I attended the Chicago Ruby Hack Night meetup last tuesday. The theme was IronMQ, a message queue web service. You can post/get/delete messages through a set of super simple HTTP endpoints, and they handle the tricky (or at least boring) stuff like storage, retries, etc.
Honestly, I almost didn’t go. I know that exposure to new technologies is good for me, but usually I have a hard time justifying messing around with something that doesn’t relate to a bigger project (be it professional or personal).