From June 12-14, 2025, the Baltic Ruby conference took place in Riga, Latvia (EU), bringing together Rubyists from across the region. The speaker lineup looked fantastic, and I was excited to attend. Unfortunately, my master’s thesis defense fell on June 13, so I could only join for a few hours on the final day.
Even with limited time, my impression was overwhelmingly positive - the event was well-organized, and I felt a bit unlucky to have missed the first two days.
📸 Baltic Ruby 2025 Photo Gallery
Entrance
Exploring Expressiveness: Creating DSLs in Ruby by Steven R. Baker
Image Vector Search by Chris Hasinski
The Boring Bits Bite Back by Katie Miller
Inside the Venue
Talk Highlights
The first talk I caught explored Ruby’s expressiveness in the context of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). It showcased Ruby’s flexibility in a fun and entertaining way, featuring a robot example that brought DSLs to life.
When I first began my Ruby journey, I was all-in on Rails. Later, I took this metaprogramming course that really opened my eyes to the language itself. If you’re curious about how Ruby works under the hood, I highly recommend reading the documentation on BasicObject, Object, and understanding how classes, modules, and objects interconnect.
After a short break, the next speaker demonstrated how image recognition can be achieved entirely in Ruby. I love talks like this - unexpected, creative, and eye-opening. In a time when AI and Python dominate the headlines, it’s refreshing to see how far you can go with Ruby alone.
Before the lunch break, I attended Katie Miller’s talk: “The Boring Bits Bite Back.” It resonated deeply with me. I’ve recently been working through technical debt especially around authorization. Katie touched on exactly the kind of concerns that have been on my mind lately.
For anyone exploring authorization in Ruby apps, I strongly recommend ActionPolicy. It’s currently my top choice. I also remember trying Strongbolt years ago, which was the only gem I knew of that offered model-level authorization. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem actively maintained anymore, but it had real promise for enterprise use cases.
I hope next year I can attend the full event and catch all the talks. Baltic Ruby is definitely something I’d love to experience again - this time from start to finish. 😊