Aaron Patterson’s closing keynote (and antidote to the DHH funeral) at Rails World 2026: “Get in loser, we’re going programming”

If David Heinemeier Hansson’s opening keynote at Rails World 2026 felt like “the most confusing funeral I’ve ever experienced,” Aaron Patterson’s closing keynote was the raucous Irish wake that brought the corpse back to life, handed it a pint, and told everyone to get back to their laptops once they’ve sobered up. The tl;dr table To appreciate how thoroughly Aaron answered DHH, lI put together a table comparing the two keynotes: Metric / Stance DHH Opening Keynote Aaron Patterson Closing Keynote Tone Aggressive, messianic, defensive Warm, self-deprecating, deeply technical, hilarious, punctuated often with Aaron’s laughter Mentions of Ruby 11 times in 63 minutes The foundational medium of every slide Position on code “Pencils down.” Hand-writing code is a failure state. “I’m going to keep reading my code, and I hope that you will too.” Tech stack bet Discard web apps; vibe-code native apps and black-box Rust. Invest deeply in Ruby: Ractors, ZJIT, Ractor-local GC in Ruby 4.1. Attitude…