I did the round-trip from the land of cows to Raleigh to attend the Raleigh RubyCamp over the weekend.

I think I heard about 80 folks showed up, but I'm not certain on that.

Mark (root@37s) and James did a very nice job of organizing it. They provided good coffee and donuts to start the morning right. Krispy Kreme is never a bad idea.

We gathered, and a handful of folks presented introductions about what they wanted to do a session on. We then figured out the slots, and got started.

Brenton Leanhardt talked about Genome and Cobbler, two emerging technologies at Red Hat. Cobbler helps to stitch together distributions, Kickstarts and repositories, while Genome helps manage the inventory of virtualization hardware and the guest instances running on them.

His use-case for the technologies is the fact that we've got Xen hosts running on machines scattered under desks and in closets, which have been donated to a virtual pool.

Where did you launch that instance last month? Where can you launch a new instance today? Genome helps answer those questions. Many of the Genome bits are Camping apps.

I presented my short slide-deck about JBoss-Rails.

Mark Imbriaco led an open discussion about Rails deployments. It ended up mostly being us asking how 37signals did things. He described their hosting environment, their occasional frustrations with Mongrel, along with some stories about running migrations against a 100gig database.

Sean Cribbs talked about his experience in joining and then leading open-source projects, particularly Radiant CMS. He discussed breaking up the core into many plugins and modules, and the uptick in community participation that followed.

Overall it was a great weekend, and I even got some nice t-shirts out of it. Not bad.

Oh, fortuna!

I'm rejoining the Red Hat/JBoss mothership, doing rubyish things, and what do you know, but there's a RubyCamp at the RHT HQ in Raleigh on October 18th.

37signals and Ruby Row are sponsoring the event.

Space is limited to 200, but at the time of this posting only 57 have signed up. It's an unconference, so bring your own good ideas, and you can lead a session