Mendix World – Day 2; Good bye Rotterdam

Its quite easy to assume a fandom prejudice; to praise Mendix “because we are a fan blog”, but our fandom does not stem from the fact that the product we love is called Mendix; thats mere flattery. No, it is worthy of its praise on the basis of its merit, inspiration and the motivation to make the world a better place, not by conventional means, but by the call to convert crisis into opportunity in an innovative fashion. This is how I could summarise day 2.

Mendix World 2012 concluded in excellent form, despite some hiccups from 1 speaker’s anxiety and/or health issues in a session, but reports from all the other talks and tracks were very positive and successful. Johan Den Haan gave a more in depth preview of what to expect from Mendix 5 and proves to be yet another big leap in the Mendix paradigm. The new features aren’t necessarily stuff that I would have thought of for a next release, but the more I think on it, the more I realise that those features will add a lot more than just productivity, but also greatly improve interaction in services, end user experience and interfaces. I cannot wait for the first incremental release of the product and look forward to see its arrival.

Another gem from the keynotes was Ron Tolido’s keynote. He gave a colourful talk on “Enterprise meets Agility” based on research with Capgemini and MIT, for which you can find the whitepaper here. His forward manner and ability to engage with the audience makes him a great speaker and sheds light on a few insightful challenges enterprise organisations face in a rapid changing world.

The tech tracks very interesting. Jouke, Arjan and Arjen all provided very exciting presentations. Not only could one appreciate the forethought and effort that went into making it interesting, relevant, setting the stage and expectation for Mendix 5 in more detail, but you could see that these guys think about what they do in a big way. Their inspiration and enthusiastic approach is visible to the observer. The quotes they use in their talks especially resonated with me. It wasn’t your usual off the shelf buzzword-complient help-me-sell-my-products phraseology; it was focussed, sincere, mature and visionary.

At the end of the day, mostly everybody was exhausted by 2 days’ of networking and delivering inspirational insights into Mendix. Despite that, some of the R&D team sat down with Derek Gardiner and myself and we informally interviewed them on the day to day interaction with each other and gathered some history behind Mendix. This was thoroughly enjoyable and refreshing and left us with something to remember. I wish that we could interview more of the team and hopefully we will still have the opportunity to do so in the future.

The interview and the chats we had was the proverbial icing on the cake of the conference. If we’re able to, we’ll be covering some insight into what we’ve learned there, but we just want to personally thank these guys for their time, their outstanding attitude and willingness for allowing us the chance to get to know them and would like to encourage them to continue building and delivering great software, continue innovating and cultivate the Mendix culture that makes them unique.

Mendix World – Day 1

MendixWorld it turning out to be an event that exceeds my expectations. Everything from the Derek Roos’ keynote up to the party, the organisation and execution was done with class and in good style and is a testimony of the Mendix culture. Its encouraging to witness this firsthand and see all the other partners and members of the Mendix eco-system.

Everything went smooth except for the usual WiFi failures that occur during demos at big events as with the launch of the iPhone 4. We can always expect that Murphy will attend our tech conventions even if he didn’t officially receive an invitation. Other than that the rest of the convention made me think I was attending a TED talk for my job.

Attendance was very high; over a 1000 attendees registered; thats a huge turnout and was visible. The number of people you meet at such an event makes a person’s finitude a sobering realisation. My brain is still whizzing with info.

One thing that is certain though, is that while we engaged with so many diverse individuals in such a short time span, I found engaging with the R&D guys to be a singular inspiring experience. We hope to give more insight into their world in the near future. From the modeler guys, to the business server guy, front end experts and QA process guy, business engineers, tech sales people, support and many others (who all have names btw) each giving amazing insight into the workings and the history and structures behind making an excellent product a reality. Its delightful to be associated with passionate and competent people with a sense of wonder and a sense of humor in your field of work. My only hope is that they retain their culture as the company grows.

We’re looking forward to tomorrow’s line-up and attending some workshops and other sessions.

Oh and there is one more thing: I’m looking forward to Mendix5. The best thing to happen to Mendix since Mendix 😉