The first ever DrupalCamp in UK was a great event!

I attended the Drupalcamp UK which took place over this weekend (13th & 14th of June, 2009) at BBC office in Manchester. I was only able to be there for the first day, but I enjoyed it so much!
Since Tim Millwood has provided an overview of this event in his blog post, I'll just omit that and write about some of the sessions, including my own.

Acquia - Who we are and what we do by Robert Douglas

Robert Douglas gave a presentation about Acquia and its services. To be honest, I was not too excited about this session as I assumed it would be commercial. But I was wrong and it turned out to be quite informative.
One of the most interesting topics in Robert's presentation was Acquia's partnership program. Borrowing Peter Brownell's (a.k.a the greenman) words to describe this: "drupal is growing up. the ecosystem is getting diverse and complex. acquia are doing good work to change the game. "

Drupal and Scrum by Mori Sugimoto

After having lunch, it was my turn - I gave a presentation on Scrum. Since it was after lunch and the room was warm and dark, I was quite certain a number of audience would fall asleep, but amazingly most of them seemed awake throughout the session. I took it as a good sign :)
The summary says it all, but Scrum is a great project management method and highly recommended. I was also planning to talk about when you *shouldn't* use Scrum, but this page was missing from the slide for some reason so I didn't get to cover that...
If you are interested, please have a look at the video - they will soon release all the sessions online.

Amazon EC2 by Peter Brownell

Peter Brownell has given a great presentation on how to take advantage of cloud with confidence, which he does as CTO of School of Everything. I wouldn't need to use cloud services such as Amazon EC2 for a while, or to be precise I don't have adequate skills to manage it yet. But there was a lot to learn from his practices (e.g. 'take notes on all changes you make to the server', 'know how to turn off and turn back on your server again - if you can't do this in confidence, you will be in trouble').

Pizza and chat

After all the sessions were over, we moved to a communal space, enjoyed 70 x 16" pizza (burp) and chat with fine UK Drupallers. A number of people came up to me and told me about their attempts, problems and success stories related to project management and Scrum. It was really good to learn the trend in problems we have and exchange useful information.

I took the same train back with Robert Castelo and Nicolas Borda. Since I missed Robert's presentations and he missed mine, we gave each other a presentation on the way back. A great a bonus!

Although I was only able to attended the first day of the event, I really enjoyed it and meeting everyone. Thank you Galooph, and everyone else who has helped for all the hard work to make the event happen! Thanks also to all the sponsors!