Highlights

• Meeting other Ruby/Rails enthusiasts from all over. (Well, all over the US, at least).
• Joel Spolsky's opening keynote was hilarious (in a good way). Some other commentators found it low on content, but I thought it had a strong message: usability matters!
• Seeing Kent Beck present was fantastic. He had the audience hanging on his every word, as he described how "anything he'd done had taken 20 years to have an impact".
• Ezra's talk on Vertebra, his XMPP-based "cloud control" project, was fascinating. What a great abuse of technology!
• The JRuby and Rubinius teams are co-operating closely, in a spirit of friendly, respectful rivalry. Particularly notable is their effort to collaborate (with each other, and Matz) on a rigourous set of executable specs for Ruby language.
• The upcoming version of Phusion Passenger will support not only Rails applications, but also Rack (and therefore Merb, Sinatra, Camping), and (get this) WSGI (and therefore a bunch of Python frameworks, including Django)!
• There are increasingly varied options for deploying Rails apps, including the traditional {Apache,nginx}+{mongrel,thin}, JRuby WARs in a servlet container, Passenger, and the Amazon-EC2-based services like RightScale and Heroku. Heroku's deployment model is pretty damn clever: just "git push".

Regrets

With 4 streams going on, the talks I got to were naturally out-numbered by those I missed. Some of the ones I really wish I'd seen include:

• MagLev: Gemstone's Ruby implementation-in-progress, based on their Smalltalk VM
• Scott Chacon on "Using Git" (apparently he went into mind-bending detail of the Git internals)
• Justin Gehtland's "Small Things, Loosely Joined, and Written Fast"