Tagged “rails”

Back in April, John opened Blue Ridge Ruby 2026 with a talk that had very little to do with the things you usually see on a Ruby conference stage. No benchmarks, no framework upgrades, no live coding. Instead, photographs of trees. Forests. His own land. The talk, Learning from Permaculture: Sustainable Software Development, drew on twelve-plus years of farming with permaculture and twenty-plus years of designing and building software to ask a simple question: what does the garden know about building things that last?

The recording is now live on RubyEvents, and we wanted to mark the occasion, in part because of how the room received it and in part because of the company it kept.

Permaculture starts from a few principles that sound almost too simple to be useful: observe before you act, produce no waste, value the margins. Anyone who has inherited a large codebase knows the…