Episode 551: Practical Hotwire with Jeremy Smith

Jeremy Smith returns to the podcast ahead of Rails World to talk about his upcoming presentation, Practical Hotwire: Turbo and Stimulus on the Ground.

Jeremy shares how years of working with Hotwire in real Rails applications led him to identify a dozen recurring problems and pitfalls involving Stimulus, Turbo Drive, Turbo Frames, and Turbo Streams. He also walks through the surprisingly extensive process of turning those lessons into a 30-minute conference talk, including building a dedicated demo application, creating before-and-after examples, recording screencasts, researching edge cases, and using AI tools to help organize and refine the material.

They also discuss Jeremy’s decision to structure the talk around a Hot Ones-style progression of increasingly spicy Hotwire problems, the difficulty of deciding what to cut from an overstuffed technical presentation, and what actually makes a conference talk useful and memorable.

Finally, Jeremy previews one of the strongest opinions in the talk: that developers should often prefer Turbo Streams over Turbo Frames. He explains how Frames can introduce indirection and limitations as applications grow, why Streams can offer a more flexible approach, and how different Rails teams can arrive at very different—but equally valid—ways of using Hotwire in production.

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