Every year the Drupal community meet up at various conferences and more localised camps. This weekend we attended one of the largest camps in the country - DrupalCamp London in order to connect with our peers and learn about the latest developments within the software and the community. The event is comprised of a CXO business day which Barry and Julia attended and then two days of training sessions, discussions and sprints which I then joined them for.
The CXO Day
Julia and Barry took part in the first day of the conference which was the CxO day.
Discussions and talks took place covering topics around the business of creating and servicing Drupal sites, from recruitment and sales through to the psychology, motivation and benefits behind choosing open source software.
Julia was asked to present the Sales discussion findings and was also asked to appear in a promo film for Drupal Camp London 2017... so watch this space!
The Weekend Sessions
As always the quality of the keynotes and talks we attended were outstanding.
Particular highlights for me were a philosophical session on the potential future gentrification of Drupal (something I've never even thought about), an in depth review of the paragraphs module for Drupal 8, a review of when Drupal 8 is the right tool to use with a variety of examples and an in depth look under the hood of the new Drupal 8 theming system.
There were also some great talks around agile project management too. I will endeavour to return to this article and link to these talks as and when they become available online, as at the time of writing they are not available.
The Social on Saturday Night
The social nights (Friday and Saturday) took place at the Blacksmith and Toffeemaker pub and were a great chance to catch up with other members of the community over a pint and some great burgers! We really loved the pub and recommend you check it out if you're ever in the area.
This year I met my drupalganger Bart Feenstra from Druid over in the Netherlands. Despite my protesting that having hair, a beard and glasses doesn't make us twins, the rest of the community seemed to think it was good enough so who am I to argue?!
We'll let you judge for yourselves whether we are indeed twin strangers or just two blokes with similar hairstyles!
As always the socials continued in to the early hours and were great fun to attend. It always surprises me that the Drupal community can thrive on so few hours of sleep!
And next...
Next year it will be same time, same place I am sure for DrupalCamp London which grows in popularity every year.
Looking forward the community has a variety of events coming up including DrupalCon New Orleans and DrupalCon Dublin, as well as further southern UK camps in Brighton and Bristol.
We'd love to attend them all but we'll see how swamped with exciting Drupal 8 projects we are before we commit to anything!!
Thanks again to all of the organisers, speakers, volunteers and attendees and all the great people we got to know during the weekend. We had a great time. See you at other events very soon!
