Creating the Rails World 2024 conference app

Long live open source software

Every day, digital product creators and software engineers like us are privileged to build digital products using tools made by other creators free of cost. And at Telos, our main tool of choice is the Ruby on Rails framework, first released in 2004 and still standing the test of time and getting better. 

While many software environments (I am looking at Microsoft and Apple) are gated spaces engineered for profit maximization, Ruby on Rails has flourished as open-source software. It’s been Rails, this well-conceived and beautiful gift to the community of other creators, that has allowed numerous companies such as Shopify and Github to grow from fledgling startups to companies of massive scale. This highlights how human creativity, together with generosity, is a much-underappreciated combination that yields flourishing all around.

We are creating the Rails World conference app

With the upcoming Rails World 2024 in Toronto, now the official conference for the Rails community, we at Telos wanted to share in the process of building and gifting open source software to the community. So we reached out to the Rails Foundation’s Amanda Perino and are proud to announce that we are producing the open source software that will power the conference’s digital app experience. Our hope is that the app will continue to be improved upon and used in many Rails and Ruby conferences to come.

The Rails way

So what will this app do? The main objective of the app is to enable Rails World attendees to see the conference schedule, add sessions to their own agenda, receive notifications when sessions are starting, and maintain a personal profile that they can optionally share with others with their social links and bio. We are starting in a pretty minimalist fashion. But this should still make the in-person event a successful one as people have the information they need when they need it.

How are we building it? You guessed it – the Rails way! This includes: a full-stack pattern with Stimulus and Turbo, Solid Queue, Kamal for deployments, AvoHQ for the admin experience, maybe even SQLite and many of the awesome features which makes Rails an outstanding full-stack framework for creating digital products. We are also using MailPace for transactional emails used by the app.

Some generous folks have helped along the way. Thanks to AppSignal for providing free application monitoring for the Rails World app. We appreciate the support.

Help us make it better

We are also inviting you Rails enthusiasts to be a part of this journey. We will be sharing our progress over the next month as the build progresses and look forward to feedback and comments along the way. To that end, here are a few resources if you are interested in taking a look and giving us feedback.

• The open source Rails World app repo
• The Github project
• Community Figma Designs (coming soon!)

Over the next few weeks, we will share some of our progress. We are always open to feedback and suggestions so the app can support the conference in an engaging and fun way. Feel free to add to the discussions in Github, or to drop an email to hello@teloslabs.co.