The first morning of Blue Ridge Ruby, John Athayde stood at the front of the YMI Cultural Center and showed us pictures of trees. Forests. His own land. The projector at the venue was so good that the photos felt like windows. His talk, Learning from Permaculture: Sustainable Software Development, used permaculture principles to talk about how we tend our codebases. I came in expecting a Ruby conference. I didn't expect to spend the morning thinking about how a forest grows itself, and how the same patterns might apply to the systems I work on every day. He also pointed us toward Chad Fowler's The Phoenix Architecture,, which is now next on my reading list.
That was the first talk. Once the first talk happens, the conference has actually started.
A small conference, in the best way
Blue Ridge Ruby is a regional conference in Asheville, North Carolina. About 100 attendees this year, held at the YMI Cultural Center on South Market Street. The size matters. I had time to talk with almost everyone. The schedule helped too: 30-minute talks with 30-minute breaks in between. By the end of each day I wasn't drained the way I usually am at bigger conferences. Fitting, since the conference itself turned out to be largely about sustainability.
The night before, the speakers gathered for dinner. I got plenty of time to chat with Kevin Murphy, Ernesto Tagwerker of FastRuby (a sponsor), Rachael Wright-Munn, and Adam McCrea of Judoscale (another sponsor). Lovely people, lovely food, but the conference itself didn't feel real to me until that first talk the next morning. That's just how it goes.
Jeremy Smith, one of the organizers along with Mark Locklear and Joe Peck, kicked things off with an opening that leaned into nostalgia: small golden ages, DuckTales, and the kinds of moments you only recognize while you're inside them. A good frame for what came next.
The thread: long-term care
Looking back, almost every talk I saw was, at some level, about long-term care. Care of code, care of communities, care of ourselves.
John Athayde's permaculture talk was the most explicit version of this. Ifat Ribon's Yes, &…: Ruby's Secret Talent for Improvisation connected improv to code. I'd seen a preview at a WNB.rb online meetup, and it landed even better in person. Improv is about staying loose enough to keep playing with what's in front of you, which is also a pretty good description of working in a long-lived codebase.
Kevin Murphy's talk, InstiLLMent of Successful Practices in an Agentic World, started out funny. A hilarious bit about being a new employee at "Hours Unlimited" had the room going. Then it quietly flipped a switch. It moved from talking about agents to talking about humans on your team. Code review isn't just a quality gate, it's an invitation to a discussion. Form deep working relationships. Treat the other humans on your team like, well, humans. Lessons that work whether your collaborator is an LLM or a coworker.
Rachael Wright-Munn's Your First Open-Source Contribution was about giving back to the ecosystem you depend on, which is its own form of long-term care. And Thomas Cannon closed the loop with 5 Ways to Invest in Yourself for the Long Haul, which made the implicit theme of the whole conference explicit.
By the end of the first day I was pretty sure the program had been curated around this idea, even if no one said it out loud.
My turn at the podium
My talk, Optimize Your Mindset (Without Overclocking), went on after the lightning talks. Quick word for lightning talks, by the way. I first encountered them at LA RubyConf back in 2018, and they've become one of my favorite parts of any Ruby conference. Five minutes each, anything you want. We got a git commit deep dive, a very funny (and informative) Judoscale bit, a perspective on learning Ruby as a newcomer in 2026, and several others. They're a window into what the community is actually thinking about right now.
After some fun projector adventures with macOS Tahoe earlier in the day, my setup went off without a hitch. The talk was one I'd given before, but I'd completely overhauled it for Blue Ridge Ruby. The piece that resonated most, I think, was the new section on deep work and focus.
The short version: the focus problem isn't your fault. There is so much stacked against us actually being able to think. Social media, notifications, infinite feeds, open offices, constant chat, back-to-back meetings. It's a lot. We need help designing our days if we want to keep any room for real thinking. I dug into research from Cal Newport, Nir Eyal's Indistractable, Johann Hari's Stolen Focus, and Dr. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine. I'll have a longer write-up on just that section soon.
The hallway track
The 30-minutes-on, 30-minutes-off rhythm meant the hallway track was as substantive as the talks. I got to meet Burdette Lamar, who helps with documentation on the Ruby Core team. I geeked out with Kielan from Boston about fantasy books, and she reads more than I do, which is saying something. We pulled together an impromptu WNB.rb lunch on day one with about ten members. I got to help Brooke Kuhlmann pass around eink devices during his talk. And I lost track of time talking with Thomas Cannon about web comics, weight lifting, and books. So many books.
That's the kind of thing that only really happens at a conference this size. With 100 people and a schedule that gives you room to breathe, you don't have to choose between attending a talk and having a real conversation. You get both.
What I'm taking home
I came to Blue Ridge Ruby to give a talk about caring for the human side of being a developer. I left with a much fuller version of that idea, thanks to everyone else on the schedule. Care for the codebase, care for the team, care for the ecosystem, care for yourself. It all rhymes.
If you missed it this year, keep an eye on blueridgeruby.com for next year. And to Jeremy, Mark, and Joe: thank you for putting on the kind of conference where you actually have time to think. That's rarer than it should be.
Videos will be coming soon if there was any talk you wanted to watch, thanks to Confreaks!
