This week, I attended the 20th International Botanical Congress (IBC), which was held in Madrid, Spain. The IBC is the largest and most prestigious international meeting in the field of botany and is held once every six years. My public presentation was titled ‘Strategies to improve alignment accuracy in large-scale plant phylogenomic analyses‘ and was part of the session ‘New Frontiers in Plant Phylogenomics‘. The congress and its accompanying events were outstanding, and it was a pleasure to connect (and in many cases re-connect!) with colleagues from around the world.