Tropical on Rails 2025 brought together Rails developers from across Brazil and beyond for a thoughtful and engaging event. With a mix of technical talks, practical workshops, and networking opportunities, the conference offered valuable insights and a strong sense of community within the Ruby on Rails ecosystem.
As an engineer at Planet Argon, attending this conference was a chance to reconnect with the Ruby ecosystem and recharge creatively. From Hotwire deep dives to scaling strategies for massive apps, the insights I took home are already reshaping how I think about building modern Rails applications.
In this post, I'll briefly recap the event, some of my favorite talks, and how this experience will influence our work at Planet Argon.
Overview of Tropical on Rails 2025
Tropical on Rails 2025 brought together a diverse community of developers, speakers, and companies for two days of knowledge sharing and connection. Set against the backdrop of Brazil's coastline, the event created a welcoming space for discussions around code and community. Beyond the scheduled talks, hallway conversations, and informal meetups offered valuable opportunities to exchange ideas and experiences with fellow Rails developers.
This year's agenda focused on real-world strategies for building modern, scalable applications with Rails. Sessions covered topics like Hotwire, front-end integration, performance tuning, and large-scale system architecture. A recurring theme was how Rails continues to evolve to meet current development challenges—especially in hybrid web and mobile contexts—while staying true to its principles of developer happiness and productivity.
Key Takeaways from Sessions and Workshops
🚀 The Great Mobile Hack: Hotwire Native — Daniel Medina
This talk by Daniel Medina was an absolute standout. It showcased how the event's own web app was transformed into a native mobile experience using Hotwire Native. The process kept Rails in the driver's seat while delivering a native feel for mobile users. The key takeaway? You don't need to sacrifice the Rails developer experience to deliver smooth, performant mobile apps.
🧠 Hotwire Demystified — Chris Oliver
Chris broke down the "HTML over the wire" magic behind Hotwire. He clearly explained when to use Turbo Drive, Turbo Frames, and Turbo Streams—and why reaching for Streams too quickly might not be the best idea. I appreciated his pragmatic approach:
"Let your HTML guide your JavaScript."
Also, the reminder about correctly using 303 See Other for redirecting after a DELETE action was a subtle gem that sparked some ideas for refactoring parts of our own apps.
📡 Scaling Rails to 200M Notifications — Gustavo Araujo
This talk by Gustavo Araujo was a deep dive into scaling Rails apps for high-throughput environments. His team at CloudWalk had to deliver over 1 billion notifications per year across WhatsApp, SMS, email, and push. Some highlights:
- Smart use of Puma configuration (balancing workers and threads)
- Use of read replicas and partitioning to handle DB load
- Emphasis on observability tools like Skylight and AppSignal
- Avoiding pitfalls like DB pool mismatch and excessive threading
This was a masterclass in Rails ops, and I walked away with some very actionable insights.
Beyond the Talks: The Power of Community
One of the most rewarding parts of Tropical on Rails was connecting with other developers. I had great conversations about caching strategies and Hotwire pitfalls, and I even got to chat with folks from product teams using Rails in different industries.
There's something energizing about being surrounded by people who genuinely love the framework and are eager to share their war stories and ideas. I also met a few folks who were curious about Planet Argon's approach to legacy Rails apps, which may lead to some exciting collaborations in the future.
What This Means for Us at Planet Argon
The insights I gathered at Tropical on Rails are already sparking new initiatives back at Planet Argon:
- We're revisiting how we use Hotwire in some of our internal projects, especially after Chris Oliver's talk. We'll refine our use of Turbo Frames and experiment more with dialog-based interactions.
- Inspired by the performance lessons from Gustavo's talk, we'll be auditing thread usage in Puma across a few of our hosted apps, ensuring we're not overcommitting resources.
- Lastly, the excitement around Hotwire Native has got me thinking about how to apply this to client projects where a mobile experience is needed without going full React Native or Flutter.
Wrapping Up
Tropical on Rails 2025 reminded me why I love the Rails community: the perfect blend of technical depth, real-world wisdom, and human connection. It wasn't just about new gems or performance tips but about people who care deeply about building better software together.
If you ever get the chance to attend, I highly recommend it. And if you're curious about any of the topics I mentioned—or want to chat about Rails in general—drop me a line!
🌴 Until next year!