Mountain Camp Davos and DrupalCamp London — It’s a wrap!

The past few weeks have been busy. Very busy! First there was Mountain Camp, situated in the snowy white scenery of Davos, in Switzerland. Around 140 Drupalistas from Switzerland and abroad gathered for the camp’s inaugural event.

Michael Schmid led a four hour workshop on Docker and the principles around it.

I spoke on rethinking infrastructure, a topic of great interest to myself, as we are currently refactoring parts of amazee.io to make better use of microservices. The topic evolved when I stopped to think of how systems have evolved from when I initially started building systems — because everything was quite different back-in-the-day™. You can find presentation resources and the slides of my talk over on my blog.

We had a booth at the camp where we showcased the amazee.io cluster which we rebuilt using Raspberry Pi’s as a base. This method makes it easier to explain our cluster and illustrates our ability to power a cluster in every datacenter pretty well.

Fast forward to a few days later… I’m sitting in the train to London via Paris to attend DrupalCamp London. I’ve been to London already but not yet attended their DrupalCamp. Joining me at this camp is Johanna Bergmann, fresh from keynoting DrupalCamp Northern Lights in Iceland. As our team is fully remote, the only times we get to meet up in person is at Camps!

Initially, I planned to attend at least a few sessions, but in the end I just made it to Danese Cooper’s closing session. Instead, I was busy talking about amazee.io, demoing the Raspberry Pi showcase of our processes, and talking tech in the halls.

Danese talked about the history of open source projects and how newcomers to open source sometimes don’t know the history of the project. This sometimes makes it hard for newbies to get started. Her talk was followed by a great moderated discussion on community issues. Danese started with a few slides with the faces of founders of popular open source projects, which the audience had to call out, if they knew. We failed miserably. Even veterans of the open source community didn’t know the history of most projects.

All in all, I had great discussions with a lot of people from the community, where we discussed how we could make Drupal development better and easier for newcomers. I was also able to talk to current and potential clients about their development pain points and how amazee.io could ease that pain. A quote I remember from DevOpsDays Capetown, “Sending an engineer into the field talking to people how they use your product is much more valuable than a month of desk-research.”

We see a lot of different approaches to how people build Drupal sites, which helps us making our product even better. The more we can customize to fit our client’s processes, the more time they can spend on developing rather than running after issues.

From Mountain Camp in its first year to DrupalCamp London in it’s fifth, I want to thank the organizers for the countless hours and dedication spent making these events happen.