Brussels Developer Camp

It's 19.50, I'm in the train from Brussels to home, on my way back from the CiviCRM developer camp. Erik Brouwer has just left the train, Eagles on the headphone and there's a multicolored display of non-identifiable ligths thru the window.....just another 90 minutes and I will be on the couch with a glass of red, cats purring on my lap and telling Floor all about the two days. So what was it like, this developer camp? Well, perhaps I should mention first that it was very useful, that I have learned a lot about API's, hooks, ACL and localization that would have taken me days to figure out without the developer camp! In some cases the theoretical sessions were too fast for me, and I sometimes struggled to keep up. But once we got to the hands-on sessions I caught up and it was a great boost to be able to acutally do something with various ways of using API's in an hour. The whole 2 days were a very worthwile experience and I will be back for more on the next one that is within travelling distance. It was also very nice to meet other CiviCRM developers, users and addicts. It was interesting to share stories, hear what kind of challenges others had, see what cool solutions were created and have a face to remember with some names already familiar from the forum. I enjoyed the showcases that the different people presented, cool stuff!!! The live experience of this community of people all putting in their individual effort in the process of creating something together gave me a lot of energy. To all participants: thank you for a positive experience! To all would-be participants: do join us the next time, it is worth your while.

Comments

It really was an excellent experience, I have been to many similar seminars (although not in the open source community) and this was by far the best. Informative, motivational and well organized

thanks Michal,Piotr, Michael and Xavier and all the participants - our organization democratsabroad.org will benefit enormously from this camp

The training was wonderful, thank you everybody !

Hey Erik,

Thanks for the blog post - really useful feedback. Yes, was great to meet you all - look out for another European CiviCRM camp in the UK this autumn!

I've written a forum post here (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,12207.0.html
) would be great to hear people's thoughts on the community session and the civicrm groups prototype there there as we are going to go live soon.

Finally, a special thanks to Xavier and Tamsin at Tech to the People for being such excellent hosts, and to Xavier for guiding us to expertly through Brussel's often confusing public transport system :)

Hey sorry for posting so late here, I have a massive email catchup problem that I'm whittling down :)

The camp was AWESOME, one of the best if not the best training experience I've ever gone through actually ! I was a member of a group of three volunteers from the Democrats Abroad IT Team and we felt extremely welcome by the community members and are eager to participate more. I have actually undertaken some upgrade tasks immediately after the camp that have proven to be a great way to jump in. The camp itself was awesome in its tailoring to our on the spot requests for information and in the time management that made sure we covered everything we had asked for through simultaneous break out sessions.

Looking forward to continued interaction with the Civi community !