We had a great conference in Andernach. Great to meet with all the people back in Germany after 5 years of a break.

Location

When you fly in, instead of taking the subway to the city next to the airport, you take a train, maybe switch to another train and you make it to Andernach. If you come by car, your GPS will show you the way. By picking the smaller city, we get much more value from the hotels, restaurants and sights for our money. The city itself glances with history and buildings from the medieval and roman ruins. Add to that the nice parks and the initiative with the editable city with plenty of public vegetable and fruit gardens. Finally for us, organizing something just 6 km away from home is much easier than anything far away.

Hotel

The hotel was perfect for us. We filled most of the bed rooms and had the place to ourselves. You easily met people from the conference in the breakfast area, at the bar or in the restaurant. The room could comfortably sit everyone, they put out excellent food in huge quantities and everyone was pleased. The Wifi worked well although if you have something like a 100 devices connected in the conference room, sometimes it slowed down. The hotel itself is fairly new (from 2020) and beautiful to look at. A lot of art is displayed in the hotel and on the garden around it. And if you leave property, you can walk to the roman garden behind showing the ruins of a roman bath house. On the other side you can walk the gardens along the river. Finally you need to see the restaurant on top. Great food and excellent views in all directions.

Speakers

We are thankful for the speakers joining us and presenting something. The mix of topics varied from news about Xojo, to various programming techniques and how to improve your projects. We could have had one or two more speakers, so please consider to sign up as speaker and show something you learnt coding in Xojo.

Money

You know we calculate upfront the ticket price we like to charge. When we come closer to the conference, we know the numbers and thus we can calculate what to include. We plan to reach break even, including the revenue for the training day. Not to make a profit, but to make sure we spend all the budget! And the numbers worked out to make this an all-inclusive and all-you-can-eat conference. I think most attendees got surprised when we paid the meals and sight-seeing instead of splitting the bills. 76 Euro are left and I think I may just order some Pizza for an after-conference-party in the office!

Videos

The videos will come. We recorded with multiple cameras and have 300 GB of recordings to review and cut. This may take a few weeks and we'll release videos over time one by one. Attendees already got the download link for the slides. Enjoy!

Next conference

Before we think about the next conference to host, let's see what Xojo Inc. does. I think the American users would appreciate having an event on their continent. Once we know what Xojo Inc. plans for later this year or next year, we can see if we host something again.