Ever wanted to build a plugin for Rails to add new features? Rails plugins allow you to hook into the lifecycle of a Rails application to add routes, configuration, migrations, models, controllers, views and more. In this talk, we'll learn how to do this by looking at some examples Rails gems to see how they work.

The goal of this talk is to provide a realistic look at building Railties or Engines to extend Rails apps.

The target audience is anyone who wants to either create a Rails plugin or contribute to one. Lots of gems are looking for new maintainers and hopefully this can encourage people to help maintain more projects.