BLUG – A brief recap
BLUG 2011 started for me on wednesday. I drove to Antwerp by car. It is only a 200 something km trip. My satnav took me on a 30 km detour due to some heavy traffic. Took me one extra hour.
I arrived at the hotel and Theo was already busy setting up the venue. At the reception I ran into Martin Donnelly, one of the author of the “Mastering XPages” book.
Some of the usual suspect were already at the venue and after a short talk, we all started with packing the bags for the attendees. Lot of stuff to put into. Lot of bags to pack.
BLUG had about 270 registered attendees and appr. 220 of them showed up at each of the 2 days.
Off to the bar to have some decent beer. Belgium has a lot of different kinds of beer. If you come to Antwerp and you like to drink a glass of beer you surely have to try “the Antwerp Bolleke”.
In fact it is a creation of Johannes Vervliet in 1833 but after his death the company was taken over by Carolus De Koninck. The “Antwerp Bolleke” is called the daily beer of the real Antwerp habitants. It is the only city in Belgium which has such a strong tie with his local beer. The high fermentation of this beer makes it as one of the best in the world.
More and more speakers showed up. Paul Mooney and Tim Clark finally arrived after a long bike tour.
After a few more rounds of Antwerp Bolleke, we took the lift to the 16th floor to have our speakers dinner. A great choice of cold and warm food was offered along with more beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages.
Tim Clark embarressed me by talking about my donation to Movember. He handed me over a copy of DeBretts “Guide for the Modern Gentleman”.
This beautiful guide shows the average man how to act like and become a gentleman. Every day things are listed here, things like how to replace bicycle tires to the more gentleman-like things like how to interact with your suit tailor. A very entertaining read to say the least, and the whole book is beautifully illustrated.
Day 1 started with the keynote by Kevin Cavanaugh. Theo asked me to do a live blogging of the keynote. I tried my best and according to the statistics we even had some followers. Tim Clark joined me a s a panelist and so did Chris Miller. ( flickr pic )
The breakout sessions started right after the keynote. No surprise that there were many sessions about XPages. 40 sessions in 4 tracks delivered by 36 speakers.
Over the day all tweets and pics with the #blug hashtag were displayed on a big screen in the sponsors area. Twitterfountain has been used to get the content from Twitter.
Later on, Speedsponsoring. Speedsponsoring is like Speed Dating. Every sponsor has a 5 minutes timeframe to tell visitors at the booth about their product. After the 5 minutes every group moves on to another sponsor.This goes on for 60 minutes. Imagine the level of noise having 12 sponsors delivering their content. For the speakers it must be like having gargled with razorblades at the end.
Great fun. Paul Mooney was the emcee and I saw Tim Clark constantly bringing beer to the speakers to cool the vocal cords.
The beer was for free. IBM sponsored the bar at day 1.
Day 2 started after a short night for many of us. Rumours have been heard about “Microsoft will migrate to Lotus Notes”, “The iPad 2 is available for €249,- at the Apple Store in Antwerp”. Well, such things happen on April, 1st …
More sessions on XPages and other topics. All sessions I attended were of high quality. It was sometimes hard to follw Martin Donnelly talking about the extension library. This man talks sooo blooooody fast.
Tim Tripcony showed how to use themes to make the development of an XPages application easier. The presentation is available here. Many more presentations are available on the speakers blog sites.
The raffle at the closing session was a perfect end to a great conference. Many valuable prices were handed over to lucky winners.
Again the bar was opened; this time it were the sponsors who made all beverages available for free.
A great thank you to the organizers, sponsors, speakers and attendees for this great 2-days conference. If you could not attend BLUG this year, you should definitely put it onto the list of FREE conferences to attend during 2012.