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.