The most interesting thing I saw yesterday was John Lam and Jimmy Schementi’s presentation on IronRuby. They’ve got Ruby running on the client in Silverlight - they’re calling the combination Silverline. Assuming that it’s going to work just fine in Moonlight, this is hot - no more switching back and forth between Ruby and Javascript.
Avi Bryant’s work on Ruby with the GemStone VM was also interesting. If the performance numbers GemStone talked about turn out to be true in the final version, this could be a very fast Ruby. They’ve got some interesting technology around distributed objects (think of a cluster of machines as being a single, shared object space, with transactions on changes to your objects), but it’s a whole different way of looking at the world. Worth watching. Talking to some of their people at their party, some of them get that moving to an open source model is going to be a requirement for them to be taken seriously - hopefully they’ll solve their issues of how to change their business model.
The (paper) message boards downstairs are covered with companies looking for Ruby people. It’s a great time to be looking for work. My favorite was the one from square circle triangle - it’s a faux ticket to Australia.