I had the chance to attend the August SF Ruby Meetup today at GitHub. As always, it was a mix of exciting talks, practical tips, and new projects to check out.
Drew Hoskins introduced Temporal, which now has an official Ruby SDK. He showed how we can build Durable Execution with distributed systems. He demoed a simple workflow using Temporal that pulls a user's location using two external services. I've built workflow engines in the past using background jobs and Redis, but as workflows grow in complexity, they quickly become a pain to manage. Temporal makes it easier to focus on your business logic than spend time managing the infrastructure.
Enrique Mogollan presented his MCP server inspector written in Ruby. He demoed the CLI version and shared his plans for a future web UI.He also pointed us to mcpui.dev, an interesting project that lets you build dynamic UIs for MCP servers.
Miles Georgi introduced Foobara, a new Ruby framework centered around the command pattern. It provides structure to the classic Service Object approach and offers a way to organize apps around clearly defined commands.
Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians, shared how her team helped Whop reduce CI time by 50%.
Some practical takeaways:
- Skip logging in tests
- Avoid external API calls (use mocks instead)
- Be mindful of what your factories create — reuse associated instances when possible
I also discovered a couple of tools worth trying:
- test-queue, an alternative to parallel_tests
- test-prof, a Ruby test profiling toolkit
Sergey Karayev closed out the talks with a session on programming with AI agents. He shared do's and don'ts when working with LLM coding agents and explained how to draft an effective agent.md.His demo of Superconductor was a fun look at what's possible with modern AI tooling.
Between talks, we had an open mic session where I officially launched my new newsletter: TokenRuby.
