Now it’s one week since SQL Saturday Iceland 2017 finished and I’m almost recovered. It was a blast like last year but I enjoyed this one a bit more as I feel we were better prepared and knew more what we were facing. Before last year I had only attended SQL Saturdays as a speaker and an attendee and even though you feel you can sense some of the work that goes into the preparations you still don’t know until you do it. But it’s not only work and worries organizing a SQL Saturday. There is a lot of fun, new friends and learning to be had from it if you put in the effort. The organizing team had great fun together, I met a lot of lot of speakers, some for the first time others again and this experience of organizing such a big event will help me in my future endeavors.

We had two pre-cons on the Friday which we had record attendees at. We also broke our record on the Saturday with just over 100 attendees. There was still 1/3 no shows so that’s something we need to work on. But I’m very pleased with how the event went. We had three tracks and the attendees were usually split nicely between those 3 tracks and everyone I met in the breaks were happy with what they saw and heard. We had 19 great speakers that took the journey to Iceland to speak and we are so appreciative of them. They are the key to this event being a success and their willingness to share their knowledge and time is so fantastic to such a small and isolated community as Iceland is. The venue was also great. All the equipment worked really well and the rooms were perfect for this size of an event. It didn’t hurt that you could see the snow falling in the un-spoilt nature through the big windows in the rooms.

We also had great sponsors. Some were there for the first time while other have been with us from the start. It is fantastic to see such great backing for the SQL community and we are very thankful that our sponsors made this event possible. I really hope they got something out of it as well as we want this to be a win-win for all included.

At last I just want to say thank you to the organizing team and other volunteers that worked hard both on the day but also during the weeks leading up to the event. I’m already looking forward to next year but before that I have some events to attend both as speaker and also as an attendee. More about that soon.