Impressions from DrupalCamp North 2015

Come for the software, stay for the community - this past weekend, we attended DrupalCamp North, a small but very well organized conference with various presentations, a business track & Drupal 8 sprints. There's already a great summary of the camp on the Imagine Creativity blog, that gives a great overview of the happenings around DrupalCamp North. Here are a few of my Camp impressions that I would like to highlight:

The conference took place in the town of Sunderland, which has less than 200 000 inhabitants and is just an hours Metro ride from Newcastle. 

After arriving Thursday afternoon, I joined a group of enthusiastic sprinters working on getting Drupal 8 ready, as well as trained new contributors to get their first patches commited to core.

One of the sessions, I was most interested in, was the keynote: "Talk is silver, code is gold? Contribution beyond source code in Drupal" by David Rozas from Spain. He did a great scientific analysis of the inner workings of the Drupal community. This session has been picked as one of the community keynotes for DrupalCon Barcelona, coming up in September. 

Working together, learning from each other and mentoring new contributors, is one of the main reasons why many developers go and attend small scale Drupal events, like this one. The sprint rooms had a great vibe and a mix of experienced contributors, as well as newcomers who got their feet wet working on Drupal 8 tasks.

We have seen an improvement and streamlining of our mentoring processes over the recent years. The privilege of getting a personal introduction from a regular core contributor can mean a lot to someone who is new to the project. These passionate individuals do a great job at training new talents. For more info visit the mentoring group or find sprints on drupical.com. 

Working hard on tickets in the issue queue, listening to presentations and networking in the conference hall easily made for a packed day. We then concluded those with even more discussions and social activities in the afternoon.

The local organizers then took us for a great dinner in Newcastle. 

Apart from the conference, there were also two nice sightseeing opportunities. I was especially excited to see the Gateshead Millenium "tilt bridge".

The Sunderland International Airshow fortunately took place on the same weekend, allowing Camp attendees to see some spectacular maneuvers in the sky. Well done to the DrupalCamp North organizing team! Rumour has it that there will be another camp in the north of England next year...