I attended the first BarCamp Milwaukee yesterday, and I think I had the same reaction as many people walking in there: "I can't believe this tech community exists in Milwaukee", which is just silly. I know some people came from other cities and even states, but I think that it speaks to the weird mismatch between perception and reality in terms of the tech community here. I'm hoping that one thing that can come out of this is an ongoing set of meet-ups, possibly continuing at Bucketworks, rather than having this one-time (although fabulous) event, to keep and build momentum.

I attended 2 sessions and led a third. The first session, about Ruby on Rails was great for me (I was the guy asking way too many questions) since it was something that I'd heard a ton of great things about but hadn't had time to really investigate. The second session was about gadgets, and I really liked the discussion regarding the open-source vs. proprietary software model in the work of small devices, as well as looking at why certain devices failed or succeeded. I led a session about Linux in everyday devices, focusing on how things become hackable with Linux inside, and whether that is a good or bad thing for consumers and for businesses. It was actually an interesting follow on to the discussion that started in the Gadgets session.

Anyway, kudos to the organizer and I hope this is the start of something bigger here in Milwaukee.