This post was originally published on the SmartLogic Blog.

As Hurricane Sandy pummels the East Coast, I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll still be able to get out of Baltimore to head to RubyConf in Denver. This is the first big conference I’ve been to that’s not RailsConf, and I’m looking forward to the new perspectives and knowledge I’ll gain — weather willing.

Here’s three things I’m particularly excited about, besides being dry:

Learning About the Wonderful World of Ruby from Matz

This one’s a no-brainer. I’m pumped to hear from the creator of Ruby, and maybe get a sneak peek of what’s coming with Ruby 2.0.

Focusing on Ruby in Sessions

When I went to RailsConf, it was all Rails sessions, with nothing focusing just on Ruby. I’m excited to focus exclusively on Ruby, with, of course, some Rails and other web stuff sprinkled in. There’s one about dRuby (distributed Ruby) that I’m particularly interested in.

Hearing about Scalable Web Architectures

There’s two sessions related to scalable web architectures that I’m looking forward to, because I’m working with apps using scalable web architectures every day. First, I hope Chris Hunt from Square, who’s covering Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) at Square, mentions rspec_api_documentation when he covers API documentation! But really, I’m also interested to hear his perspective on Square’s approach to SOA. Second, I am interested in learning more about Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) from Michael Bleigh, co-founder of Divshot. This isn’t directly related to what I’m doing at work right now, but I’m looking forward to bringing takeaways home to our team.

Are you headed to RubyConf? What are you looking forward to? Comment below, or tweet me @ericoestrich.