Pragmatic Studio does it again, putting on another top notch event: Rails Edge Reston. I was fortunate enough to attend and pick up a few more gems of Ruby wisdom. Some of the highlights:

• Met William Groppe (Mr. Ruby Brain) in person, after collaborting online on solrb for a little while. Putting a face and a handshake to a virtual collaborator is important.
• Also met two of edsu's co-workers. Nice to see so much Ruby library work. Times they are a changin'.
• Metaprogramming was the very first session. As it should be.
• Stuart Halloway did a solrb code review and his changes will be reflected in future commits. Speaking of Stu, he and his evil twin, Justin Gehtland, have produced a spectacular enhancement to Rails with Streamlined, a way to elegantly declare a user interface to a relational database. After seeing Streamlined again in more detail, I'm convinced that Flare is destined to be Streamlined Solr. Justin and Stu - thanks for your inspirations, in more ways than one.
• Got to see many of my good friends and heros again, including Mike, Dave, Chad, Jim, Duncan, Stu, and Justin. I met Bruce Williams and Marcel Molina Jr. for the first time. All presentations were well done, and informative to even seasoned Rails developers.
• I briefly presented Collex/Flare/solrb during Thursday nights "Open VGA" sessions, though a bit too frantically. My presenting chops were a bit rusty, and doing a 7 minute presentation illuminated the need to get a more succinct and distilled elevator pitch for Solr Flare. code4lib conference is the next Solr flare explosion for me.

Definitely consider making it to future Pragmatic Studio events. There are a couple of upcoming ones: Ruby on Rails Training (Bellevue, WA, Feb. 12-14), Advanced Rails Training (Chicago, March 12-14). If an event of interest is sold out, don't despair; sign up for the waiting list.