Rails World 2025: DHH Brings Goodies, Omarchy Magic and Zero BS

By Deepan Kumar

Amsterdam, September 2025. Rails World was buzzing. Developers packed into the venue like Rails gems in a Gemfile, coffee flowing strong enough to revive dead dependencies.

Then DHH hit the stage. Calm, cheeky, and carrying a bag full of surprises. Rails 8.1 wasn’t just an update. It felt like a care package.

Here’s the scoop.

DHH — Opening keynote — Rails World 2025

Rails 8.1 Goodies 🎁

Active Job Continuations
Background jobs can now pause, breathe, and pick up where they left off. Less crash and burn, more Netflix “continue watching” energy.

Markdown Rendering
Rails now speaks Markdown natively. AI loves it. Humans love it. Your docs, comments and notes stay clean without duct-taping extra gems.

Lexxy for Action Text
Meet Lexxy, the smarter parser for Action Text. It doesn’t just keep your content structured. It actually highlights language syntax. Drop in a code snippet and it looks gorgeous instead of like a sad wall of plain text.

Hotwire and Native Wins 🚀

Turbo Offline
Your app won’t collapse when Wi-Fi ghosts you. Think airplane mode. Imagine standing at the gate with your boarding pass but the internet is dead. Turbo Offline saves the day.

Action Push Native
Push notifications sent straight from Rails into your mobile app. Less plumbing, more “it just works”.

Web Push
Browsers want some love too. Rails now taps your shoulder right in the browser.

Faster Dev Loops 🔄

Local CI DSL
Simulate pipelines right on your machine. No more waiting for cloud CI to finish its coffee.

Extra Candy ✨

System tests toned down: They’re lighter now, less noisy and you only use them where they actually make sense. Nobody’s shedding tears for the old auto-generated ones.
Beamer: SQLite replication. Yes, SQLite is suddenly multiplayer.
Kamal Geo Proxy: Deploy closer to your users with geo-distribution baked in.

Free Campfire 🔥

Remember Campfire? The Basecamp chat app from way back. It’s now free. Simple. Clean. No clutter. It feels like Slack if Slack went on a diet and stopped shouting about integrations.

The Omarchy Surprise

Just when everyone thought the surprises were over, DHH pulled out Omarchy. His hyper-opinionated Linux setup. Think Arch Linux combined with Hyprland, polished and preconfigured so it just works.

No endless tinkering. No “how do I set up my dev environment again”. Omarchy is like Rails itself: batteries included, drama excluded.

It was a curveball in a Rails keynote, but classic DHH. Why stop at improving frameworks when you can also make developers’ daily lives smoother?

The Vibe

This keynote wasn’t just feature drops. It was DHH saying loud and clear: Rails is not old. It’s evolving, it’s fun and it’s giving you tools that just make sense. Watch the complete talk here

TLDR: Why Rails 8.1 (with Omarchy) Rocks

Resumable jobs, Markdown, Lexxy syntax highlighting.

Turbo Offline, Action Push and Web Push.

Local CI DSL and frame budgets for faster dev joy.

Campfire is free again.

Omarchy, because even your OS deserves Rails-level polish.

Final Take

Rails 8.1 is a flex. It’s Rails saying: stop overcomplicating life in JS-land when you could be building faster, smoother and saner here.

And if Omarchy becomes the dev OS people didn’t know they needed, we might just look back at this keynote as a historic moment for how we code and how we work.