Have a question? We have the answers!
Attendees are free to choose a ticket type that best fits their needs. A description of each ticket can be found on our Registration page, when it becomes available.
Ticket prices were decided by calculating a variety of costs to host this larger scale event. Beyond providing food and drinks for each day of the event, other things such as venue and room rental costs, WiFi, power, A/V, fabrication (staging, seating, linens, signage), union labor, and many more aspects are considered with deciding the ticket prices.
We can provide a document confirming the details of the conference. Please email your request to RailsConf@rubycentral.org.
Yes. Due to our policies and safety, anyone under the age of 18 is not allowed to register for a Ruby Central conference. Children under age 18 must be accompanied by an adult at all times.
Currently, there are no plans to make the event live-streamed. We will update the website if we will offer a virtual live-stream of our sessions.
Tito has a two-step process for registering a ticket for the event. The first step is collection of payment details. Once the payment has been processed, you’ll then receive a notification to ask you to complete the registration. This will bring up three prompts: either register for yourself, register for someone else, or wait (if you are unsure of who the ticket will be assigned to). The second step is where you input all of your personal details required for your badge, your food preferences, and other information that will help personalize your experience. For a more detailed explanation of the check-out flow, please continue here.
There could possibly be rooms available, but they are “outside” of our room block dates according to the Passkey reservations website application. However, you may still be able to book them with our room block rates. If you are experiencing this issue, please contact us at railsconf@rubycentral.org and we will work with you to try to find a solution.
You can purchase as many tickets as you wish through our ticketing system, Tito. Once you’ve purchased your tickets, you will then be asked to provide the names and email addresses of each individual you wish to invite by assigning the tickets to someone else. Each individual entered will then be contacted by email and will be responsible for entering in their own personalized registration. If this process is not completed, the attendee will not be officially registered for the event.
We will be using email, Slack, and a Welcome Guide to communicate what to expect, what events are happening, and other important program information to attendees. We recommend that you keep an eye on your emails for important updates from the RailsConf Planning Team. Our official website, RailsConf.org, will also have the latest news and updates about the conference program.
Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) is approximately 8mi./13km from the Sheraton. If you are commuting via Amtrak or other transportation, check out our Location page for more details.
Yes! You can see all of our volunteer opportunities on our Ruby Central website.
You can re-assign your ticket to another individual through your Tito registration. You MUST delete any of your ticket registration information before the new attendee can input their registration details.
Unfortunately, we cannot add tickets to an existing purchase.
Cancellation and refunds for in-person RailsConf tickets are required to submit a request via our Refund Request Form up to 48 hours after purchase.
Refunds are not available after 48 hours from purchase. You may sell your own ticket and reassign to another individual after the refund policy deadline has passed.
Currently there are no plans to open a virtual live-stream of our event. However, please keep an eye out for updates on our socials and website for any changes.
We offer discounts for groups of 5 or more. When purchasing your ticket through our ticketing site, the discount will automatically be applied to your purchase when purchasing 5+ tickets. You will be responsible for having every member of your group register their own individual ticket once the purchase has been completed.
Early bird rates are available until they are sold out or until April 1st (GMT). Early bird ticket rates are only applicable to the Individual Ticket rates.
Students can purchase a student rate ticket through Tito. You will be asked to provide proof of enrollment from Ruby Central Staff.
We have partnered with Sheraton Philadelphia to offer a discounted hotel rate at $199.00 per night (++ taxes and fees).
A new room block is available at The Logan Philadelphia Hotel with a discounted hotel rate of $189.00 per night (++ taxes and fees). This offer will expire on June 20th, 2025 before 11:59PM EST, or when the room block fills.
Book Your Room
Ruby Central may implement preventative health and safety measures at this Event to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, the flu, and other similar communicable illnesses and diseases. If you experience cold, flu, COVID-19 symptoms, or any other illness within 5 days of the conference, please monitor symptoms as necessary before arriving on-site. Face masks are optional. The COVID-19 vaccination is not required to attend the conference.
In case of emergency, if we are needing to evacuate the building due to fire, active shooter, or other severe cases, please follow these steps provided here and carefully follow staff instructions. There are medical AED Stations and First Aid kits on-site. Please let staff know if there is a medical emergency as they’ll assist with contacting hotel staff and paramedics.
The Pennsylvania Hospital (800 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA 19107) is about an 8 minute drive from the hotel (1.5 mi/2.5km).
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The Hospital of the Univ of Pennsylvania (3400 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA 19104) is about a 14 minute drive from the hotel (3.2 mi/5.1km).
Visit our Policies page to see our stance on anti-harassment, accessibility, liability, attendee data and privacy, health and safety, and speakers agreement.
We collaborate with the hotel’s catering services to offer morning and lunch options plus reception foods and drinks*. All of our hosted meals will be vegan/vegetarian forward with meat protein options. This choice in the menu helps best cater to a variety of dietary options such as vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free, and keto/low-carb. Kosher and Halal meals are ordered based on the number of requests submitted.
*Day 1 and 3 will not have lunch on-site. We have a 2 hour lunch block for you to explore the city and eat outside of the venue. For a list of local restaurants within a 10 minute walking distance, please visit our Location page.
Short answer: no, wear whatever you want!
Longer answer: most attendees dress fairly casually in t-shirts and jeans. However, business casual is also very common.
Yes. All sessions*, including the workshops, will be recorded and posted at a later date to our Ruby Central YouTube channel.
* Sessions that speakers request not to be recorded, will not be recorded. This will be noted on the RailsConf Schedule.
Yes, there will be childcare services available. There is limited space availability and also will require a non-refundable deposit per child that will be taken care of by our child caretakers. Our childcare provider will be Jovie. To reserve a space, please register via our ticketing registration site. Deadline to apply for childcare is: June 1st, 2025.
Please indicate on your registration if you need access to a lactation room. A Ruby Central staff member will contact you soon with further details close to the date.
We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our community members who reached out to us this month–whether it was by joining our Listening Session on June 10th, emails, messages, or our survey. We deeply appreciate the feedback and insights you shared. Since the Listening Session, our team has been carefully reading all the responses we’ve received and reflecting on how we can continue to grow and evolve as an organization as we enter a new chapter for Ruby Central. Ruby Central exists for and because of our community. In that spirit, we’re sharing some of the key questions that have come up in these conversations and our responses. If you have additional questions or would like to share feedback with our team, we encourage you to fill out our Listening Tour Survey (https://tinyurl.com/34yf8uwt).
Our conference chairs and program committee members decide who will speak, from regular sessions to keynotes. We go through a process that includes CFP submissions, a review period, outreach to potential keynote speakers, and confirmation of what each keynote will entail. There’s a lot happening behind the scenes to ensure that individuals not only accept participation but also confirm the extent of their involvement.
For some of our keynote speakers this year, it wasn’t clear until the last minute what their involvement would look like. While conversations about the details and logistics of their session were ongoing, final details weren’t confirmed until mid-May.
It’s challenging to announce a speaker’s involvement before we have a formal agreement and session details are finalized. Our announcement of the speaker lineup (including keynotes) typically only happens after we have received official confirmation from all parties. This is a lesson learned from previous events where keynote speakers were announced prematurely, and a speaker ultimately had to drop out—this year, we aimed to avoid making that mistake again.
That said, we recognize that earlier updates would have been helpful for the community and are working to improve the timing of those announcements moving forward.
While Ruby Central and the Rails Foundation are separate and unaffiliated organizations, we share similar goals in supporting the Ruby community. As such, there may be some natural overlap at events, including RailsConf. For example, individual members or sponsors of the Rails Foundation will be attending this final RailsConf as we all come together to celebrate its closing chapter. It’s not uncommon to see familiar faces or shared partnerships across different community events.
No, and this has never been the case at Ruby Central events. Our Program Committee is made up of volunteers from diverse backgrounds who bring expertise from various areas of the Ruby and Rails ecosystem. Each year’s Program Committee is comprised of a new group, bringing a fresh vision and theme to each event. Their role is to create a program that reflects what’s timely and relevant to the community.
Sponsors have no influence over speaker selection or the program’s content. However, we do have “Sponsored Talks” included as part of certain sponsorship packages. These sessions are clearly marked on the schedule. While sponsors select the content of those talks, we request that it aligns with the overall event theme and tone.
We believe that highlighting new and diverse frameworks is crucial to the growth and sustainability of the Ruby ecosystem. Historically, RailsConf has been heavily focused on the Ruby on Rails framework. However, this focus has also limited our ability to explore and highlight other parts of the Ruby ecosystem.
In recent years, internal changes at Ruby Central and the demands of running two major events annually have made it challenging to implement broader programmatic shifts in a thoughtful and strategic manner. With this year being the final RailsConf, our focus has been on honoring its legacy — reflecting on the past, celebrating the present, and imagining the future of Rails.
That said, we’ve heard this feedback from the community and take it seriously. We’re currently restructuring RubyConf, our flagship annual event, with the intention of expanding to include a wider range of frameworks and tools for the web and beyond. Our goal is to ensure the Ruby ecosystem continues to evolve and thrive by welcoming and amplifying more voices and technologies.
Ruby Central is committed to creating safe, inclusive, and welcoming spaces for everyone. We take Code of Conduct violations seriously. If someone disrupts or harms anyone in our community at our events, our staff and moderators may take immediate action, including issuing warnings or removing individuals from our spaces without refund.
This Code of Conduct applies to all individuals involved with Ruby Central, Inc. (including staff and vendors of events) hosted events (RubyConf and RailsConf), community spaces (ie. Meetups), and virtual online spaces.
We are here to protect and support everyone who enters our community in good faith.
Please refer to our Code of Conduct policy for further details.
Ruby Central is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the Ruby programming language and fostering a welcoming, inclusive, and globally diverse community. Our core values include lifelong learning, impact, trust, inclusivity, collaboration, empathy, and enjoyment. These values guide everything we do.
Looking ahead, we recognize that meaningful inclusion requires ongoing, active effort. This year, we’ve launched several initiatives designed to support and amplify underrepresented voices, including:
These programs are shaped by community feedback, and we’re committed to evolving them further. As a small team (many of whom work part-time or as contractors) we know collaboration is key. If you have suggestions, partnerships, or communities we should connect with, we invite you to reach out. Building a more inclusive Ruby ecosystem is something we do best together.
As a small nonprofit with a tiny but amazing staff, organizing two large-scale conferences each year stretched our capacity, both operationally and financially. Most of our energy was spent moving from one event to the next, leaving little room to invest in new programs, infrastructure, or deeper community engagement.
At the same time, we heard from community members that RailsConf no longer served the same purpose it once did. Combined with rising event costs and broader economic shifts, it became clear that this was the right moment to close this chapter.
By focusing on one flagship annual event, RubyConf, we can create a truly world-class conference experience, reinvest in the community, and ensure the long-term sustainability of Ruby Central. This shift also allows us to grow initiatives like our Open Source Program (supporting RubyGems, RubyGems.org, and Bundler), and expand support for regional meetups, scholarships, and grassroots efforts.
We also recognize that the global Ruby community is thriving, with events like RailsWorld, Euruko, RubyKaigi, Tropical on Rails, and new regional events springing up. We view RubyConf as a platform to bring together global conversations, and we invite you to help shape what RubyConf becomes in our next chapter.
We’re actively discussing how to evolve RubyConf’s programming to better reflect the diversity and future of the Ruby ecosystem. One of our key goals is to expand beyond the “well-known” voices and technologies, bringing in new speakers, emerging frameworks, and engaging the younger generations of software engineers to help shape what comes next.
We’re currently rethinking the structure of our conference tracks and exploring what kinds of topics and perspectives should be represented. While we absolutely recognize the continued importance of Rails — and tentatively plan to include a Rails-focused track — we also want that content to reflect our forward-looking mission and offer fresh, valuable insight to the community that they may not get elsewhere.
At the same time, we’re making intentional space to highlight modern tools, frameworks, and ideas that push the ecosystem forward.
If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see at RubyConf, we invite you to share them through our Listening Tour Survey (feedback form).
Ruby Central is actively building programs that support the long-term health and inclusivity of the Ruby ecosystem. Some of our current initiatives from this year (2024-2025) include:
We’re also evolving RubyConf into a more inclusive and future-focused event — one that highlights diverse voices, explores new frameworks, and welcomes the next generation of Rubyists.
We recognize challenges like fewer academic institutions teaching Ruby, and the shift in industry toward other languages. That’s why we’re actively working to reconnect with companies, educators, and community organizers to show why Ruby remains a powerful, relevant tool, and to open doors for newer developers entering the field.
These efforts take time, care, and resources. With a small team, we’re building thoughtfully. We’re always looking for aligned partners, sponsors, and contributors to help grow these initiatives. If you’d like to get involved or support this work, we’d love to hear from you.
At Ruby Central, we’re actively building stronger relationships with organizers, meetups, and community leaders around the world to better understand how we can serve and support the full diversity of the Ruby ecosystem.
We’ve heard your feedback. We recognize there’s more work to do to ensure a wider range of voices are represented on our event stages and within our broader community. As a small but passionate team, we’re committed to evolving how we work and how we engage, especially as we enter a new chapter for RubyConf.
Here’s where we’re focused:
As we work toward these goals, we’re guided by our core values of inclusivity, empathy, and community impact. We’re excited about what’s ahead — and we’re always open to collaborating with others who share our vision for a more vibrant, diverse, and connected Ruby community.
Please email your questions to sponsors@rubycentral.org. You can also review our Sponsors page to learn more.
Learn more about our membership program here.
Please use our hashtag #RailsConf2025 and tagging us on the following social platforms:
To ensure our commitment to Data Privacy, we do not encourage sharing photos of conference participants without their explicit consent. We ask that all attendees avoid screenshotting any information that includes attendees’ data or personal information (such as name, photo, webcam, etc.).
Please review our Code of Conduct for RailsConf and all Ruby Central hosted events. If you have any questions or concerns prior to or during RailsConf, please notify a RailsConf staff member immediately. You can also contact us at railsconf@rubycentral.org and we will respond as soon as we can.