Amanda Bizzinotto is Head of AI/ML at Ombu Labs, the consultancy behind FastRuby. With a master’s in data science and early experience fine-tuning GPT-2 models, she now leads development of practical AI tools—including an automated Rails-upgrade roadmap and a Slack knowledge bot used across Ombu Labs. Her focus is scaling multi-agent architectures, safeguarding data with Guardrails.ai and Presidio, and coaching Rails engineers on effective prompt engineering. Amanda speaks frequently at Artificial Ruby NYC and writes technical deep-dives on AI patterns and Ruby libraries.

Chad Fowler is a software entrepreneur, investor and long-time Ruby luminary. He co-organized the original RailsConf series, wrote the best-selling book “The Passionate Programmer,” and helped popularize practices like convention-over-configuration and immutable infrastructure. As CTO at Wunderlist he led a multilingual micro-service rewrite that scaled to millions before Microsoft acquired the company in 2015, where he later directed developer advocacy. Today Chad is a partner at BlueYard Capital, investing in AI-first startups while experimenting with LLM-driven code generation, IoT and generative music. His blend of Ruby history, large-scale architecture and hands-on AI tinkering makes him uniquely qualified to talk about where programming goes next.

Justin Bowen is the creator of Active Agent. With 17 years of experience building with Ruby and Rails, he’s on a mission to bring his favorite language and framework into the future of AI development, ensuring they remain a top choice for developers creating AI-driven products.

Over the past decade, Justin has developed AI solutions across a variety of industries and technologies. He’s partnered with Stanford Healthcare on computer vision for operating rooms, built AI tools for monitoring cow health in dairy barns, and helped large Rails monoliths implement new features with LLMs. Frustrated by the lack of AI tools for Rails and the constant need to build custom infrastructure, Justin created Active Agent to make AI development faster and tons of fun.

You can follow Justin on LinkedIn.

Justin Searls is co-founder of Test Double, where he helps teams ship better software with fewer headaches. A longtime voice in the Ruby and JavaScript communities, Justin is known for pragmatic takes on testing, DX, and tooling—lately exploring how AI can accelerate feedback loops without sacrificing code quality. He’s a prolific speaker and writer, and he’s not afraid of a spicy hot take when it helps teams get real results.

Kieran is a Ruby developer and AI builder passionate about bridging Rails with modern AI workflows. With years of experience creating AI-powered products, he is the creator of Leva, a Ruby gem for evaluating LLM performance, and founder of Cora, an AI-powered inbox management tool. His work emphasizes practical, developer-friendly solutions for integrating AI into Rails applications, while encouraging experimentation and community-driven growth in the Ruby ecosystem.

Obie Fernandez is a Principal Engineer on Shopify’s Augmented Engineering team and a 20-year Ruby luminary. Author of the best-selling “The Rails Way” series and the recent “Patterns of Application Development Using AI,” he has founded multiple tech companies (Hashrocket, Olympia), edited Addison-Wesley’s Professional Ruby Series, and now spearheads open-source AI libraries such as Raix and Roast. Beyond code, Obie is an electronic music producer and touring DJ, bringing the same creative energy to both beats and software.

Scott Werner is the CEO and co-founder of Sublayer, an open-source Ruby AI-agent framework that turns your codebase into the prompt.  Previously he was CTO and co-founder of Sayspring, the voice-app prototyping tool acquired by Adobe in 2018, where he led the team behind Adobe Podcast. A Rubyist for 10 + years, he has built high-velocity product teams from early startups to Adobe, always focused on developer experience.  Scott shares experiments in agent-oriented programming, “vibe-coding,” and the post-LLM future of work in his Substack newsletter Works on My Machine and on stages such as ELC and Artificial Ruby. 

When he’s not shipping Sublayer releases he’s prototyping AI side-projects—like the Markdown-to-web gem “Monkey’s Paw”—or evangelizing metaprogramming as a super-power, not a foot-gun.