Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the fourth instalment of DrupalCamp London. It’s grown from humble beginnings in 2013 to one of Europe’s most important Drupal gatherings. This year, more than 500 Drupal fans met at London City University to attend the CxO Day on Friday and/or the community talks on Saturday and Sunday.

The CxO Day was a good opportunity for leaders of Drupal-based businesses to meet and exchange experiences. I especially enjoyed Vesa Palmu’s talk “Growing your agency: Organic, mergers and acquisitions” about the different ways to grow a business; lots of good advice!

Over the weekend, the wider Drupal community came together to listen to talks, work on Drupal 8 and enjoy the “Hallway Track” (consuming more than 100l of coffee and 400 pastries in the process). Clifton Cunningham’s enthusiastic keynote was a great start, although I’m afraid that his insights into building a big web application developed in-house doesn’t 100% apply to Drupal; for example, you can’t just split up Drupal into microservices maintained by separate teams. The following sessions held by community members were much more Drupal-centric, of course, and most of them touched on the upcoming Drupal release 8 in some fashion. Since I’m not a developer, I chose quite often to engage in hallway conversations instead of attending presentations. From the few I did attend, I took away these points:

• After learning about Bigpipe in “Drupal 8 with Cache and Bigpipe” and about AuthCache in “Don’t Varnish over the cracks”, I just can’t wait to see our customers flip the afterburner switch for their authenticated website visitors!
• It was interesting to see a more modular approach to what we do with our laptop script in “Provision your Mac with Ansible”.

In parallel to the sessions, some developers (a whopping 70% of which were female) gathered for the “Sprints”, group coding sessions that resulted in 2 solutions to Drupal 8 issues being “Reviewed & Tested by the Community”. Well done!

For me, the highlight of every DrupalCamp is always the people. I met lots of familiar faces and again managed to confuse a few new acquaintances with my peculiar mix of German and Irish accents. I thoroughly enjoyed DrupalCamp London and will make sure to register early as soon as DrupalCamp London 2017 is announced. Thanks and congratulations to the #dclondon team for another great Drupal community event!