Ruby Fringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture.
I think that some of the coolest things happening nowadays in Ruby are outside of Rails. The more I work with Rails, the more I see its limitations, it just wasn't that well thought out before it was widely adopted. There is something to be said for a framework that just organically builds without having all the hype.
Still though, I do all my websites in Rails, and for a certain kind of website, it's pretty awesome and super fast to develop something that works.
