Yet another BarCamp in Waterloo came and went. Phun. Saturday we talked about Windows 7, what’s the best platform for mobile development, and a wide ranging debate on programming languages. Learned more about Haskell. A little bit. Was possibly only person to have heard of Scala or Groovy. Wild. Also there were other discussions too, including a nice chat I had with Ali A. (missed a presentation for that one).

Myself and Jesse Rodgers run BarCampWaterloo totally on a voluntary basis, we don’t get any money, and the sponsors pay directly for whatever they are buying for us. In this case, Gary Will’s WatStart bought lunch (pizza – good quality too). Waterloo Accelerator Centre donated the space! And, Tech Capital VC bought us snacks and drinks (non-alcoholic) in a wide variety of persuasions.

What I love about BarCamp is that it’s totally in the hands of the people that show up. Jesse & I and the sponsors merely provide a forum and a teensy tiny bit of structure, everything else is in the hands of the participants. You arrive, if you feel like talking about something, showing something, or just raising a discussion topic (e.g. programming languages) you just write it on the whiteboard at any time. It’s so freeing and wonderful.

As for who was there, we went around the room and I didn’t have paper to take notes with. There was the usual ~ 30 people, including a few peeps from AideRSS (current darling of waterloo tech startups :-), other startups such as FossFactory (cool idea, and we talked about how they will make the business model work a bit), Well.ca, CastRoller, and a couple others I missed.

In addition one of the students from VeloCity, UW’s experiment in high-tech oriented student residence (or else, a new metropolis for bicycle fanatics). A smart and lucky fellow. And other students, professionals at larger firms, and other authentic techies. And we had in the audience both an eeePC and the latest macbook pro, made from a single solid block of diamond.

And if all of that sounds like fun, make sure to join our BarCampWaterloo FB group to find out about the next one (or if you hate Facebook, look at the wiki page).