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List of the Keynotes of Railsconfs past

Railsconf Keynotes

Table of Contents

Keynotes

2006 (The First One) Chicago

David Heinemeier Hansson

"Resources on Rails"
Youtube Link

Martin Fowler

Video Not Available

Paul Graham

Video Not Available

Dave Thomas

Video Not Available

Why the Lucky Stiff & The Thirsty Cups

Youtube Link
railsconf.org schedules from the internet archive do not refer to this as a keynote. Blogs and youtube description does. This was mentioned but not included in the Keynote of Keynotes talk.

2007 Portland

David Heinemeier Hansson

Video Not Available

Avi Bryant

Video Not Available

Dave Thomas

Video Not Available

Tim Bray

Video Not Available
All I had for this one was an email message from Tim Bray:

I remember the content, there were 3 strong messages.

  1. I was working for Sun at the time; Sun was a co-sponsor of the conference, and I explained why; Sun was very Web-centric and at that time Rails was on an explosive growth trajectory and we wanted to sell the computers to support all those Rails websites.  I got a big laugh by saying “If Ruby isn’t the world’s most efficient programming runtime, from our point of view that’s not 100% bad.”
  2. The Ruby & Rails community really needed to get their act together about supporting Unicode.  At the same time, I made speeches at both RubyConf and RubyKaigi about this subject, had a couple of long talks with Matz and I claim a small piece of the credit for convincing the Ruby people to take Unicode seriously.
  3. I pointed out that the audience was almost all men, very few women, and asked them if they were OK with that and, if not, what they were going to do about it.

Jarkko Laine

Video Not Available

Ze Frank

Video Not Available

Jamis Buck & Michael Koziarski

"The Rails Way"
Video Not Available

2008 Portland

David Heinemeier Hansson

"The Great Surplus"
Youtube Link

Joel Spolsky

Youtube Link

Charles Nutter

Video Not Available

Jeremy Daer

Video Not Available

Kent Beck

Video Not Available

2009 Las Vegas

David Heinemeier Hansson

"Rails 3 and the real secret to high productivity"
Youtube Link

Women in Rails Panel

Speakers: Desi McAdam, Sarah Mei, Lori Olson
Youtube Link

Rails Core Panel

Speakers: Jeremy Daer, Rick Olson, Michael Koziarski, Yehuda Katz, DHH
Youtube Link

Robert Martin

"What killed smalltalk could kill Ruby too"
Youtube Link

2010 Baltimore

David Heinemeier Hansson

Youtube Link

Robert Martin

Youtube Link

Gary Vaynerchuk

Youtube Link

2011 Baltimore

David Heinemeier Hansson

Youtube Link

Richard Gabriel & Guy Steele

"50 in 50"
Vimeo Link
The recording is not from Railsconf, but since it's a scripted piece, it's likely the same or similar enough.

Dan Melton

Youtube Link

Corey Haines

Youtube Link

Chad Dickerson

Youtube Link

Aaron Batalion

Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

"Double Dream Hands"
Youtube Link

Eric Ries

"Lessons Learned"
Youtube Link

Glenn Vanderburg

"Craft, Engineering and the Essence of Programming"
Youtube Link

2012 Austin

David Heinemeier Hansson

"Progress"
Youtube Link

Rich Hickey

"Simplicity Matters"
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

"I've made a huge mistake"
Youtube Link

David Cohen

Youtube Link

Ruby Rogues Live Recording

Speakers: James Edward Gray, Charles Max Wood, Josh Susser, David Brady and Avdi Grim
Youtube Link

2013 Portland

David Heinemeier Hansson

"Patterns of Basecamp's Application Architecture"
Youtube Link

Michael Lopp

"Stables and Volatiles"
Youtube Link
This recording is not from Railsconf, but as far as I can tell the content is the same or incredibly close. He seems to have given this talk multiple times.

Yehuda Katz

Video Not Available
All that I could find from this was a DM to Yehuda with the reply:

I think that's the one where I ripped up my entire talk overnight to deliver a rebuttal to DHH on Javascript. I haven't ever been able to find it, sadly.

James Duncan Davidson

Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

2014 Chicago

David Heinemeier Hansson

Youtube Link

Farrah Bostic

"What happens to everyone when everyone learns to code?"
Youtube Link

Yehuda Katz

"Ten Years!"
Youtube Link

Baratunde Thurston

"Humor in the Code"
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

Sandi Metz (Not a keynote)

"All the Little Things"
Youtube Link
This talk wasn't a keynote but is generally regarded to be one of the best talks about Ruby & OO given at Railsconf, if not the best.

2015 Atlanta

David Heinemeier Hansson

Youtube Link

Sarah Chipps

Youtube Link

Rails Core Panel

Speakers: Aaron Patterson, Santiago Pastorino, Godfrey Chan, Jeremy Daer, Guillermo Iguaran, and Andrew White. Hosted by Evan Phoenix.
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

Kent Beck

"The Aaron Patterson Memorial Keynote"
Youtube Link

2016 Kansas City

Jeremy Daer

Youtube Link

Nickolas Means

Youtube Link

Chanelle Henry

Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

Paul Lamere

Youtube Link

2017 Phoenix

David Heinemeier Hansson

Youtube Link

Pamela Pavliscak

Youtube Link

Marco Rogers

Youtube Link

Justin Searls

Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

2018 Pittsburgh

David Heinemeier Hansson

Youtube Link

Mark Imbriaco

"Rails Doesn't Scale"
Youtube Link

Eileen Uchitelle

"The Future of Rails 6: Scalable by Default"
Youtube Link

Sarah Mei

"Livable Code"
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

2019 Minneapolis

David Heinemeier Hansson

Youtube Link

Bari A Williams

"Ethical Issues in the Law and Tech"
Youtube Link

Ariel Caplan

"The Stories We Tell Our Children"
Youtube Link

Brady Kriss

"How we make good"
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

2020 Your Couch

David Heinemeier Hansson

Not a talk, interview
Youtube Link

Eileen Uchitelle

"Technically a Talk"
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

"Aaron's Variety Show"
Youtube Link

2021 Remote

David Heinemeier Hansson

Not a talk, interview
Youtube Link

Eileen Uchitelle

"All the Things I Thought I Couldn't Do"
Youtube Link

Bryan Cantrill

Youtube Link

Bryan Liles

"Little Ideas Are the Catalyst for Big Change"
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

2022 Portland

Xavier Noria

"The Journey to Zeitwerk"
Youtube Link

Eileen Uchitelle

"The Success of Ruby on Rails"
Youtube Link

Crystal Tia Martin

"A Tech Gorl Origin Story"
Youtube Link

Vaidehi Joshi

"Meditations on Software"
Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

2023 Atlanta

Eileen Uchitelle

Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

Rafael Mendonça França

"Investing in the Ruby Community"
Youtube Link

Gary Ware

"The Power of Improv"
Youtube Link

Shani Boston

"Leading Through Change"
Youtube Link

2024 Detroit

Nadia Odunayo

Youtube Link

Irina Nazarova

"Startups on Rails"
Youtube Link

John Hawthorn

Youtube Link

Aaron Patterson

Youtube Link

2025 Philadelphia

John Dewsnap

YouTube Link

Aji Slater

YouTube Link

Railsconf World Champion Aaron Patterson

YouTube Link

Hit List

If you're only going to watch a handful (and I do not recommend watching them all, by any means) make it some of these. They are in a vague priority order, but don't read too much into it.

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