Have you ever been tempted to subclass a core class like Hash or String? Or have you read blog posts about why you shouldn't do that, but been left confused as to the specifics? As a maintainer of Hashie, a gem that commits this exact sin, I'm here to tell you why you want to reach for other tools instead of the subclass. In this talk, you'll hear stories from the trenches about what can go wrong when you subclass core classes. We'll dig into Ruby internals and you will leave with a few new tools for tracking down seemingly inexplicable performance issues and bugs in your applications.