BLUG 2013 took place from March, 21 – 22 2013 in Leuven , Belgium. The Faculty Club was a wonderful venue and also the conference hotel was a great place to stay during the conference.
I attended BLUG for the first time as a vendor and speaker after choosing to work at BCC since November 2012. So I had to be at our booth most of the time, but thanks to Fathima Gany ( BCC Sales ) and Sarah Steffen ( BCC Development ) I also had the chance to attend some sessions.
Scott Souder and Louis Richardson presented at the OGS. I only saw a small part of the session, but according to other attendees it was great. .
During the 2 days, I met some people, I only knew only virtually. It was fantastic, to meet you in person, guys ( and gals ) .
The usual suspect gathered together on wednesday evening for the welcome reception. A lot of different beer was served along with some excellent food. Lesson learnt: Do not drink too many different beers. Headache guaranteed.
Thursday evening I had to present at SpeedSponsoring. It was the first time for me and to be honest, I was a bit scared all over the day. But after the first round I had fun doing the presentation. OK, I managed to do my 3 minutes take in only 2 minutes in the first round, but that was a good practice, as Paul Mooney decreased the presentation time from 3 to 2 minutes during the one hour of screaming and shouting in the sponsors area.
On friday I presented “Life in the fast lane: Full speed XPages”. With the help of Matthew Fyleman from We4IT it was a great presentation. Matthew and I never presented together before and we only ran thru the slides once on friday, just a couple of hours before the presentation.
I got some great feedback after the session. Also there was a tweet saying that the presentation has helped to identify a bottleneck in an application.
During the closing session the raffle took place and as always many valuable stuff was given to the attendees ( iPad Mini, Apple TV, Books, Ytria Software licenses, TLCC course licenses and more )
The number of attendees at the 5th BLUG conference was about 325 ( if I recall correctly ). This is a huge success for the organizers. Congratulations.
Next BLUG ( now called the BENELUX Notes User Group ) will be in Breda, The Netherlands. Watch blug.be for details.