Conference Done.
Our conference is done. The last people returned home on tuesday and we paid the hotel invoice yesterday. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. We got 39 people to Frankfurt in the nice Amadeus Hotel. Actually a few more have registered, but we had a few cancellation, some last minute registrations and one guy didn't show up.We had some nice get together on Wednesday evening. When I arrived in the hotel, Bob Keeney was already there in the winter garden. So we checked in and started gathering with people in the hotel bar. Nice chatting. Especially seeing back people you didn't meet for a year or more. Later we had dinner in the hotel which was an excellent idea as two more people showed up later that evening.
On Thursday we had the training. We started with a little overview. Than we wrote a little utility to connect to several database servers/engines and run queries. After lunch, we wrote a picture database with Real SQL Database. Later we ported this application to postgre SQL. A real challenge as a few commands are really different there, especially the blob handling. We finished the training with a few tips, tricks and Q&A.
Thursday night was very cool. First in the hotel we met at the bar and more and more people dropped in. Stéphanes arrived at the afternoon and I met Reinhard in the bar after the training. We chatted and later we took the subway to the city center with 16 people. In the Standesämtchen, we had dinner. Good food and very nice half-timber house environment. We finished at the hotel bar where we met more people.
Friday started with Stéphane's keynote. We got updated on Cocoa, 64bit, LLVM and other topics. Thomas Tempelmann showed his Arbed tool. After the coffee break we continued with my plugin session, before Simon Larkin talked about some database tricks. In our spotlight sessions we had DynaPDF viewer showed by Jens Boschulte, ActiveRecord by Bob Keeney and the AWARD+ Software showed by Carsten Kobusch.
After a break I showed a few security and tips. For our Q&A session, we had a couple of presents to raffle off. I think everyone got at least one souvenir. Next was Geoff, but we had a few problems like a crashing Mac with Skype and a slow network. But we got Geoff on the screen finally and he showed us the new Real Studio IDE and answered a few questions for the future strategy.On the financial side it looks like we have a little profit with both days. Maybe enough for going out to a restaurant for dinner with Monika, Michael and Stefanie as a thank you. That also means for me, that we can't really host a conference day without a training day.
Thank you for supporting our events and plugins. And see you again!
The next event in Real World 2012 in Orlando, Florida.
