Top 5 Takeaways from Drupalcamp London

I recently attended Drupalcamp London for a weekend, here is a list of the top five things I learned during the time I spent there.

1. The Drupal 8 services API is awesome. It was the first session I went to, "Drupal 8 Services and Dependency Injection" presented by Phil Norton. Phil was showcasing a few examples of how the services API has been used in previous projects, specifically the "Shield" and "PCA Predict" modules.
2. Drupal developers are moving away from local virtual machines in herds, in favour of container-based solutions such as Lando or DDev. As these solutions become easier to use and more accessible there becomes fewer and fewer reasons to not give one of them a try.
3. Chat-bots and personal assistants are a big step forward for user experience. The maintainer for of the "Chatbot API" module gave a talk on how to integrate a Drupal site with Alexa, Slack, Google Assistant, Messenger and many more. The video isn't available online for this talk just yet, however, the presentation slides are. 
4. Tagging Behat scenarios which only test important site functionality with '@smoke' can help speed up the development. When every scenario isn't run after every change, you can find problems quicker. Then run all scenarios on a nightly automated CI run to make sure everything is working correctly.
5. The last talk I went to "Get Your Bits In! Using the Migrate module to populate your Drupal 8 site" presented by Eli-T, demoed the simplicity and workflow of migrating content into a Drupal 8 installation using the migrate module. The code involved was fairly minimal, not much is required to get going with the migrate functionality Drupal 8 provides.