Arizona Ruby Users Group

This month we teamed up with our friends at GDG Phoenix / PHX Android for a hands-on build night at HeatSync Labs.

Rather than a passive lecture, this was an open working workshop and hack night focused on what developers can build with AI without spending a dime – running models locally, exploring generous free tiers, and sharing practical tooling across the Phoenix tech community.

Talks

Ruby AI Gems: Building AI Applications in Ruby — Marc Heiligers

Marc gave an overview of the evolving AI ecosystem in Ruby, showing how developers can build production-ready AI features, RAG pipelines, and context-aware agents natively in Ruby without vendor lock-in.

• RubyLLM: A unified interface across 17+ LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.) offering clean Ruby ergonomics, streaming responses, and structured JSON outputs out of the box.
• Ruby MCP Client: Standardizing context integration via the Model Context Protocol, connecting AI models directly and securely to local files, tools, and databases.
• Andrew Kane’s ML Gems: Bringing native machine learning directly to Ruby with Torch.rb (deep learning & neural networks), Informers (native transformer models for embeddings and sentiment analysis), and Pgvector-ruby (vector similarity search for RAG in Active Record).

Presentation — Sheldon McGee

Sheldon McGee co-presented for the evening, sharing practical insights and demos around building with free developer AI tooling.

Links

• RubyLLM — Unified interface for AI APIs in Ruby and Rails
• Model Context Protocol: Build a Client in Ruby
• 16 New ML Gems for Ruby by Andrew Kane
• More ML Gems for Ruby by Andrew Kane

Thanks

• Co-hosted with GDG Phoenix / PHX Android
• Event space and hosting provided by HeatSync Labs

Want to present at a future meetup?

This month we’re going to have a series of Lightning Talks!

Talks

We had three talks which resulted in a lot of discussion and questions.

• How to Leverage AI for Developer Productivity (Slides coming soon) - Chris Irish
• A Good Day To Open The Business - Tavern Keeper Robin
• Understanding Rack Without the Framework Magic - Marc Heiligers

Thanks

• Pizza and Soda sponsored by FASCINATION•works
• Event space provided by CO+HOOTS, Mesa

Links

• Photo by j_arred, CC BY 2.0
• Rack talk sample source code
• Tea Tavern
• Federated - All the apps your business needs - use TEA-TAVERN to get 15% off for 6 months
• Hermes Agent

Want to present at a future meetup?

Talks

This month we had Marc Heiligers presenting on Deploying with Kamal, Day 2.

Most tutorials cover Day 0:

• Buy a VPS
• Run kamal setup
• Profit!

But what about Day 2 and beyond?

• Who patches the OS kernel?
• How do we know when Sidekiq runs out of memory?
• Is SSH really secure on a public port?

Luis Montes did a quick lightning talk showing off some work he’s been doing with Claude to create a WASM game engine with the same public interface as DragonRuby.

Malak Janus showed off the developer experience tools she’s built into Bloomlight to make future development faster and easier.

Links

• Nextgen is an interactive and flexible alternative to rails new that includes opt-in support for modern frontend development with ⚡️Vite.

Thanks

• Pizza and Soda sponsored by Velocity Labs
• Event space provided by HeatSync Labs

This month we have Sean Coleman presenting on Secure Ruby Coding Practices.

• Importance of using UUIDs instead of integer IDs
• Secure multi-tenant architecture
• Practical authorization layers

We are always looking for speakers to share their Ruby experiences! Whether it’s a 5-minute lightning talk or a full 45-minute deep dive, we’d love to hear from you.