Meeting recaps

"Out of the Book" with Henrique Kossovski

November 4, 2025

We had a surprise speaker this month, Henrique (Henry) Kossovski, a UK student and entrepreneur who asked for the group’s feedback on his nascent startup Out of the Book, an immersive storytelling platform.

Henry shared with us that he got the idea for Out of the Book when he was writing a story in which a character kills the reader, and leading up to that event he wanted the story to incorporate the reader’s location and other details. Branching narratives, multimedia, and authoring tools are other features that Henry is building into the Out of the Book prototype.

The group discussed how product is at the intersection of books and video games, interactive fiction being the closest existing analogue.

We look forward to hearing more about Out of the Book as it develops!

Polished Ruby Programming, Chs. 1-2

October 7, 2025

We’re starting a book club on Polished Ruby Programming by Jeremy Evans. Today we covered the first two chapters.

Our discussion included:

• The DragonRuby Game Toolkit and the local game dev group RunJumpDev.
• Truthy, falsey, and methods related to them.
• Underused Ruby data types: Rational, Symbol, Set, Struct, and Data.
• SOLID principles: how Ruby ignores some of them, and how none of us has ever seen SOLID brought up in actual discussions at work and not just in interviews.
• Large vs. small classes.

Legacy Rails + Phoenix apps

June 3, 2025

Marli Baumann gave us a glimpse into how her company maintains a legacy Rails app while developing a complementary Phoenix (Elixir) app.

Marli expanded our horizons on what’s possible:

• Even in the earliest versions of Rails, it was possible to dynamically render parts of a page. A lot of what Hotwire does now is not essentially new; it’s just more built into the framework.
• It’s possible for two apps (Rails and Phoenix) to connect to each other’s database.
• It’s possible to hand-roll a cron-based background job scheduler.

Game development with Gosu

March 18, 2025

Vera Chellgren gave us a hands-on tour of the Gosu game development library for Ruby:

• We created a minimal example of a background image and player movement.
• We looked at two example Gosu games, ran them locally, and made some of our own changes to them:
  • Star fighter tutorial (fly a spaceship to collect stars)
  • Cptn-ruby (platformer)

Exploring the Rails 8 authentication generator

February 4, 2025

This month we explored the new authentication generator that ships with Rails 8.

Here’s what we did:

1. Created a new Rails app.
2. Ran rails g authentication and explored the generated files.
3. Added Pico CSS (the classless version) for nice default styling.
4. Created a registration page by following this guide by Josef Strzibny.

Our rabbit trails included:

• Reading some insane and fun facts about SQLite.
• Puzzling out (with the help of this Reddit discussion) why the authentication generator creates a sessions table.

Milestones with Brooke Kuhlmann

September 3, 2024

At this month’s meetup we enjoyed a talk by Brooke Kuhlmann, “Milestones”, about automated versioning and release note generation. We learned a lot!

Talk slides: https://www.alchemists.io/talks/milestones

Project page: https://www.alchemists.io/projects/milestoner

A neat incidental takeaway from the talk, for any shortcut junkies out there, was learning about the app Alfred and how to augment it in Ruby-related ways with Brooke’s own project Pennyworth.

Writebook deploy

August 8, 2024

This month we did a group exercise of exploring Basecamp’s source-available app Writebook and deploying it to DigitalOcean.

Camping with Karl Oscar Weber

June 20, 2023

Our guest speaker this month was Karl Oscar Weber, who shared with us his work on Camping, a Ruby micro-framework initially created by _why and now maintained by Karl.

You can watch the recording if you missed it!

Bridgetown with Jared White

May 16, 2023

This month Jared White joined us virtually to talk about new features in Bridgetown, a next-generation progressive site generator and fullstack framework powered by Ruby.

The talk wasn’t recorded, but much of what Jared shared with us was also covered in Jared’s BridgetownConf 2022 keynote talk “What’s New in Bridgetown 1.2, the Plugin Ecosystem, and Content Publishing”, as well as his talk “Database-Driven Apps with Bridgetown, Roda, Hotwire Turbo, and Lifeform”.

Bluegrass Ruby's first meetup

April 18, 2023

Our first meetup saw 7 Rubyists show up from various walks of life and experience levels. We did introductions and discussed projects we’ve worked on. Vera discussed her domain specific language for generative storytelling called YeetWords, and Blake did a demo of WhatIsMyDistrict.org, a site for determining nearby public services and the city district you’re in. Other discussions included testing strictness and the helpfulness of AI in development.