As a platinum sponsor of Rubynation this year we were lucky enough to get tickets for all of the ruby developers in the office, and the chance to hear our own CTO speak about rails engines (great job Pat).  As a convert from .net this was my first ruby specific convention.  Surprisingly (in a good way) the conference was noticeably heavy on technologies that were not ruby.  I went to talks on javascript, coffeescript, cojure, sass, sinatra and node.js. It's great to see how broad the interests are in the ruby community and how readily rubyists embrace and enthusiastically adapt new platforms, languages and technologies. These people don't get bogged down in the way things are but are always looking to the way things should be, an awesome change from my previous experiences creating applications.  Its great to know that when I go to talk with a group of Ruby developers there's going to be someone there who also has an interest in Haskell or Python and are just as interested at trying to implement those technologies as they are their language of choice.  This technology agnosticism is exactly the reason I switched to Ruby and open source in general and its great to see it happening in person. 

Day one was very focused on views and front end, pretty useful for most coders. Day two was a little more programming focused and had some great talks on databases, modularity, Rack, and the future of ruby itself.  Patrick's talk on mountable apps directly using browsercms as is examples ended up being really well attended.  Personally I was able to scratch down a bunch of notes on geospacial databases and some great resources on styling.  I didn't hit one talk that I didn't find some interesting substance to bookmark for later investigation, unlike SXSW where finding useful content was nearly impossible as Jeffff mentioned in an earlier Browsermedia post. The only downside was every hour I had to choose between two talks which was never an easy decision. Great job to all the speakers and hope to be there for next year's gathering!

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