Jan's wroclove.rb 2022 lightning talk on the state of the art for configuration in Ruby and Rails: rails credentials, Rails.application.config, config_for for YAML files, environment variables, and libraries like Figaro and dotenv. Criticisms: code has to know where its config lives (infrastructure leaks into the codebase); defaults and overrides are hard; it's hard to scope defaults to development only; lack of types/validation means the app explodes in production; and environment-variable hell. Recommends watching a presentation on Palkan's anyway_config, which inverts the approach — you declare a configuration class and the library tries registered loaders (env, YAML by convention, etc.) to populate it. Jan likes the concept but dislikes the syntax, so he built 'configuration again', a library with the same idea and a dry-struct-like syntax; supports questions, pluggable loaders (Vault, AWS, S3, etc.). Still early development but available on GitHub.