Is RailsConf attendance declining enough to sunset the conference?
* Thinking they held all the cards, RailsConf uninvited DHH from the conference in 2022. They would never admit this, but the reasons were extremely petty, and all due to Ruby Central's (organizer of RailsConf and RubyConf) hyperpartisan nature. For example, DHH dared to suggest the audacious policy of "no politics at work" during a year where extreme politicization ran rampant. This may sound like an exaggeration, and I wish it were, but it's not.
* In 2023, the first Rails World was held in Amsterdam, organized by a new entity called the Rails Foundation (created by DHH and a number of other pioneers). It was a vastly better conference. By this time, RailsConf had all but eliminated their technical track in favor of "soft" subject matter. Amenities like coffee were only available during a tight ~30 minute window in the morning. The food was awful. And this despite tickets not being cheap. At Rails World by contrast, the talks were world class, the company/community excellent, and the snacks/food/amenities plentiful and top tier.
* Rails World was a smash success while RailsConf 2023 was unambiguously, not. One sold out in <10 minutes, the other was sparsely attended at best. Sponsors started moving.
* The same pattern repeated in 2024, except worse. While Rails World 2023 has been a pilot even with relatively few attendees, far more tickets were allowed for 2024, and even with the additional capacity, it still sold out in minutes. Not only was DHH keynoting, but all talks and the event itself were of the highest possible quality bar.
Meanwhile, Ruby Central was making some very poor financial decisions. For example, they reportedly gave up a ~half million dollar deposit on a Texas venue for 2023 so they could move the conference to San Diego. Once again, for political reasons (in their world view, Texas = evil, despite some the organizers themselves choosing to live there).
With the trend lines moving in all the wrong directions, there was no way that RailsConf was going to survive much longer anyway, so they decided to call it quits for 2025.
Obviously, RubyCentral had made their 2022 decision to uninvite DHH banking on him not deciding to start his own conference, but he did, and it turned out that he held all the cards, not them. There was a lot of unnecessary strife involved in the whole process, but in the end, the Rails community has landed in a much better place.