Boulder Ruby May 2026 Presentation Night
Join us at our monthly gathering where we present topics of interest to Rubyists and aspiring programmers. We are movnig this event up 1 week to work with Boulder Startup Week https://boulderstartupweek.com/ May 4th-8th.
Doors open at 6:00pm, where you can hangout and socialize with other Boulder Ruby members.
We also have a zoom at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86988064634?pwd=RhnyR0iYNx47LASqjdOLQbAFxq9GX3.1 if you want to join online.
At 6:30, we do announcements before getting to our presentations.
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Talk 1 (Lightning Talk): Herb at Github - Joel Hawksley
Description:
We've spent the past few months integrating Herb into the GitHub.com monolith. It caught numerous bugs missed by our existing tooling and allowed us to migrate off the effectively-archived erb_lint, but a key performance blocker remains. In this talk, I'll share how you can see similar benefits in your codebase today and help improve the project ahead of its 1.0 release.
Bio:
Joel is a staff software engineer at GitHub, working on the health of the GitHub.com Rails monolith.
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Talk 2: Indispensable: What Human Programmers Can Learn from Human Computers - Alan Ridlehoover
Description:
Code used to be something we cultivated by hand. Now machines write it for us, and a quarter of a million tech workers have been laid off in less than a year. If you've been quietly grieving your relationship with code, you're not alone. And you're not the first. In 1958, NASA began replacing its human computers with IBM mainframes. Three women from the segregated West Area Computing Unit — Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson — made themselves indispensable to the mission anyway. Each chose a different strategy: retool, transform, or specify. Now it's our turn as Rubyists. The mission is still here. The role is not. This talk borrows their strategies, with gratitude, for the transition we're living through now — and shows how to stay indispensable.
Bio:
Alan is a Senior Engineering Manager at Cisco. His team is building AI skills for over 1000 engineers and constantly educating leadership about what's possible, what's feasible, and what's actually working.
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If you would like to present at this meeting, or at upcoming events, reach out to the organizers on this meetup, contact us in the #ruby channel on TechFriends, or ping us at @boulderruby or https://bsky.app/profile/boulderruby.bsky.social.