Amazee Labs Austin goes to BADcamp

The Austin team made quite the splash at BADcamp this year. While it was my fourth BADcamp, for the rest of my team, it was their first time attending. Bonus: we were all speaking!

While grateful to the organizers for the opportunity, it put our little team in quite a state. Have you tried planning a sprint while 80% of your team is working on (or preoccupied thinking about) their slides? Fortunately, because of our Scrum structure, we were still able to adapt and deliver new work to happy clients. More on that below!

If you weren’t able to make it to sunny Berkeley this last weekend and think you missed out on all the great Drupal 8 sessions, you’re in luck. Thanks to the efforts of one stellar community member, 62 sessions were recorded and are now available online. Thanks Kevin!

For your viewing pleasure, the Amazee session video round-up:

Brandon kicked off Saturday sessions by tackling the complexities of the issue queue with The Little Issue That Could: Debugging and Contributing Patches on Drupal.org.  

Maria and Kathryn each led their own Drupal 8 talk. Maria - in her first camp session ever! - dug into the importance of knowing the different vocabulary and terms used in Drupal and in documentation for finding the right module or patch for your problems in Entities in Drupal 8: A Visual Overview. See if you can spot Matthew!

Kathryn reviewed the wonderful range of options available for developers in The Right Tool for the Job: Content Layout in Drupal 8. From Display Suite to Panels, Twig, and more, if you’re implementing stuff in Drupal 8, there’s so many goodies you owe yourself a listen.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I shared the Amazee story of converting three global offices to a single workflow process and how the Austin team has adopted, and adapted to Scrum at From Specification to Collaboration: One Agency’s Move to Scrum. There was a lot of great follow up and questions afterwards and I wish there was more time to get the BOF going I think we all needed.

One big happy Amazee family

Our remote team members, Johanna and Tyler from amazee.io, also joined us at BADcamp. It was a great impromptu Amazee team reunion. If we’re lucky, they’ll put in talks for next year. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the stuff these guys can do with DevOps. At least that’s what they tell me.

From left to right: Xavi Ros (honorary Amazee for the night), Kathryn McClintock, Stephanie El-Hajj, Tyler Ward, Maria Comas, Johanna Bergmann, and Brandon Williams

The friendliest bunch

It was a great few days of reuniting with friends and making new ones, something BADcamp always delivers on and is one of the reasons I keep going back.

From left to right: Kendall Totten, David Needham, John Nguyen, Stephanie El-Hajj, Chris Shattuck, and David Hunt 

Drupal community rocks! A humble, smart, and fun bunch. #BADCamp @chris_shattuck @KendallTotten pic.twitter.com/G4kXPgNgmQ

— Gilberto Medrano (@craftalia) October 24, 2016

Events like this make me love being part of this vibrant community and why I love spending my free time helping run local Drupal events of my own. Wait, what's that? A not-so-subtle mention that we've officially announced Texas Camp? I think it was. 

See you all next year!