Last night we celebrated the 10th anniversary of CloudCamp London by celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Hitch-Hikers Guide to The Galaxy (HHGTG). It was a lot of fun – probably the best CloudCamp ever.

I can’t say that I was there from the beginning, as I sadly missed the first CloudCamp London due to other commitments. I have been a regular attendee since the second CloudCamp, and at some stage along the way it seems that I’ve been pulled into the circle of Chris Purrington, Simon Wardley and Joe Baguley to be treated as one of the organisers. The truth is that Chris Purrington has always been the real organiser, and Simon, Joe and I just get to fool around front of house to some degree. I should also shout out to Alexis Richardson, who was one of the original CloudCamp London instigators, but at some stage found better uses for his time (and developed a profound dislike for pizza).

CloudCamp has been amazing. Simon taught us all about mapping. Kuan Hon taught us all about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) long before it was cool. It was where I got to meet Werner Vogels for the first time (when he just casually walked in with some of my colleagues). It’s where I first met Joe Weinman and many others who’ve ended up leading the way in our industry. It’s been and I hope will continue to be a vibrant community of people making stuff happen in cloud and the broader IT industry. Meetups have exploded onto the scene in the past ten years giving people lots of choice on how they can spend their after work time, so it’s great that the CloudCamp London community has held together, kept showing up, kept asking interesting questions, and kept on having fun.

Simon asked us to vote last night to rename CloudCamp to ServerlessCamp, as (in his view at least) that’s the future. With one exception we all chose to keep the broader brand that represents the broad church of views and interests in the community.

Here’s my presentation from last night, which in line with the theme was a celebration of Douglas Adams’s genius:

In keeping with the theme I wore my dressing gown and made sure to have a towel:

It’s been a great first decade for CloudCamp London – here’s to the next one.