Does anyone know how many developers showed up to the Xojo Dev Retreat in Nashville?
ā¦and Iām a big guy, so you can count me twice.
There were more tables than you may see on a picture and not everyone participates in all dinners.
If I remember it was like 50 people in total.
And once we get back to regular conferences, we may get back to higher numbers.
ok, letās say 150 attendants (148 plus Jerry Fritschle x 2).
Counting:
āā¦hundreds of thousands of Xojo developersā¦ā
Letās say 300 000 of them.
Letās say 150 of them attended the Developer Retreat
(150 / 300 000) x 100 = only 0.05% of all those developers āscattered across the globeā attended the conference.
Maybe flights out of Antarctica where canceled due to bad weather
Admittedly, its fun to play with Xojoās marketing figures.
Pretty sure someone during the conference said there were about 35 in attendance.
And pretty sure those who stopped using Xojo are not going anymore.
Attendance at conferences had always been a tiny fraction of the overall user base
But it was mostly dominated by āprofessionalā users - consultants, contractors, etc who made a living writing Xojo code
That wasnt exclusively it
There were often companies sending folks who wrote code all day every day
I can think of several off the top of my head
People attending on their own dime that they couldnāt then write off as a business expose was often a tiny fraction of attendees
No low-code hobbyists?
I think the attendance was pretty good, as Kem stated.
It just doesnāt relate to any of Xojo Incās fancy claims of total developer count.
Of course, I am open to any verifiable evidence that holds up Xojoās claims.
I tend to agree
In general attendance has always been ālowā compared to overall user base or claimed user base - whichever
Most years it was < 100 and I think only surpassed that once that I know of
If in fact there are āmillionsā or even hundreds of thousands of users youād expect better than 100
One small company I used to work with before REAL/Xojo had conferences that were about the same size from a MUCH smaller user base
So - what gives ?
I truly believe the difference was the kind of people using the products
The other company as a percentage seemed to have more contractors, consultants, etc as clientele as far as I know
They werenāt the kind of tool āhobbyistsā would naturally find & use
EDITS : several to insert word to make more intelligible, clean up grammar & autocorrections
They couldnāt finish counting because there where so many of them.
Next year that number will be top secret
I have only attend conferences that were related to a specific programming language.
Went every year between 1983 and 1993 (that is when I left that employer). I wrote and presented white-papers and about 1/2 of them. Those had 100ās of people in EACH session, and normally there were 3 to 5 sessions at the same timeā¦ it got rather crowded.
And Iāll bet very few of you even ever heard of the language (SAS)ā¦ still very active today
Personally I donāt consider Covid to be remotely over so itās 100% remote or watching after the fact videos for me, for anything like this. Air travel and unmasked indoor gatherings like this are a no-go for me.
I recall attending Lotusphere in Florida in 1999, primarily a Lotus Notes admin / dev conference held at Disney Dolphin and Swan Hotels. Somewhere between 10,000-14,000 attendees. Coming from Australia, those numbers blew my mind. The logistics were next level. The Pointer Sisters played at the midweek party at SeaWorld. Crazy times. Lotusphere - Wikipedia
Unfair to compare, and no offence to anyone in attendance, however it did occur to me in jest that the photo shared by Norman above looked more like a āvictims support group / survivors groupā than a bunch of highly motivated tech evangelists.
Norman, you should install the Microsoft Editor or Grammarly browser extension!
Last time I was at an in-person DevCon was in the mid 90s when I was tech editor of FoxTalk. The # of devs at FoxCon was Iām guessing at least a thousand, conservatively. And that was after the M$FT āmergerā started to bleed the life out of the product and the community, beginning with promising ānothing will changeā and then dropping the Xenix and macOS versions a few months later.
Letās just say I have not had good luck with cross-platform products and their support and stability over the years [sigh]. I remember doing an app deployed on Windows and Mac with the UI translated to US & British English, French & Canadian French, and European & Latin American Spanish using FoxBase Plus ā it was for a large office furniture manufacturer. I was dumb enough to pass on M$FTās promise to them as a supposed insider (I had the personal assurances of the dev team and their PR handlers) and reaped the consequences.
Of course FoxPro was removed from Visual Studio after 6.0 altogether. It now exists only in the form of Lianja (and as the basis for the query optimizer in Sql Server).
If you canāt trust a corporation with those kinds of resources, you canāt trust Geoff. Iām sorry. Heās probably a great guy and all, but when you have 50-ish people showing up for a devcon thatās way more probative than whatever he says, concerning the direction the product is headed.
I learned this the hard way, many moons ago.
Iād like to go to one somedayā¦ not that Iām all that interested in the discussions, but there are a few people Iād love to meet and offer my thanks and respect.