When Joe Masilotti attended RailsConf 2025 in July, he noticed something small but interesting: the QR codes on everyone’s badges. Scanning one pulled up a contact card with the person's phone number and email address. While useful, this felt a little too personal for someone you might have met less than five minutes prior.

But it gave Joe an idea.

What if there was a simpler, more intentional way for conference attendees to share the information they want and, in turn, more easily remember who they connected with?

Less than a month later, this idea became the Ruby Friends app.

Building With Hotwire Native

Joe’s journey with Rails started over ten years ago. At the time, he was an iOS developer at a consulting agency and got thrown into a Rails project without any prior experience. Over time, he shifted more toward Rails, but he never lost his mobile background.

With Ruby Friends, he saw a chance to bring both worlds together. He built the app with Hotwire Native, which allowed him to launch it across web, iOS, and Android in under a month, with feature parity on all three.

“This is a way for me to use my iOS, Android knowledge, and Rails experience together,” Joe said in a video interview with Ruby Central. “It’s been really fun for those worlds to collide.”

Future Plans

Ruby Friends started as a simple website where Rubyists could create a profile with their photo, a short bio, and links to the platforms where they actually want to connect, like GitHub, Twitter, or Bluesky.

However, Joe is building quickly and hopes to experiment with NFC integrations and develop more features to make conference networking feel more natural and stay connected with your Ruby friends.

While this idea could work for any developer community, Joe has no plans to move the app beyond Ruby in the foreseeable future (if ever). “By starting with Ruby, I can tap into the network I already know, and I can actually use the app myself,” he shares.

Joe will be a keynote speaker at Rails World 2025 in Amsterdam next month, where he is excited to use Ruby Friends and get user feedback from other attendees.

Watch the Interview

We sat down with Joe to discuss how he built Ruby Friends so quickly, how the app can improve networking in the Ruby ecosystem, and potential features, business, and collaboration ideas.

Watch here: