The Pingback Podcast

Muhamed Isabegović is a staff engineer in Vienna by way of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He brought EuRuKo to Sarajevo in 2024, the first Ruby conference ever held in the country, then founded RubyConf Austria. He tells Joel and Greg how pitching his hometown on a wave of homesickness turned into three days, three tracks and €100,000 he had to raise, why he organizes conferences to put himself in a room with people he wants to learn from, and the story of the one goat that fed all of Tuzla. That goat is now the name of GoatConf, a free, tech-agnostic conference in Tuzla on 3 to 5 June 2027, with an hour-long break after every session for the hallway track. They talk about why small towns work for conferences, whether free tickets mean empty seats (and 37signals’ trick of a $100 deposit you get back when you show up), and what makes a speaker lineup: the people on the stage, not the stage. Then the AI side of Muhamed’s work. Chasing Chad Fowler’s ideas about regenerative software, he added deterministic constraints for Ruby and Rails to Enola, Dejan Menges’s architecture graph, so a check catches each mistake an agent makes. He describes Tabula, his memory layer and harness, and ∗codeplain’s idea that code gets regenerated, not maintained. Greg has had little luck with open models, and Joel connects it all to Sam Ruby’s Roundhouse. To close, Greg flags Omarchy 4.5 and this week’s Rails security releases (upgrade, especially if you use Active Storage), and the three of them dig into a Railway employee’s agent probing a competitor’s platform: who is responsible when an agent goes off the rails, how Greg uses AI in security audits, and whether you can still sell software anyone can build, or only the expertise behind it. Find Muhamed Muhamed’s site Muhamed on X Muhamed on GitHub GoatConf 2027, Tuzla, 3 to 5 June 2027 Links from the episode RubyConf Austria EuRuKo 2024 in Sarajevo Enola, and Muhamed’s Enola work RubyLLM by Carmine Paolino AppSignal ∗codeplain SF Ruby Omarchy Chapters, best moments and the full transcript: https://pingbackpodcast.com/episodes/episode-6/

Joel and Greg take a week off from guests to catch up. They start with the Evil Martians livestream on the agent benchmarks they run for the Rails Foundation, and the story of an agent that found an answer elsewhere and passed it off as its own work. From there: whether models get “nerfed” or are just non-deterministic, and why a benchmark needs more than a best of three. Then Black October. Greg walks through this month’s PHP, Node.js and Ruby vulnerabilities and argues the panic is mostly marketing: Node’s bug really did give a shell, while Ruby’s regex bug needed specific conditions to bite. He explains how he built his own Ruby Docker image while the official one lagged hours behind the release, how Rails LTS keeps old Rails apps patched, and why monitoring is the biggest part of security. They also cheer Sam Ruby, a guest from episode 3, joining Shopify, and talk about how open source work gets people hired, what a technical interview means when you drive agents for a living, and staying calm under pressure, from job interviews to marathons and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The last stretch is home automation. Joel turned a $40 photo frame into a family dashboard, a Rails backend behind Wes Bos’s front end, wired to Home Assistant. Greg lives off the grid and uses Home Assistant to heat water and charge his car only when the solar panels are producing. Next time: the Omarchy release candidate. Links from the episode Evil Martians Rails LTS by makandra Home Assistant TRMNL, the e-ink dashboard Greg uses Omarchy Chapters, best moments and the full transcript: https://pingbackpodcast.com/episodes/episode-5/

Our guest this weeek was Raul, you can find out more about him and his products on the links below:His X account: x.com/raulonrailseBaza for the ring binder story: ebaza.ro  Calm Companies: calmcompanies.club