When Microsoft's annual .NET Conf went online for everyone in November 2020 — three days of free, livestreamed .NET content — ThreeB IT signed up as a community sponsor. The right call for a year when conferences had collapsed into rectangles on a Zoom grid and the community was paying for its own bandwidth.
The interview
The sponsor segment included a short interview with Thimo on the .NET Conf 2020 livestream. The video — Net Conf 2020 Interview — is still online:
▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW7BJRjta_A
It's a quick read of who we are, where we sit on the .NET stack, and why a small-town German software house was investing in international .NET community visibility in the middle of a pandemic.
Why we sponsor
Sponsoring a free conference looks like marketing from the outside. From the inside it's closer to dues. Three reasons we've kept doing it across multiple .NET Conf editions:
We hire from this community. Every developer who's joined ThreeB IT in the last few years was, at some point before they sent us their CV, watching .NET Conf or attending a local .NET meetup. Sponsorship is one of the ways we pay forward into the funnel we drink from.
Microsoft's open-source posture is real. The .NET Foundation is a genuine independent body, and ThreeB IT participates in it directly — Thimo's .NET Foundation community bio lists him as a community speaker/organiser. Sponsorship of .NET Conf is the headline version of that posture; the local Ibbenbüren .NET Meetup Thimo has organised since 2017 is the everyday version.
It's where the news lands first. .NET Conf is where Microsoft typically marks the GA of the year's major .NET release — .NET 5 in 2020, .NET 6 in 2021, and so on. Being in the sponsor row means being in the conversation about what just shipped.
The local follow-up
Every year, the Ibbenbüren .NET Meetup runs a .NET Conf Review session — a local read-through of what landed at the global event, what's worth experimenting with in the next quarter, and what's worth waiting on. The 2021 and 2024 editions are both on the meetup page.
The big conference stays big. The small follow-up keeps it useful.