This post is inspired by the keynote "Startups on Rails" by Irina Nazarova (CEO, Evil Martians) at RubyConf Thailand 2026.

Have you been asked recently: "Wait, you're still using Ruby?" — with that particular pause and a hint of sympathy?

At RubyConf Thailand 2026, Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians, opened her keynote by addressing this widespread anxiety. After conducting over 50 interviews with founders who chose Ruby and Rails in recent years, giving 6 talks, organizing a conference, and working with 25 Rails startups at Evil Martians, she identified two core problems in the community: fear about careers and "shame" about the stack.

Let's look at whether these feelings are justified.

Where Does the "Rails Shame" Come From?

There's a paradox in the tech industry:

  • Investors and PR love big words: Python is associated with ML, JavaScript/TypeScript — with web universality.
  • Companies need results: So they pick Rails for rapid development, but… quietly avoid mentioning it in press releases.

Everyone knows Figma as a technological flagship of WebAssembly and a modern product. But few people know that its backend has been running on Ruby (Sinatra) for years. They have a technical blog post about it, but it's not in their press releases — they talk about WebAssembly and other things instead.

Founders stay silent about their stack. Job postings replace the word "Ruby" with generic "Backend Engineer." Engineers hedge with "We use Rails, but we're considering other modern stacks." And developers spend their weekends learning Rust, just in case.

This phenomenon — being embarrassed about your own tool — makes the community feel cornered, even though the technology continues to generate billions of dollars in business value.

As Nazarova puts it, these are the typical responses to fear: denial ("Ruby is fine, nothing's changing"), shame ("I don't mention Ruby anymore, I say 'backend' and hope they don't ask"), flight ("I'm learning Rust on weekends, just in case"), and defensiveness ("Ruby has ALWAYS been underrated!"). None of these are productive.

  The Ruby Developer's Psychological Loop

  [ Hype pressure: AI = Python ]
                 │
                 ▼
  [ Rails hidden in job postings and media ]
                 │
                 ▼
  [ Feeling that the stack is "outdated" ]
                 │
                 ▼
  [ Defensive reaction: pivoting to Rust / JS ]

A History Lesson: Will AI Kill the Profession?

The main source of fear is the question: "How do I secure my career and my family's future for the next 10 years?"

Sarah Mei, who founded RailsBridge and has been in Ruby since 2006, has lived through multiple industry shifts. At SF Ruby Conference 2025, she offered this perspective:

"Operating from a place of fear is not helpful to us as individuals, as an industry, as a society."

She points to three major shifts that each felt like the end:

  1. Virtual machines in the late 90s: "You'll never run a VM in production. You need hand-tuned memory." It seemed like they'd put programmers out of work.
  2. Cloud in the mid 2000s: "You need to control your own hardware. Cloud will never work for serious apps."
  3. AI now: "You'll always need to write code yourself. AI can't replace developers."

What each shift actually did: made development faster, enabled more ambitious projects, and allowed more people to build. Every time, the industry got bigger, not smaller.

Takeaway

Fear of AI and Python's dominance is a natural reaction to a changing era. But retreating into denial or hiding your tools doesn't help. Ruby isn't dying — it's going through another transformation.

In the next article, we'll move from psychology to hard business numbers and look at real AI startups built on Rails in 2026.

➡️ Read Part 2: AI Startups on Ruby on Rails: 4 Real Cases from 2026

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