BarCamp Milwaukee has officially kicked off. I missed this mornings festivitiesdue to a lazy Saturday morning and traffic on 294. I finally rolled in just before 1PM as the sessions were kicking off. Thankfully I made in time to see one of the sessions on my don’t miss list, Intro to Ruby on Rails. The session was presented by Jordan Arentsen, Justin Knoll andsomeonewho’s name I didn’t catch. I felt somewhat like a fish out of water as I sat there with my laptop, running Vista, emblazed with a Windows Logo puffy sticker and huge IE7 logo amongst the 10 or so Mac Books out of the 20 or so people attending the session. Still, that’s why I’m here. It give me opportunity to engage with the non-Microsoft crowd. Find out what’s going on in the world outside of the Redmond-walls.

I’m not sitting in the Drupal session. Drupal is a content management system built on PHP and Apache. I’ve heard of Drupal but never had a chance to dive into it. The overall theme that I’m gathering from both the Rails and Drupal sessions is there is a vibrant community behind these technologies, providing a vast library of pluggable modules to extend the capabilities of Rails and Drupal. ASP.NET has always had a vibrant community. Have you heard of .NET Nuke??? And with Live.com and Vista, there’s the Gadget Gallery.

Unfortunately, the Internet access is a little spotty. I’ll try to provide updates as the day progresses. If you’re here, stop the guy with the only laptop with an IE7 logo and say “Hi”.