I enjoyed RubyNation this year. The small size makes it easier to get to know both local developers and bigger names in the Ruby community.

A highlight for me was @geemus’s talk on Fog, a high level API for deploying to a good number of cloud services like Amazon and Rackspace. I’m super late to the cloud game, but it seems we could take some pain out of managing our QA and stage environments at Razoo by deploying them to the cloud. Phrases like “deploying to the cloud” are grinding my nerves though.

Another highlight was the Ruby for Kids session. 10 kids joined volunteers from the conference, including yours truly, to hack on a game they’ve been building with gosu. These kids are 10 to 14 years old and using Macs, TextMate, Terminal, Git, and Ruby! If we can avoid destroying the planet, the future is certainly bright.

As with every conference, I was inspired by the creative energy. I’m going to update my illustrious croc gem, which is useless now that RVM is standard operating procedure.