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Blogging since 2008 until 2010

UK Scale Camp

On Friday (The 4th of December 2009), my boss and I went to the first UK Scale Camp - organised by Michael Brunton-Spall.

Done as a BarCamp-style un-conference; the talks were provided not by pre-decided speakers, but by the attendees themselves. I was very impressed with the event on a whole. We were well looked after; the sponsors provided breakfast, lunch and plently of beer for the evening and everyone there was very polite and friendly. Of course, the talks were the main thing - and there was a lot to choose from. The talks went up onto the wall in post-it note form and were copied to a Google Speadsheet for easy viewing.

There were many highlights to the day. The introductions session was a great idea and turned out people from The Guardian (of course), The BBC, Last.fm, Microsoft, Wikia and many others. The talks were awesome and the speakers very professional. I especially enjoyed the talk from two guys from Media Molecule on the problems they faced scaling the web services associated with Little Big Planet; they were both very entertaining and knowledgeable. The group discussion on how to scale activity feeds was also most enlightening; I've got lots of notes to be trawling through from that. And 'Ed' did a great job of explaining how his small team had managed with their relitively high work-loads. To be honest, there was so much of interest to me that I would have been happy to pay for a single track conference over three or four days with the same content.

I'm not really any good at this non-technical writing (not to say I'm good at the technical writing either), so I shall leave it there. I would, however, like to say a big thank you to Mr Michael Brunton-Spall for organising it all; all the other attendees for being awesome and friendly; and, as my evening was spent getting really rather drunk and playing pool with fellows from Last.fm and Microsoft, the sponsors for buying the breakfast, lunch and beer. Hats off to you all.

First posted: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:37:48 +0000