This year, the first Kirby Konf finally happened. After it was canceled during the pandemic, I was more than happy the conference finally came to life.
The Kirby Team chose a great place for the Konf. The city of Mainz is nearly in the center of Germany, so very easy to reach for most german visitors. With the Frankfurt Airport not that far away, international guests did arrive easily too.
The venue, the Gutenberg Digital Hub, was pretty well suited for this first, smaller conference aswell. It had a nice meeting area, with a sunny outdoor area located right at the river Rhine. Since it's very center in the city, we had a blast getting lunch at different places between the talks.
It is difficult to capture how the Konf felt. With roughly 120 people gathering from across the globe, one might expect some friction in getting acquainted and feeling welcome. Yet I can confirm that was not the case. It truly surprised me that the community I had always viewed as friendly and welcoming proved just as inviting in person. Within about three seconds, everyone was chatting, laughing, and enjoying themselves.
To capture the mood, I tried to catch some scenes and put them in a little video for you.
Some time after booking the tickets, I thought about how I could get involved in the conference aswell. I really enjoy the local city meetups in Bremen and Hamburg very much, so I naturally thought about adding something myself to the konf aswell. After some deep discussions with a little friend in my head, I actually submitted a talk proposal to Bastian. I didn't want to talk about tech, there are so many other great developers doing that already, so I thought about adding a softer perspective, a bit more personal.
My talk "Embracing the Impostor" was about the voice in your head telling you you're not good enough. I call mine Bernd the Bremser, and I'm far from the only one who has one: impostor syndrome is especially common in creative fields. But with LLMs, confidence has become cheap. Anyone can sound like an expert in seconds, and the web is filling up with output that is fluent, confident and often wrong. With the habit of checking, built over the years with our little friend, we now have a very valuable skill for the years to come.
If you want to watch the whole thing, here's the talk in full length:
But be sure to keep an eye on the Kirby Casts Youtube Channel, there were so many more awesome talks that will be released step by step.
Chris reminded us about the climate impacts of modern technology and explained a bit more about his (and other peoples) work at the Green Web Foundation, proposing a carbon.txt standard that helps measuring real carbon impact of web applications.
Bruno amazed us with his deep knowledge in agentic engineering, where he showed workflows and caveats of running tasks in the cloud.
Yoshie and Thomas held an inspiring talk about responsibility in web projects, and how that directly ties to accessibility and an open, welcoming web. Their new poyo studio website is also such a great place to experience their expertise.
Last for day one, Sascha reminded us how the web is a playground.
Wow, what a day. I had so much fun meeting all the people I connected online with, but also talking to new faces along the way.
On day two, the Kirby Team started with a quick Q&A section, until Johanna took over and gave us an interessting insight in their work and how Kirby was used to solve quite complex challenges.
Next on stage were Markus and Fabian from Reinorange, showing us how to work with Kirby in large scale. With larger clients and larger websites, the requirements change and it's nice to see how Kirby can keep up in specialiced hosting and multi-site setups.
The closing talk was held by Matthias, speaking about the web and how we shape it. A very uplifting and encouraging talk, that was the perfect fit to end the Konf.
So to summarize: the first Kirby Konf was a blast. I had a really great time, meeting old and new friends. But don't just take my word for it. I've gathered some other blog posts here:
- A room full of new friends by Jay
- Community by Thomas
- Kirby Konf 2026 by Nils
- Kirby Konf, finally! by Flo
- Kirby! Konf! by Nils
Big thanks to Christian for those awesome photographs. You can have a look at a whole gallery on the Kirby Community.