I go to at least one conference a year (3-4 most years), and there is a magic in small conferences that big ones can't easily replicate. You just have more meaningful conversations on average at the small ones. Not sure why that is. Probably it's just the intimacy of a small group that makes that happen, whereas the big swarm conferences make you just swarm around until you hit the pillow in the hotel. So I'm REALLY looking forward to rocking XO Ruby in New York this weekend!
I'm not stopping at just XO Ruby. ai.engineer NYC and the Daytona HackSprint are the final destinations next week.
softwaremakers.ai#
If you are reading this in your inbox, chances are you are familiar with the Rails.Builders community that I've been organizing since 2025. It's a cohort-based community to hack on our side hustles together.
Since it doesn't seem to be too bad a format, I'm soft-launching softwaremakers.ai for Rails engineers to get a tiny bit closer to the personal edge of engineering with the new tools we have at our disposal. I will start with two free session formats:
The second one is inspired by Austin's AI Implementation Club that I went to in September: Present what you're gonna work on, work in silence, present what you've built. This one will be maybe a bit awkward since we'll be working in silence "online", but it's something I wanted to experiment with and there is no reason it wouldn't work to get ourselves results. A mini-hackathon for a couple of hours once in a while can go a long way, especially now that two hours can produce a month's worth of work.
Bot-led deployments#
My week's highlight was the new deploy process at ClickFunnels. Our in-house agentic code bot now helps us deploy:
First of all, it's now just merging into master that makes it deploy. We've come a long way from a multi-hour process 3 years ago to a single GitHub merge click and a few minutes of watching the reports and results get served to you by the deploy bot. Then, Clicky helps manage deploys, like freezing and unfreezing them. And, like everywhere else in the app, it has insight into the different platforms and can tell you what is going on (if anything is). Big kudos to our platform engineering team for making this my favorite and most DX-friendly SlackGitOps deployment process. The full story here by Nate Vick:
[AIN#40] AI Nuggets Week#40#
📺 Expert Knowledge YouTube Nuggets#
Is the week over already?
🎰 Just for Fun links#
Nothing to laugh at this week, shit's serious. 😜