Ruby Melbourne: October 2026

This year I've been trying to figure out whether it's possible to do high quality Engineering work without reading code. In 2025, using Vibe Coding, our Science Writers built 50 new interactive websites that help high school students understand Science. This was great, but it put a large burden on our engineering team. So we've started building automated systems to improve the quality of this work. This talk is about that process, and some other ways that I'm playing around with these ideas.

I've previously delivered versions of this talk for AI Engineer, YOW! Tech Leaders, MelbJS, and PyConAU. I'll customise and update the talk for the Melbourne Ruby audience.

After many years, I've been having fun building out a few ruby based apps. This talk is about the lessons I've been learning along the way and how I've been tackling the problems encountered. It's a high level talk rather than going deep onto any specific topic involved.

• Why Rails really isn't the answer.
• Databases and storage.
• Authentication and Authorisation.
• Docker for local development.
• Hosting in production.
• What to tackle and leave out.
• Marketing and getting users.