Tonight I went to the starting session of BarCampBoulder. It is pretty cool so far — I met a bunch of interesting people, the schedule for tomorrow looks fun, etc. Most of the folks attending seem to be doing web development of one kind or another; lots of RoR hackers around. So, considering that my one attempt at using a CMS was a disaster, and I wrote my first javascript program a week ago, I think I’ll be learning a lot…

BarCamp, for those who don’t know (like me, a couple weeks ago), is an “unconference”. People get together in a room and decide what the conference topics will be. Everybody participates.

So, it is sort of like FOSDEM, only even more free-form, and, at least here in Boulder, quite a bit smaller.

For me it seems ideal. One problem I’ve had working at home is that I rarely talk to people who generally share my interests. The local LUG is mostly sysadmins — not really my thing. the Denver JUG is pretty good, but somehow I never quite remember to look at the dates and drive to Denver. So, just meeting developers who even vaguely share my interests is pretty great.