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Alan Ridlehoover shares his perspective as both a longtime Ruby developer and conference sponsor, reflecting on the evolving Ruby conference landscape and strategies for maintaining legacy Rails applications.

• Started with .NET before discovering Ruby and Rails 14 years ago
• Found learning Ruby and Rails simultaneously challenging, prompting his first RailsConf attendance in 2012
• Memorable talks at first RailsConf included Sandy Metz on testing and DHH on Russian doll caching
• Sponsors Ruby conferences primarily for recruiting, with Cisco Meraki managing over 4 million lines of Ruby code
• Sponsorship benefits include promoting company visibility and filling the recruiting pipeline
• Moving focus to regional conferences like Sin City Ruby as RailsConf comes to an end
• Advocates for conferences addressing legacy codebase challenges for applications predating standard best practices
• Suggests organizations with 15+ year-old Rails applications face unique scaling challenges not widely discussed
• Proposes potential gatherings around Ruby and AI applications
• Shares the insight that "trust is the antidote for fear" which helped David overcome anxiety at a conference

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