I sat front row for @dhh's talk yesterday morning. Having talked with him the day before, I’ll admit… I wasn’t particularly surprised (nor unprepared). A bit of a field report from #RailsWorld#: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for. Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably. I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time. That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them. There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit. Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity. In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering. Long live Ruby. Long live Rails. p(gloom)