What happens to Ruby when Rails dies? Ruby rode the Rails rocketship to worldwide renown. While a handful of developers were writing Ruby code before Rails came along, many (if not most) of us owe Rails a debt of gratitude for taking Ruby mainstream, thus allowing us to make a living writing code in a language we love. However, the application design preferences expressed by Rails are falling out of favor. Our apps have more complex domain logic that becomes burdensome to manage by following "The Rails Way." Is that it, then? Does transitioning from Rails mean leaving Ruby behind? WHY? If we're being honest, I think it's fair to say that all of us have thought about this at one point in the past year or two, or maybe before. Whether while we're cursing the mess we got ourselves into with ActiveRecord callback spaghetti or complicated modeling brought on by the predisposition to make everything in app/models a subclass of ActveRecord::Base, we think "this just isn't fun anymore. What happened to the programmer happiness I felt when things were simpler?" But I strongly believe that even in a world where it's said that every programming language needs a "concurrency story" and functional programming is on the rise, there's room for Ruby. It's certainly not a language I want to stop writing any time soon, even if only as part of a larger whole. There's no easy answer to the question posed at the start of the talk description, so don't watch this talk expecting to hear one. Instead, expect to be prompted to think critically about the way you view yourself as a programmer, and what that means for your life and career.