Pull requests are where quality is won or lost, and too many teams still treat reviews with a rushed “LGTM”. In this talk, you’ll learn a practical, repeatable approach to high-quality PR reviews that balances speed with risk management - covering how to triage changes quickly, review in layers, and write comments that lead to better outcomes without friction. We’ll also show how QA and developers bring complementary lenses to the same review, turning acceptance criteria, scenarios, and observability into shared responsibility instead of production surprises. You’ll leave with a lightweight framework and concrete habits for authors and reviewers that make reviews faster, kinder, and more effective.

The networks we use every day depend on centralized infrastructure that’s vulnerable to censorship, surveillance, and single points of failure. Whether it’s disasters, deliberate interference, or plain old downtime, entire populations can, in an instant, be cut off from digital communication—sometimes when they need it most. The heart of the problem is hierarchy—the hierarchical structure of these networks makes them easy to exploit or to simply shut down.

Reticulum is one solution to this problem. It’s a cryptography-based networking stack that flattens the hierarchy entirely. It was built for creating resilient, ad hoc, and private networks using almost any communication hardware you can imagine—from LoRa, WiFi, and Ethernet to old school packet radio and serial ports. Whether you’re dealing with natural disasters or just want communications that can’t be easily disrupted, Reticulum is a powerful tool for building independent, interconnectable networks that work without central points of control.

This talk will break down what Reticulum is and dig into how the protocol works—from its clever addressing tricks to its baked-in encryption. We’ll explore the built-in utilities that ship with Reticulum; try out apps like MeshChat, NomadNet, and Sideband for communication; and even show some code and learn how to build apps of our own.

By the end, you’ll understand how Reticulum and the applications that run on it work and how to set it all up for yourself. Plus, you’ll have the knowledge to grow the network and its capabilities by writing with applications of your own. But most importantly, you’ll walk away understanding how to build communication networks that can survive disasters, resist interference, and keep working when traditional infrastructure fails.

Backed-up job queues, crashing worker processes, memory bloat? If you’ve had to support production background job workloads, you’ve felt it. Give me five minutes, and I’ll show you the five simple steps we’ve used repeatedly for resilient job queues—queues that are cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and run smoothly without manual intervention.

When Active Record works, it’s great.  Polymorphic associations in Active Record promise elegant flexibility: one interface, many possible models. When they work, they feel almost magical. But when your application grows and real‑world complexity sets in, that magic can quickly turn into confusion, broken queries, and performance headaches. We’ll explore where polymorphic associations shine, where they silently introduce technical debt, and why even experienced Rails developers can end up wrestling with unscoped queries, tricky joins, and hard‑to‑optimize relationships. We’ll walk through real examples of tangled polymorphic logic—and more importantly, show practical strategies to refactor, untangle, or even avoid these pitfalls entirely. By the end, you’ll know when to reach for polymorphism, when to run away from it, and what to do when your complex query simply refuses to cooperate. -

Let’s talk about what makes Ruby on Rails able to Full-Stack Flex! This talk was given at CodeMash 2026 and I’ll talk about bringing Ruby and Rails back to CodeMash!

Hi all, given that there’s a level 3 snow emergency in Franklin County, we’re going to cancel tonight’s CRB and resume in Feb. Hope everyone’s staying safe and warm!

Presented by Tech Community Coalition

Join the Columbus tech community for our annual holiday celebration! This is a great opportunity to connect with fellow developers, designers, and tech professionals from across the city.

🎟️ Details and Your Free Tickets on Eventbrite

• When: December 11th, 2025
• Location: 421 West State Street
• Cost: Free

CRB will meet next in January

I thought I knew how to build Rails apps. Then I joined a new company and discovered an entire architectural approach I never knew was possible in Rails: event sourcing with Commands, Deciders, Event Stores, and temporal queries.

This talk covers what event sourcing actually is, why major tech companies and financial institutions have built their systems around it, and when this pattern makes sense versus traditional CRUD. We’ll look at real Rails code examples and practical implementation options available in the Ruby ecosystem.

Whether you’re curious about the pattern or considering it for your next project, come learn alongside me as I share what I’ve discovered about this powerful architectural approach.

The Columbus Ruby Brigade Board of Directors has approved a comprehensive revision to the organization’s bylaws. These changes are designed to streamline organizational governance and better reflect the current scale and needs of our community.

The proposed bylaws require approval by a two-thirds majority vote of the membership present at this meeting. The key changes include:

Board Size Flexibility: The minimum number of Directors is reduced from five to three, with the Board having discretion to expand as needed. Current Directors may continue serving through the end of 2026 to ensure continuity during this transition.

Self-Perpetuating Board Structure: The Board will transition from member-elected to self-perpetuating governance, where the Board is responsible for recruiting and approving new members rather than conducting annual elections.

Elimination of Term Limits: Board members will no longer be subject to term limits, allowing for greater continuity and institutional knowledge retention. Previously the term limit was five consecutive years.

Officer Role Consolidation: The same individual may now serve simultaneously as President, Secretary, and Treasurer, providing operational flexibility for a volunteer organization.

Simplified Membership Model: The concept of formal membership has been removed, it was intended to support dues collection and an official membership roster, which are not part of our current operational model.

Streamlined Amendment Process: Future bylaw amendments will be approved by Board vote rather than requiring membership approval, enabling more responsive governance.

Documents for Review:

• 📄 Proposed Bylaws (PDF)
• 📄 Current Bylaws (PDF)

We encourage all community members to review these documents prior to the meeting. Questions may be directed to board@columbusrb.com or posted in our Slack workspace.

Your client wants a mobile app but you only know Ruby on Rails? No problem! In this talk we will explore Hotwire Native and how we can leverage existing code-bases to develop and ship both web and mobile apps to our clients!