Paraxial.io at Rails World 2024

Paraxial.io is a security company building a product targeted at developers. Our goal is to make securing your application as painless as possible. Naturally, building a good product requires connecting with users. Rails World 2024 was held in Toronto last week, and Paraxial.io was proud to sponsor the conference.

David’s keynote is up on YouTube and absolutely worth watching. A major theme in the presentation is that Rails as a project is intended to help developers start their web application, build features, and accomplish work. Rails is free, used by everyone from Fortune 500 companies to independent freelancers. No vendor lock-in, you have the freedom to use Rails with any hosting environment, from bare metal server to cloud provider, and the team has built some incredible tooling to support that goal.

For Rails developers, Paraxial.io exists to help prevent data breaches due to security issues. On a personal level, I have always disliked when cyber security companies announce support for a technology by over-hyping vulnerabilities and criticizing the free project their revenue depends on. Rails is a fantastic framework, it encourages developers to write secure code, free of SQL injection and XSS flaws, through sane guardrails and patterns. Rails has been used in contexts where security is critical, from finance to medicine, for over a decade.

Why should a developer use Paraxial.io? Security is a large and complicated subject, sometimes determining where to start is difficult. If your goal is to prevent your Rails application from being hacked, reading a book on how TLS works won’t help much, because most data breaches occur when different areas of security are neglected: running outdated gems, pushing insecure code into production, and lack of protection against bot attacks. These are a few of the scenarios that Paraxial.io helps you prepare for and mitigate, like a fire extinguisher for your project. Paraxial.io also keeps records of the work performed, meaning you get real security for your application, and the data necessary to pass compliance audits.

At this year’s Rails World there was incredible interest at the Paraxial.io booth. The statement “Developers don’t care about security” is false, and the huge number of demo requests we saw at Rails World is proof of this. In my experience most security companies do not care about developers. The large firms are chasing executives and budgets, the developer experience of their products is an afterthought. One visitor to the Paraxial.io booth described a multi-billion-dollar security product as some of the worst software he was ever forced to use, and wished us well on our journey. Rails World gave us a level of insight and communication with developers that does not happen remotely.

If you are on the fence about attending or sponsoring Rails World, you should absolutely do it. The sessions will be published online, but it is impossible to capture the real meaning of the conference without attending in person. The organizers put in so much work to make the experience worthwhile for attendees, it all paid off last week. I am grateful Paraxial.io was able to contribute as a sponsor, and for everyone who made Rails World possible. Thank you!

Paraxial.io stops data breaches by helping developers ship secure applications. Get a demo or start for free.