Alex Bunardzic has a brilliant presentation about Ruby, where he explains why Ruby is about less code, more intention, and smarter servants. Was that totally redundant? Anyway, worth checking out:
Ruby, Rails and The Art of Software Development
And from RubyConf 2005, Akira Tanaka talks about open-uri, but also explains how APIs relate to Huffman coding, and what makes a great API:
Update: More from RubyConf 2005, courtesy of Nathaniel Talbott: