The Ibbenbüren .NET Meetup — running monthly since 2017

Thimo has organised the Ibbenbüren .NET Meetup since 2017 — two years before ThreeB IT was registered. It's the longest-running .NET community presence in the Münsterland / Tecklenburger Land corner of NRW.

The facts

  • Members: 148 (and counting)
  • Co-organisers: Thimo Buchheister (CEO, ThreeB IT) and Thorsten Brügge (COO, ThreeB IT)
  • Language: German
  • Cadence: monthly, third Thursday of every month
  • Venue: Tivolino Sportsbar, Münsterstraße 61, Ibbenbüren — directly off the A30 motorway, drivable from Osnabrück, Münster, and the Tecklenburger Land
  • Focus: Microsoft .NET, software architecture, Scrum / Agile
  • Audience: developers, architects, project managers, cloud professionals
  • Online: Twitter @DotNetIbb; website threebit.io
  • Rating: 5.0 / 5 (6 reviews)
  • Venue partner: ThreeWork (part of Hartman International)

Recent topics

The session schedule tracks current Microsoft platform releases:

  • ".NET Conf 2024 — Summary & Highlights" — 12 December 2024 (the now-traditional annual Review session — see the .NET Conf sponsorship post for context)
  • "Create Your Own Copilot with Teams AI Library" — 7 November 2024
  • ".NET Conf Workshop — Focus on MAUI" — 27 September 2022

The pattern is the same every year: when Microsoft ships a major .NET version at .NET Conf in November, the next Ibbenbüren session is a deep-dive into what landed and what's worth experimenting with locally.

Why a local .NET meetup matters

Two reasons, both practical:

  1. It's how a regional developer ecosystem stays current. Münsterland is not Berlin or Munich — there isn't a Microsoft campus or a tech conference circuit on the doorstep. A monthly local anchor is how engineers here get exposed to Aspire, MAUI, or whatever .NET shipped this quarter without burning a travel budget.

  2. It's a hiring funnel and a retention tool. Every engineer who has joined ThreeB IT in the past few years was, at some point earlier, at this meetup. That's not a coincidence — it's the model. We sponsor the venue, organise the talks, write the meetup invite copy, and the people who turn up regularly are the people we eventually meet over a coffee, and sometimes over an offer.

The same shape shows up across our other community presences — the .NET Foundation bio, the .NET Conf sponsorships, Bitkom, the Sessionize profile. The meetup is the everyday version. The rest are scale-ups.

How to join

meetup.com/de-DE/ibbenburen-net-meetup. RSVP, show up at the Tivolino on a third Thursday, and you'll find one of the cleanest .NET community rooms in the rural Northwest.

ThreeB IT Community Meetup .NET Ibbenbueren