From October 9 – 11 and from October 14 – 16, the European edition of the Masters Summit for QlikView was held in London and Barcelona. The goal of this event is to show and discuss advanced concepts, methods and techniques for QlikView development and deployment through 3 days of hands-on sessions and discussions. Together with Bill Lay, Oleg Troyansky and Rob Wunderlich I was one of the speakers at this event.

The Masters Summit team, from left to right: organizer Kevin McCann and speakers Bill Lay, Barry Harmsen, Rob Wunderlich and Oleg Troyansky

Experienced developers

We had a good mix of medior and senior developers attending at both events, employed by both QlikView customers and QlikView partners. These experienced attendees made it possible for us to cover the material in-depth at a steady pace without the need to skip tough subjects. It also meant that we got great questions and discussions, a lot of which continued during breaks, lunch and drinks.

Besides the high level of knowledge of the attendees, it was also very cool to just meet so many people with whom I normally only communicate via forums, social media and my blog. I was able to put a lot of faces to names.

Special guests

At the London event, we also had Steve Dark, Stephen Redmond and QlikTech’s Henric Cronström attending as our guests. They participated in our ‘stump the geek’ panel discussion and Stephen closed the first day with a very entertaining presentation on the history of data visualization. Having these experts attend added an extra dimension for me, all of them offered some really good tips, tricks and additional information during the sessions. It was also very interesting to hear Henric explain what QlikView is doing behind the scenes, often confirming what we’ve concluded based on empirical evidence, but also busting some myths.

Excellent evaluations

Both events were very well received by the attendees. On the post-event evaluation form the average grade for both events was 9.4 (out of 10). All of the attendees indicated that they would recommend the Masters Summit to their peers. For all of us, the event was a success!

We got lots of very nice comments on our evaluation forms as well, of which I’d like to share a few of my favorites:

“Given the presenters my expectations were high but nevertheless were exceeded.”

“Awesome! Presenters were great and took their time to answer every question.”

“When you finish the Developer course you think you know all, but when you come to this summit you realize that you know nothing. It was much more than I expected.”

“Summit was well worth the time. Rich learning environment, solid use cases and world class experts.”

“3 days of a lot of useful solutions that are ready to be used. Definitely this will be fundamental for my professional growth.”

and, my personal favorite:

“Geektastic”

A thank you to our sponsors

We were also very lucky to have two great sponsors:

All of the “buying everybody drinks” without any of the hard selling; our sponsors helped ensure that we had some great attendee retention after the sessions as well 🙂

One free tool that I recommend you all take at least a look at is QlikLook. This utility, which was jointly developed by BIPB and Vizubi,  displays an interactive, fully clickable preview  of QVW’s in Outlook and Windows Explorer. I’ve only been using it for a few weeks now but I’ve already become quite attached to this functionality.

See you next time?

The next edition of the Masters Summit for QlikView will be held in Chicago on April 1 – 3 2014. See you there?