-May 26, 2026-Getting Started with Rails (Chris Oliver)
• Toronto Tech Week- May 25-29, 2026

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

This BREAKING NEWS episode is a candid reaction to Ruby Central’s latest shakeup, with Chris, Andrew, and David unpacking leadership departures, financial strain, the cancelled gala, and what all of it says about the organization’s direction. The conversation moves beyond the headlines into bigger questions about trust, transparency, community values, conference strategy, RubyGems sustainability, and whether Ruby Central can rebuild credibility by involving more of the community in what happens next. Hit download now to hear more! 

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• A New Chapter for Ruby Central
• RubyConf 2026- July 14-16, Las Vegas, NV

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

Chris and David welcome guest John Athayde, who runs the branding and UX consultancy, Meticulous. They dive into John’s unusual path through the Rails world as a designer, front-end developer, consultant, author, and UX thinker. The conversation moves from early Rails history and The Rails View into a broader discussion about why designers need to understand implementation, how AI is changing product and UI work, where component-based design is headed, and why browser support is still one of the messiest parts of modern web development. Hit download now to hear more!

Links

• John Athayde Website
• John Athayde X
• John Athayde Bluesky
• Meticulous
• Build Software Like Pixar Makes Movies with John Athayde-The Swift Kick Show
• The Rails View: Create a Beautiful and Maintainable User Experience by Bruce Williams and John Athayde (O’Reilly)
• Quick ui.sh demo- Adam Wathan X
• This is the most user -unfriendly form UI- @tkm_hmng8 X
• Duck Hunt - Wes Bos X
• Rails World 2026-Austin, TX September 23-24

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

This episode of Remote Ruby opens with stories of exhaustion from a sleepless week. Then, Chris, Andrew, and David spend most of the episode unpacking two big themes: trust and governance in open source, and the growing mess of software security and AI-assisted development. They dig into the new Ruby Central write-up on the RubyGems/Bundler fracture and question whether it actually clarifies the path forward, then pivot into the Axios npm compromise, supply-chain risk, and how fragile modern package ecosystems can feel. Then, they go into a wide-ranging discussion on AI coding, bloated production apps, image-performance headaches, CSS/rendering quirks, and why teams may need to rethink APIs, CLIs, MCPs, and markdown-first docs as agent traffic keeps growing. Hit download now to hear more! 

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• RubyGems Fracture Incident Report 
• Bundler has moved to the RubyGems organization (GitHub)
• Mitigating the Axios npm supply chain compromise (Microsoft Security blog) 
• Garry Tan X
• The Missing GitHub Status Page

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

On this episode, Chris, Andrew, and David bounce from Ruby and Rails security updates into the messy realities of caching, UI architecture, and browser support. They break down the latest Zlib-related Ruby CVE, Dalli updates, Rails security and bugfix releases, and what maintenance windows mean in practice. Then, they swap stories about Redis, Memcached, observations about GitHub’s reliability amid massive Claude attributed code activity, and the kinds of performance problems that only show up at scale. The episode closes with a thoughtful Rails frontend discussion covering nested layouts, active sidebar links, CSS-powered empty states, pagination behavior, popovers, anchor positioning, and why Safari still makes simple UI work harder than it should be. Hit download now to hear more!  

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• Zlib::GzipReader
• Dalli
• Memcached
• Attributed Claude activity over the last 90 days on GitHub (Armin Ronacher X)
• The Standup with ThePrimeagen Podcast-Is AI ruining opensource? (Lost episode)
• Nested Layouts with Rails (GoRails)
• current_page?
• link_to_if
• Geared Pagination

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

Chris, Andrew, and David catch up on health, sleep deprivation, and the new Invincible season and Fallout. David shares some RubyConf CFP submissions news and this year’s broad conference themes. They discuss Andrew finishing difficult authentication work, touching on OAuth/SSO complexity and pricing, the idea of products built more for bots than humans, and where AI is proving useful, especially for debugging and research. The conversation eventually widens into a more skeptical look at the AI industry itself, touching on scraped code, deepfakes, surveillance, lobbying, and whether the promised productivity gains really match reality. Hit download now!

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• Invincible
• Fallout
• Robby Russell X
• Sam Altman X
• Ghostty
• Ruby 4.0.2 Released 
• RubyConf: July 14-16, 2026, Las Vegas, NV
• Rails World 2026- September 23-24, Austin, TX (Update)

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

On this episode, Andrew’s buried in messy authentication work spread across legacy code, Chris recounts a frustrating GitHub Actions debugging session, and David explains the mental drain of working across both Vue 2 and Vue 3 in the same application. They talk about using workflow run triggers, scheduled builds, and GitHub’s new Agentic Copilot workflows such as CI Doctor, Automatic Code Simplifier, and issue/PR management, while lamenting low-quality AI-generated PRs and paid AI code review tools. Andrew makes a special announcement about Blastoff Rails, they compare LazyVim, lazy.nvim, and Kickstart Neovim, we hear about Ruby 3.4.9 and its bug-fix release, and Marco Roth’s Herb improvements for ERB tooling. Hit download now to hear more! 

Links

• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• Upload-artifact v7.0.0 (GitHub)
• Download-artifact v8.0.0 (GitHub)
• GitHub Agentic Workflows
• Bringing Code Review to Claude Code
• Scott’s Pizza Tours
• Blastoff Rails-June 11-12, 2026, Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Learn Enough Bridgetown to be Dangerous (Andrew’s talk)
• lazy.nvim
• LazyVim
• kickstart.nvim
• kickstart-modular.nvim
• Tree-sitter
• Herb
• Marco Roth X (Herb)

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter

Chris and David welcome back Adam McCrea from Judoscale, to discuss the uncertainty around Heroku after Salesforce’s announcement that it would stop taking new enterprise customers. Adam shares how the news landed in real time during a founder’s retreat, and the conversation expands into what Heroku’s apparent “maintenance mode” means for developers, pricing, autoscaling, platform alternatives, and the broader challenge of building durable developer businesses in the AI era. They also touch on Judoscale’s upcoming “platform tour” and the value of smaller Ruby conferences. Hit download now to hear more! 

Sponsors:

Honeybadger

Judoscale

Links:

Chris Oliver X

Andrew Mason Bluesky

David Hill LinkedIn

Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift

Adam McCrea X

Adam McCrea LinkedIn

Judoscale

Remote Ruby-Episode 163: Autoscaling Rails with Adam McCrea

Heroku: What’s Next by Jon Sully (Judoscale Blog)

An update on Heroku by Nitin T Bhat

Render

Laravel Cloud

RBQ Conf, March 26-27, 2026, Austin, TX

Blue Ridge Ruby, April 30-May 1, 2026, Asheville, NC

RubyConf, July14-16, 2026, Las Vegas, NV

Rails World 2026, September 23-24, 2026, Austin, TX

Ruby Events 2026

• Chris Oliver X/Twitter
• Andrew Mason X/Twitter
• Jason Charnes X/Twitter