DrupalCamp day 1

A brief summary of some of the cool stuff I picked up from day 1 at DrupalCamp, interestingly most of it wasn't necessarily Drupal related ... day 2 and pics (featuring lots of ComputerMinds lanyards!) etc to follow ...

Hudson - a tool that automates builds, running of unit tests, running of jmeter performance tests and some other loveliness. Configure it to run periodically against your various SVN branches (works with other SCC systems (Git, CVS etc) too I believe). It even has front end with little weather style graphics, rainy if its broke, sunny if it's good, cloudy if not sure etc. Brilliant brilliant brilliant.

Drush is just brilliant - command line control over all kinds of stuff

Jmeter - We already use jmeter as our load tester of choice, but it was nice to see a bit of momentum behind it within the community. One day we might see modules coming with a set of jmeter "tests" that you can add to your jmeter testing suite. You can use Hudson to run your jmeter tests periodically too and it will store you jmeter results for each build (or tag or whatever) and you can view graphs of the change in your sites performance metrics (can you tell we are quite excited by Hudson!)

EC2 - heard some interesting things about the much hyped EC2 cloud service from Amazon, I think the most useful snippet of advice was that when it takes under 5 minutes to build a new server and get it online you don't necessarily need 2 of everything to deliver a "fully redundant" infrastructure. I think a lot of sites would accept the risk of 5 minutes downtime in exchange for halving their hosting costs

Lots of other good stuff going on too, and great to put faces to names and meet some of the other Drupal firms out there - see you all in Paris