State of the Browser 2026

Walking into London’s Barbican Estate is like stepping into a parallel timeline, a concrete vision of what the 1960s thought the future would look like. When people first encounter the term “brutalist”, the association that usually springs to mind is “brutal” – harsh, cruel, merciless – but the term actually comes from “brut”, the same word you’ll see on bottles of champagne, where it means dry. Not dry as in the opposite of wet, because this is February in England, it’s rained every day of 2026 so far, and today the sky, the buildings and and the streets are just a monochrome montage of damp shades of grey. No, brut is dry in the sense of raw, unadorned; from the French béton brut, literally “raw concrete”, a term coined by Le Corbusier to describe the architectural style where textures and patterns left by the formwork used to cast concrete become part of the finished structure.

I’ve been here today for State of the Browser (SotB) 2026: a one-day, one-track conference organised by London Web Standards, about browsers. No AI, no crypto, no cloud - just HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the continuous evolution of the humble web browser. In a dramatic departure from form, I’m not here to speak, or run a workshop, or play a show at the party… I’m here as a regular attendee, to listen and learn and chat to people. I even paid for a ticket. Two, in fact, ‘cos SotB does that thing where you can buy an extra ticket for somebody who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend, and with my early bird ticket being an extremely reasonable £70 (and the diversity ticket £30), it would have been rude not to.

In a way, the Barbican is the perfect venue for a conference about the state of the web. Like the web, it (mostly!) works; despite its architectural significance, the Barbican isn’t a museum; it’s a living, working event space, theatre, cinema, a library, an art gallery, not to mention home to the thousands of people who actually live here. Like many web standards, it’s controversial: for everybody who loves it and thinks it should be celebrated (hi!) there’s somebody who thinks its an eyesore and we should just tear it all down and start again. And, like those same web standards, maintenance and new development is constantly constrained by the long-term consequences of historic decisions, and the understanding that if you break existing things to add new ones, a lot of people will get very upset.

If you’ve seen me talking about CSS, or email, or HTML, or any number of things over the last few years, you’ll know I love a good standard. Protocols, not platforms; I want to live in a world where what we do online - work, play, consume, communicate - is governed by open standards driven by transparent collaboration, not a series of megacorporation walled gardens. I enjoy events like State of the Browser partly because a lot of the people there share that perspective, but also because, dammit, web conferences are joyful. We know the web is infuriating, and idiosyncratic, and every web developer has a list in their head of everything they’d fix if they had a time machine – but the web is also beautiful and wonderful because it’s so accessible. Not in a WCAG sense, but in the sense that when you make a web browser do something neat, everybody sees it, right away. Everybody gets it. It’s shapes and fonts and colour and movement and live demos that make people laugh out loud because they’re genuinely delightful.

Bramus Van Damme kicked off with a wonderful session about CSS anchor positioning, a relatively new CSS feature that lets you position elements relative to other elements - popups, tooltips, margin notes… you want health bars to appear above the players’ heads in an online game? Or info panels on something like Google Maps? Like a lot of modern CSS features, this doesn’t seem like a big deal until you try to implement it yourself and end up drowning in JavaScript and scrollOffset calculations, and Bramus’s session was a great roundup of the state of the art, the work that’s gone into getting to this point, and what web developers can do with it all.

Fiona Safari’s session about how to thrive at work as an introvert was excellent, but I have to be honest: I don’t think it was the right content for this conference. That’s not any reflection on the presenter - the talk was well researched, well presented, and very relatable in places - but when the event is one day, one track, seven talk slots, and it’s called “State of the Browser”, I expect every session to be about, well, about the state of the browser; about evolving web standards, and what’s changed since last year. Fiona’s session would be a fantastic addition to any number of multi-track conferences, or to an event with a broader scope, but I found the contrast with the rest of today’s sessions to be a little jarring. Fiona: you were awesome; this one’s entirely down to the programme committee.

Chad Gowler’s session on the limitations of WCAG as a model for evaluating accessibility had some brilliant insights - not least the observation that “when something’s terrible for everybody, it’s not an accessibility problem, it’s just a bit shit”, backed up by the example of how a hyperlink that’s styled exactly the same as the surrounding text, and so effectively invisible, is WCAG compliant because it isn’t relying on colour alone for discoverability. Also, turns out many video games do a much better job of making their content accessible and inclusive than most websites (did you know the X-Box packaging, the physical box your games console came in, is designed to be openable by visually impaired folks? Today I Learned.)

Zach Leatherman took us on a delightful riff through the history of the web, framed by asking how you’d build an image comparison component with every iteration of web technology from HTML 1.0 through to modern CSS. There was some truly insightful discussion of the “temporal dead zone” between the component being rendered and actually being usable, and tips on how to work around it – and I have to shout out to the image map example for dusting off some code I’ve not seen in decades and putting it to genuinely hilarious effect.

As an aside: There was also the thing where Zach took a framed photograph out of his bag, placed it on the stage, and somebody from the audience ran up with another framed photograph and placed it alongside it, which felt like it split the room into the people who were laughing out loud ‘cos they knew exactly what was going on, and the people who didn’t get it at all and, maybe, had the slightest sense they’d gatecrashed a private party and weren’t supposed to be here (hi!)… I know as well as anybody that conferences lead to cliques; you see the same people in the same places, year after year, you become friends, you have callbacks and running jokes and it’s all part of the fun, and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself on more than one occasion… but hey, today was a reminder to me that when something like that happens, it only takes a minute to explain to the rest of the room what’s going on, and bring them all in on the joke.

One of the ways SotB keeps ticket prices manageable is they don’t provide lunch, but Barbican’s surrounded by good restaurants; I followed the crowd to a Korean barbecue place for fried chicken and rice, got an excellent cappuccino from Giddy Up, a tiny coffee stand hidden inside Fortune Street Park, and then back for the afternoon sessions.

Jason Williams, the creator of Boa - an experimental JavaScript engine built in Rust - talked us through the story of Temporal, a replacement for JavaScript’s much-maligned Date object; seven years of specification work, prototyping, experimentation, proposals and counterproposals and meetings and working groups - including the not-inconsiderable side quest of getting the IETF to update the RFCs regarding the ISO8601 date format to include time zone name and calendar metadata. It was also great to see Ujwal Sharma’s date on the RFC in question; I met Ujwal a few times, back when we were doing conferences in Russia (yeah, that used to be a thing!) and it’s great to see that he’s gone on to work on some properly excellent stuff.

My only real criticism of Jason’s session was this one single slide, and that’s mainly ‘cos it was on the screen for a long, long time while he talked us through the various stages of the TC39 engineering process. I will keep saying this until people listen: MORE SLIDES, FEWER WORDS, BIGGER TEXT. If you want to talk us through six stages of a development process, and each stage has a small paragraph explaining it? That’s six slides. Six nice, big, chunky slides. The rest of it was spot-on; great content, great insight, great examples.

Ever built a website that has to work on Nokia features phones, 320x240 displays with D-pad navigation running Opera Mini, via unreliable 2G and EDGE data networks? Mike Hall has, and his session, “Lessons from Building for the Bottom of the Web”, was a tour de force of engineering within some fairly unique constraints: no web fonts, maximum page sizes, optimised SVGs, building custom minification routines for HTML (including replacing spaces with newlines ‘cos that’s the same number of bytes but if your entire web page is on one line Internet Explorer would crash), and the resulting observation that if you build a web app that’s responsive and usable on a Nokia feature phone, it’ll probably be blistering fast and work on literally everything.

And then Cassie Evans closed out the day in style live-coding (or rather, live-uncommenting) a browser game built around the GSAP animation engine - a lot of code, a lot of laughs, the kind of session that makes you want to go home and open up an editor and play around with all the things in the demo because it just looks like so much fun.

By the time we head out, the sky’s cleared and the setting winter sun is catching the curves and contours of the concrete and it’s all so beautiful the only thing to do is go and reflect on it all over a nice glass of something, and so now I’m writing this in the corner of one of those post-event pubs where the acoustics are so bad everybody’s shouting at everybody else because nobody can hear anybody anyway.

If AI really is going to replace software development with a 24/7 diet of botslop and existential dread, somebody forgot to tell the web folks. State of the Browser 2026 was a celebration of code, craft, open standards, collaboration and transparency, and not a ralph loop in sight.

I’ll leave you with a call to action. At the end of the day, Bruce Lawson - one of the genuinely excellent people who is working tirelessly to keep the web open and transparent and joyful - pointed us to an ongoing UK government inquiry about requiring Apple and Google to provide better interoperability and access to key features of those vendors’ mobile devices and operating systems.

They need your help. If you’re building web apps, or mobile apps, or any kind of software that targets Apple mobile devices, and you’d like to see a more robust transparency mechanism than “Apple promises to be nice if you ask nicely”, get involved. Go here, tell them what you’re working on, tell them why things like forcing Apple to allow browser engines other than Webkit on their iOS devices would be a Good Thing:

👉🏼 https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/proposed-commitments-from-apple-and-google-app-certainty-and-interoperable-access

And that’s it for now. I’ll see y’all on https://twitch.tv/dylanbeattie on Monday afternoon, where I’ll be beating Claude Code with a length of pipe until it stops lying to me, and then I’ll be in Malmo on Saturday for Beauty in Code 2026, but right now I’m going to go and drink a very loud pint.

I might put Eli’s sign on my phone screen first:

Ben Died

Ben died.

He wasn’t in a car crash. He didn’t have cancer. He wasn’t old. He didn’t get murdered, or fall off a cliff, or have an anvil dropped on him by a wily roadrunner, do any of the other things that people are supposed to do before they die. He just went to the pub, had a pint, went to bed at an uncharacteristically civilised hour because he had work in the morning, and died. I don’t know if there’s more to it than that. I suspect there isn’t. Would it make any difference if there was? Probably not.

I found out from a Facebook post. Yep, that website that Mark Zuckerberg built so he and his friends could lech over their classmates, and twenty years later, among the relentless feed of promoted posts and AI slop and who knows what, there’s a post from Yan saying Ben died in his sleep last night. Clare gets a message from Lizzie at the same moment I see the post, which is just as well ‘cos otherwise I would have assumed it was a prank, or somebody’s account got hacked. Those things are normal. Pranks happen. People leave phones unlocked and their mates post stupid shit online for a laugh. Accounts get taken over. Those are things which actually happen. But Ben going to the pub and then going home and dying? That doesn’t happen.

That was all a few weeks ago, and, if you’ll forgive the indelicate phrasing, life didn’t stop; apart from a few evenings in the pub that I should really have spent preparing for conferences, I did all the things, delivered all the talks, played all the gigs, saw all the people… then yesterday was Ben’s funeral. Redruth. Cornwall. Well, actually in Treswithian, on the outskirts of Camborne, but at first all we had to go on was “Redruth” so we sorted train tickets and hotel rooms accordingly and figured we could work the rest out later… so Thursday I’m travelling home from Stockholm, Friday I’m at home supposedly catching up on work and chores but none of those things happen, Saturday I’m in Bristol to celebrate my brother’s 40th birthday, which is great fun other than the logistics of catching up with family who all have different assumptions about each other’s travel plans, and then it’s Sunday and I’m on another train - not my train, because my train is cancelled, but a different train; for a while it looks like I won’t make my connection in Taunton, but the connecting train is delayed enough that it all works out, and Clare’s already on the train, and then we’re at Redruth, standing outside the station in the kind of rainstorm that would have Noah wondering if his ark is still on Mount Ararat and whether it might be made to float again, and then we’re in a taxi, and then we’re at the hotel, and Chris and Yan and Lizzie are there and Ben isn’t and it’s just… not right.

I’ve been to funerals before. Not many, and they weren’t unexpected - one of them the deceased wasn’t even deceased yet; they threw a big farewell party before choosing euthanasia a few months later, because in Belgium that’s a thing you can do when the chemotherapy isn’t working any more and it’s only a matter of time.

But this was the first time I’ve ever felt like the gang’s all got together but somebody’s missing and never coming back and the conversation’s like riding a bike with a wonky gear and it takes a while to work out why every so often there’s a metaphorical ‘clunk’ in the conversation ‘cos that’s the point when Ben would have said something hilarious - and let’s face it, quite probably obscene.

I’ve no idea what his family and friends made of the motley entourage of black-clad weirdos who showed up on Monday nursing various grades of hangover, but I hope us all being there maybe helped them understand the kind, funny, patient man that their boy had become. There were words, and songs, and music, and tears, and lots of hugs, and then beers and beige food and another rainy taxi ride and a very long train ride back to London, and what was supposed to be a proper night’s sleep in my own bed.

And now it’s a cold, rainy Tuesday in February and my calendar says I’m ‘back at work’, which, when you’re independent and self-employed, is a nebulous concept at the best of times, but I am so mentally far away from anything that might constitute actual work that I have no idea how I’m going to find my way back there; my bike’s had its fifth puncture in two weeks and my phone seems to be constantly on 5% battery and I’m supposed to be rehearsing songs for the gig next week but I’ve chewed all my fingernails down to the quick and I can’t sing a note without my voice cracking and everything feels like a metaphor for everything else and frankly it’s all just shit.

Life is weird. Friendship is weird. Friendship as an adult in the age of social media is especially weird. I’d never been to Ben’s flat. I don’t think he ever came to my house. I knew he’d grown up in Cornwall. I didn’t know he had a sister, until this week none of the London gang had ever met his parents, and I suspect he had only the vaguest idea what I did when I wasn’t in the pub – but I’ll never forget those strange months after lockdown, when things were open but not open and everybody was desperate to go out and see people and do things but nobody was getting on a train unless they had to, we’d get on our bikes and cycle up to Little Faith in Deptford Creek and the gang would come along - Ben in shorts, regardless of the weather - and we’d sit outside and eat and drink and talk about Warhammer and movies and weird snacks, and we’d roar with laughter and wobble home feeling for the first time in a long while like maybe it was all going to be alright. If you’d told me in those strange, frightening days that one day we’d be looking back on them with nostalgia, even fondness, I’m not sure I’d have believed you, but like I said: life is weird.

Rest in peace, my friend.

We’re gonna miss you.

Reflections on NDC London and PubConf

NDC London was the first really big conference I ever went to - as a paying attendee, way back in 2014 (or was it 2013?), when I was trying to figure out ASP.NET MVC and jQuery and how to get all my team’s code out of Subversion and into this new Git thing everybody was talking about.

I love it. I love welcoming everybody to my home city, I love the atmosphere, I love the location. It’s also where we held the very first PubConf, an event that celebrates just how incredibly funny a lot of conference speakers are - especially when the drinks are free and everybody promises not to post clips on the internet; there is something genuinely delightful about watching a speaker spend an hour artfully deconstructing distributed systems architecture or unit testing strategies in front of a conference audience, and then the next night they’re on a tiny stage in a crowded pub making you laugh until the milk comes out of your nose.

I’ve been at NDC London every year since, wearing all kinds of hats both metaphorical and literal, and become the de facto organiser of PubConf London since Todd Gardner cut down on conference travel a few years ago to focus on growing TrackJS and Request Metrics. With NDC London and PubConf successfully signed, sealed and delivered for another year, here’s a bit of a reflection on it.

Now please bear in mind, this is my experience - not yours. Unless you are also (a) living in London, (b) teaching a conference workshop, (c) giving a talk, (d) running the attendee party, (e) organising the unofficial after-party on Friday night, (f) playing lead guitar and singing in the band that will be performing at that party, (g) mixing the backing tracks and videos that band is going to use on stage, (h) running the website that handles all the event ticketing and registrations, and (i) flying to Stockholm 72 hours later for another conference, this is not how NDC London was, is, or ever will be for you.

Think of this more as a glimpse into how Dylan’s link of the proverbial sausage gets made. (I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether the story is told from the perspective of the butcher, or the perspective of the pig…)

The thing that makes NDC London different to most other events in my calendar is that it’s a hometown show. I live in London; it’s been home for nearly 25 years. But London isn’t like other places. Not even close. I live about 6 miles away from the QEII conference centre, as the crow flies (although this being London the crow is probably a feral pigeon) - but 6 miles in London is not like 6 miles where you live. The easiest way to explain it is that I probably pass two million people on my way in to Westminster every morning. Think about wherever you live. Draw a line from your house to whatever your nearest analog for “city centre” looks like… now keep going along that line until you’ve gone past two million people. See?

A typical conference week for me is half a day of packing - what do I need this time? If I’m running a workshop, I have a bunch of gear I use for that - portable HD screen, HDMI splitter, external keyboard. If I’m playing music at the after-party, I bring one set of music gear. If I’m doing a show with The Linebreakers, it’s a different set of music gear. Laptop, spare laptop, cables, chargers, clothes, wash bag, passport, pack all the things, head to the airport - and that’s it. The logistics are all front-loaded; once that bag’s been checked in and I’m through security, we’re done; the rest of the week is hotel breakfast, catered lunches, restaurant dinners, housekeeping bringing fresh towels… the actual event itself is often hard work, ‘cos that’s what makes it worthwhile, but the rest runs on autopilot.

When it’s a hometown show, things run a little different. Tuesday is a workshop day, which means up at 6am, coffee, porridge - always porridge on workshop days ‘cos it keeps my brain running until lunchtime - and then on a train by 7:15, which gets me to Westminster by 8, which is an hour early, but if I leave it any later than that there’s a good chance the Jubilee line trains are all too full to get on. Twenty minutes to set up the laptop, screen, HDMI splitter, keyboard, check the WiFi, find out which websites are being blocked, figure out how to work around them. Workshop 9am-5pm - live coding exercises, demos, examples, Q&A. Wrap up, deal with the day’s admin and reply to emails, then another hour on trains to get home. Unpack, figure out what I need to take in with me on Wednesday, make dinner, do the laundry, sleep. The Linebreakers are playing PubConf on Friday night, so my plan is to take a case full of band gear into the conference venue each day - as much as I can comfortably carry on public transport - then on Friday shift the whole lot to the PubConf venue in a cab. Wednesday’s an electric guitar and 10kg of effects and cables shoved in my rucksack. Thursday, a 15kg flight case full of microphones and XLR cables. Friday, 25kg wheely case with the mic stands, second guitar, laptop stand, and all the other bits that make the show happen.

My actual talk is on Wednesday morning - and it’s a new one, so I’ve been up late the night before finessing animations and checking videos. New talks normally get run through a user group a month or so before the conference… but with NDC London always happening at the end of January, Christmas tends to get in the way a bit and there’s not a whole lot of meetups going on in the weeks leading up to it. The talk goes well, although the room’s a little emptier than I expected; maybe it’s just the general dip in conference numbers, maybe it’s just that people don’t want to learn about CSS? But I’m happy with it, and the folks in the room said very positive things.

Wednesday afternoon is band rehearsal - the downside of having a band who all live in different countries is that we don’t get a whole lot of rehearsal time, so this is where weeks of everybody learning their own parts and playing along to backing tracks finally gels into something approximating a show. It goes well. I skip the speaker dinner in favour of sleep. Sleep is good.

Thursday I have every intention of going to some talks. It doesn’t happen - the day disappears into a series of the sort of excellent conversations that only happen when the right people are all in the same room, catching up with folks from Particular, and Dometrain, and Twilio, and Umbraco, and old friends from the nerd circuit who I haven’t seen in way too long.

Thursday evening I’m running the NDC party. Now, I think the social events at conferences are just as much a part of the attendee experience as the talks, but the speakers who do the fun talks and comedy bits at the party? Most of them aren’t giving it the slightest thought until their “proper” session is out of the way - which is absolutely fair enough. This means the party inevitably coalesces out of chaos at about 3pm on Thursday - but you know, after more than a decade of doing this, we are damn good at coalescing things out of chaos. The party itself is a blast - Alan Smith’s Sonic Pi DJ set is fantastic, there are great comedy bits from Glenn Henriksen, Hannes Lowette, Amy Kapernick, Ash Bzak, Richard Campbell tells the story of Goliath, which I have seen half-a-dozen times and still makes me roar with laughter every time. I dust off my old “How To Succeed in the Enterprise” talk I wrote for PubConf a few years back, which goes down a storm, and we round out with karaoke, which works great in this kind of venue ‘cos you’ve already got a laptop, a huge projector screen, and a couple of handheld mics so there’s nothing much to pack up at the end of the night.

Home just after midnight (and stone cold sober, because Friday is another day). Dinner was Mexican food at the party (did I mention the food at NDC is always excellent?) but that was a long time ago, so second dinner is a chicken baguette from Greggs in Westminster station, which happens to be open and adjacent at the exact moment I realise I’m starving. Just in case any of you were reading this thinking that the international conference circuit was 100% glitz and glamour.

Friday morning, I take an hour out of conference time to get out on my bike; cycling the five-mile loop to the top of Crystal Palace Park every day this winter has been doing good things for my blood pressure and my brain - not to mention my knees - and as loath as I am to admit it, I actually miss the exercise after three days of conference. This is, of course, the day that I get a puncture right at the top of the hill. I figure it’ll be quicker to fix it and cycle than to wheel my bike all the way home, so I spend fifteen minutes in the cold changing the tyre; cycle home, shower, get dressed, grab my backpack and the 25kg wheely case and head into Westminster again.

Friday lunchtime is about the point when the folks speaking at PubConf finally start sending me their presentations, so on Friday afternoon all I need to do is transport 50kg of music gear to the pub, schlep it downstairs, figure out their PA system and projector set-up, plug it all in - which would be enough of a pain in the ass if it was on a bench in a well-lit workshop; doing it on the floor in a dimly-lit pub is definitely my least favourite part of the whole enterprise - while simultaneously building the PubConf deck as people send me Dropbox and OneDrive links to MP4 and PPTX files.

There’s always a list of things we think would be cool - let’s record the show! Let’s get video of the show! - that, by the time we’re set up and sound-checked, we’re already too knackered to think about… and then the audience starts to arrive, and the excitement starts to build, and the room fills up, and there’s a buzz, and I get the last few bits dropped into the presentation deck, and then… showtime.

With, inevitably, a handful of technical glitches. PowerPoint on macOS decides today’s the day it’s going to play Chris Ayers’ MP4 at three frames per second. It has never done this before. Ever. Sorry, Chris. Computer says meh. A reboot seems to clear it. The XVive wireless monitors that we use in the band, which worked flawlessly during soundcheck (and at every show we’ve done before) - tonight, channel 1 isn’t working. It worked earlier… maybe interference from 75 nerds with at least one WiFi-enabled device each packed into a basement that’s basically a giant Faraday cage? Channel 2 isn’t great either, but hey, we’ve got four more to try… cue some hastily improvised jokes about the history of UK broadcast television and how we don’t want to try Channel 5 in case it all comes out sounding like the Spice Girls - while we’re simultaneously channel-hopping our wireless units to find a channel that works; channel 3 saves the day. In the logistical chaos, I forgot one tiny bit of gear - the thing that clips my phone onto my mic stand, so I can adjust my own in-ear monitor mix during the show. Probably no big deal… right up until the point I realise during “Playing the Planning Poker” that I can’t hear the drum track, and I can’t fix it right away ‘cos it’s hard to get your phone out your pocket when both hands are busy playing the guitar… I make a mental note that it is, in fact, a Big Deal and I probably shouldn’t forget it again.

But the show is a triumph. The PubConf speakers - Chris Ayers, Brandon Minnick, Glenn Henriksen, Chris Simon - and the PubConf singers (yep, that’s a thing now) - Ash Bzak, Helvira Goma, Jo Minney, Damian Brady, David Whitney, William Brander, Jordan Miller, and Arthur Doler - absolutely smash it out of the park; the band plays a couple of new things we’ve not played in London before that go down really well, Rytis does a fantastic job running the sound mix on the venue’s slightly temperamental PA system, and Vagif gets the biggest applause of the night after dropping out of the gig because of a broken shoulder but then deciding to come along and play a couple of tunes anyway.

There’s a surprise, too… as we’re about to launch into “Enterprise Waterfall”, Hannes stops the show, Chris Ayers approaches the stage with a VERY LARGE BOX, and the gang presents me with the Lego Starship Enterprise - a little something to say thank you for Making The Crazy Things Happen. I’m lost for words. I actually cry a little. It’s perfect. It’s lovely. It’s completely unexpected. (It’s also another 6kg of luggage to take home at the end of the night… but hey, at this point, who’s counting? 🤣)

And then there’s music, and dancing, and laughter, and karaoke, and rye whisky, and single malt scotch and a very expensive cab home, and more scotch, and something approximating sleep, and then a day of bad TV and tactical naps and Chinese food and working on promo materials for the next thing I’m doing, and then a day of unpacking and repacking (and another puncture), and now, less than 72 hours after it all wrapped up, I’m on an aeroplane somewhere over the North Sea on my way to Stockholm, where there’s four inches of snow on the ground, a load of Java developers at one conference, and a load of .NET developers at another conference. The plan is two talks, two dinners, one live music and comedy show, say hello to as many people as I possibly can, give the stone lions a hug, pay my respects to Pub Anchor if I can find the time, and be home in time for the open mic at Ignition on Thursday night.

Should be fun.

The Road to Excel

Chris Rea’s “The Road to Hell” is one of my favourite albums of all time. You probably remember the title track, but the rest of the album is fantastic - great tunes, great production, and some truly phenomenal guitar playing; Chris had a very distinctive hybrid slide playing style, something between Mark Knopfler and Ry Cooder, and it’s all over this record.

Now, back in 2021, when the news headlines was full of reports that COVID patient data was getting lost because of government departments using Excel as a data interchange format, I recorded a version of Chris Rea’s “The Road to Hell” about… well, about exactly that.

I never got the guitars quite right - did I mention that Chris was a phenomenally talented guitar player? After a week or two of of trying to figure out the guitar lines, recording and re-recording licks and solos and never quite getting it all to hang together quite right, I shelved it and it’s been sat in a Dropbox folder ever since.

With the sad news of Chris’ passing this week, I thought perhaps now would be a good time to share it. Not finished, no video, you can hear the rough edges - but here it is.

Rest in peace, Chris. Thank you for the music.

So You Want To Speak At Software Conferences?

I run a .NET user group here in London, and we host a lot of talks from people who are relatively inexperienced presenters. Sometimes they’ve done presentations internally but never spoken before a public audience. Sometimes they’re developers who have been in theatre or played in bands; people with plenty of stage experience but who haven’t presented on technical topics before - and sometimes they’ve never done any kind of public presentations or performance at all. We aim to be a friendly, supportive crowd; public speaking can be daunting, and the first public outing of somebody’s first talk can be… let’s just say that the presenter sometimes learns a lot more than the audience, and leave it at that.

But it can also be a hugely rewarding experience, and as a seasoned tech presenter who’s been doing this for a while, aspiring speakers often ask me for advice on how to take it to the next level.

Before we get into the specifics, there are two things to bear in mind.

One: ask yourself why you want to do this. What does “the next level” mean for you? Are you looking to promote your consultancy, or your training courses, or your software products? Do you want to become a professional speaker and actually get paid to give talks? Are you doing it ‘cos you want to go places and meet people? Figure out what “success” looks like for you.

Two: be realistic about how much work is involved. It took me seven years to go from my first user group lightning talk, back 2008, to my first international conference. If you think you can hack together some code, write a talk about it, stick it on Sessionize and three months later you’re on your way to a major international event like NDC or Yow! or Devoxx… well, no. That’s not how this works. Strap in; it’s a long ride.

Year 1: Get Good

Write the talk. Write a talk nobody else could do; tell a story nobody else can tell. Figure out what your audience is going to learn, and why you’re the best person to teach them that. Then give it at local user group. It might go great. It might be a train wreck. Don’t worry. That’s one of the reasons user groups exist. Learn from the experience. Fix the demos. Fix the slides. If it was too short? Write some more. If it was too long? Cut something. Give it at another user group. Do it again. Do it again. Maybe write a second talk, shop that one around a couple of user groups too.

If you can’t find user groups, look on Meetup.com. Yes, it’s a horrible platform, but it works; search by topic, search by region, find groups that look like a good match for your content, and ask if they’re looking for speakers. They probably are.

Year 2: Get Seen

After user groups and meetups come the community conferences. Typically small, one-day events, with a few tracks, and usually free (or very cheap) to attend. For me, these were the DDD events _(that’s DDD as in Developers! Developers! Developers!, not to be confused with DDD as in Domain Driven Design), _a series of one-day free developer events around the UK, organised by volunteers, usually on a Saturday so people don’t have to take time off work. They bring in a good crowd, they’re a great way to get to know other presenters and people who are involved in tech events, and you’ll almost certainly meet a few people who are on the programme committees for the bigger conferences.

Events like this are your chance to get noticed. Turn up the day before, join the pre-conference dinner and drinks, introduce yourself. Yeah, it’s awkward when you don’t know anybody. There will be other people there who don’t know anybody and will appreciate you making the effort. Enjoy yourself, but don’t end up doing tequila shots in a karaoke bar at 3am. Not now. You’re there to give a talk, remember?

Go to the event. Spend the whole day there, do your talk, watch the other sessions. Communicate with the organisers. You don’t want their memorable impression of you to be a half-hour of panic and missed calls because one of their speakers has gone AWOL and nobody knows where they are.

Figure out how to keep in touch with the people you met. Join the Signal or WhatsApp group chat; if there isn’t one, create one. Follow them on LinkedIn, or Bluesky - be prepared to go where people are; don’t expect folks to join Mastodon just because that’s where you want to talk to them. That’s not how this works. If you really don’t want to play the social media game - and I can’t blame you - there’s always good old-fashioned email. A short email a week later saying “hey, thanks for having me” or “hey, I loved your session at DDD, let’s keep in touch” can pay off in a big way.

Finally, watch out for events that put video of their sessions online. Having a couple of YouTube links of you doing your thing in front of a live, appreciate audience can make all the difference when a programme committee is looking at a handful of talks and can only accept one of them.

Year 3: Get Accepted

You’ve got a couple of talks. You’ve delivered then enough times that you know they’re good *(and if they’re not good, make them good - or scrap them and write new ones)*. You know people. People know you. If somebody asks “hey, do we know anybody who could do a good session about $topic”, your name comes up. You’ve got a decent network of connections - group chats, LinkedIn, email addresses.

Now, find all the conferences in your field with an open Call for Papers (CfP), and get submitting. Dave Aronson over at codeasaur.us maintains a really useful list of CfPs which are closing soon. Check that regularly. Many events will cover your travel & hotel costs, although with sponsorship budgets drying up right across the industry that’s not as prevalent as it was a few years ago. If not, maybe you can persuade your employer to pay your travel - “hey, boss, if I can get a free ticket to this amazing conference with all these industry experts, do you think the company will pay my air fare & hotel?”

Lean on your network. What are people submitting to? Which events should you look out for? Which topics are getting a lot of traction (and which topics are not?)

Keep your content fresh. Write new talks. Keep giving them at user groups and community events.

Keep your submissions focused. 2-3 talks per event; don’t submit ten wildly different abstracts to the same conference in the hope one of them will get accepted. Every selection committee I’ve been on, if we see that, we assume the presenter hasn’t actually written *any* of them yet and is throwing everything they can think of into the mix and hoping one of them gets chosen. Not a great way to stand out. An open CFP at a big tech conference typically gets 20+ submissions for every available slot, which means if you reduce it to a numbers game, you’re submitting 20 talks for every one that gets accepted. Keep track of the numbers, and be objective about it.

Year 4: Get Bored.

It’s great fun doing this for a while… but it’s also exhausting. Some people hit it hard for a few years, do all the things, go to all the places, make a lot of great friends and happy memories, and then wake up one day and decide that’s enough. Some people do a few talks, tick it off their bucket list and decide that’s enough for them. Some settle into a gentle routine of 3-4 events they’ll do every year. And yes, some of us end up treating our calendars like a game of Tetris, juggling flights and trains and hotels and meetups and conferences and spending half the year on the road and the other half writing talks and workshops and all the other things it’s hard to do when you’re at the airport.

That’s why you gotta figure out ahead of time what “success” looks like. If you’re doing it for fun, remember to have fun - and if you find you’re not enjoying it any more? Stop. If you’re doing it as promotion or marketing? Track your leads. Make sure it’s actually generating the attention and the revenue it’s supposed to. If you’re doing it for money, be mercenary: no pay, no play. Not every event is the same, of course. In a given year I’ll have some events that are fun, some that are lucrative, some that are running alongside workshops or training engagements. Just make sure you know which is which.

Finally: respect your audience. Whether you’re talking to five people at a meetup, fifty at a community event, or five thousand at a huge international conference: those people are the reason you get to do this. They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time. If you find you’re bored, fed up, tired, running talks on autopilot or making mistakes because you just don’t care? It’s time to try something else - and remember, there’s a thousand aspiring speakers out there who would dearly love to take that spot instead of you.

Now get out there. Work hard, have fun, teach us awesome things, and if you ever want me to look over an abstract or a slide deck, drop me a line - [email protected]. I’d be happy to help.