Wunder Takeaways from Drupal Mountain Camp

Early Thursday morning on the 7th of March when us three Wunderers Mario, David and I got on a plane from Helsinki to Zurich, Switzerland to attend Drupal Mountain Campopens-in-a-new-tab in Davos with our CTO Florian. We all had earlier applied to present and share our skills in this event and luckily we all got accepted. The camp promised to offer a lot of snow, warm winter coats, fondue and of course interesting keynotes and sessions about modern open source technologies. We met Florian after landing and together we took a train from Zurich to Davos. What beautiful scenery we saw on our way to the Alps. At first, we travelled along by charming lakes. Then the route took us through a winding path through the Alpine snowy forests higher up to the mountains through little picturesque towns. After about 2,5 h we arrived in Davos. A small Alpine town, famous for its ski resorts, international winter sports events and hosting for World Economic Forum (WEF).

Sharing the knowledge with the Drupal community

Soon after arriving and getting settled, Mario and David had their workshop: Drupal and Gatsby, the great workflowopens-in-a-new-tab. The DrupalCamp was held at the Davos Congress, the same venue as WEF. Although sessions were not organised in the main stage, it was quite exciting. Later on, in the evening, the Camp had a social activity Apéro to socialize with other camp attendees with snacks and drinks.

Next morning we headed back to the event. Today there were lots of sessions and Florian had a presentation about Cloud-native infrastructures and Drupalopens-in-a-new-tab. My speech was about project management and teamwork called 7 advice to make digital projects successfulopens-in-a-new-tab. It was based on my own experiences and learnings in project work and also partly on findings of our Wunder Delivery Model process. I talked about things that are useful in a project and teamwork and how we all can make the project successful. Before my speech, we had a nice icebreaker to discover new people from the community. We rotated and got to talk with different people to find out where they are from and what do they do, etc. After this was time for my speech. The room started to fill up. There weren’t many non-technical talks at the conference, so it was nice to see that also these type of topics raised interest. The main points of my speech were the following:

1. Get organised!
2. Plan well
3. Time management
4. Show appreciation
5. Give feedback…nicely!
6. Ask help
7. Communication and teamwork

I talked about each point and also mentioned our WunderHugs system, which raised many questions from the audience. Afterwards, I demonstrated it how it actually works and also showed our new design draft. Happy to say, Hugs really seemed to interest people, which shows we need more recognition/rewarding in workplaces.

Mountain sledging and fondue

In the afternoon I attended interesting sessions regarding remote working and project management. It was great to hear different perspectives on things. Later in the evening, DrupalCamp organizers had arranged us a proper Swiss Fondue-dinner up in a mountain restaurant. A funicular took us up and although it was an evening, the views were lovely with all the lights in the town. Also, there was a sledging option to zoom down the mountain slope to the town. Mario, Florian, and David took sledges, which took about 30min to get back to the town. Next day it was time to leave home.

More than a Drupal tech camp

DrupalCamp was great. It was interesting to see more closely technology event, see presentations and colleagues around the world. I also wanted to practice my public speaking skills and this was a good opportunity to make a speech. Thank you for this experience, it was valuable!

Learn more about Wunder culture and our opportunities for progression.

P.S Hereopens-in-a-new-tab you can find more presentations from the event.