We run this edition since 2012 in Freiburg. Always lovely to be, where Vitaly and I started it.

Here are a few impressions of the days.

Full album with 157 photos here.

I try travel by train more. For beyond tellerrand, for conferences, for meetings. On 2 September I booked a ticket from Forsthaus to Berlin for €198. On 3 September I had to change my plans of traveling by car and needed a train ticket to Freiburg. Second class was shown to me for roughly €349. An offer next to it showed €364 for the first class, which I bought. Despite the fact that it is nearly impossible to take the DB on short notice as it is horrible expensive and really no alternative for those cases, that is €562 in two days.

On the evening of 3 September I was scrolling through Instagram and saw an ad from Deutsche Bahn. The BahnCard 25 at half price. The promotion ran from 1 to 30 September 2026. It covered the business cards too. The BahnCard Business 25 for first class was €69,99 instead of 144.

So the promotion was already running when I booked both tickets. I was shown none of it. Not in the search results, not in the basket, not on the payment page, not in the confirmation.

With the card, I would have saved 25% on both tickets. Roughly €140. Minus the €70 for the card, that comes to about €70. I bought the card anyway, because it pays for itself in my case regardless. Just four hours too late.

What the Booking System Knew

This is the part I actually want to talk about, as I think it is bad customer service and stupid btw.

At the moment I clicked “book now”, the system had every piece of information it needed to do that sum …

• The fare with: €364
• The class: first
• Whether a BahnCard was stored in my account: no.
• Whether a BahnCard promotion was running: yes, its own.

Four values, one multiplication, one comparison. This is not hard engineering. This is a bloody conditional in a template.

The hint was not forgotten. My guess such things are never planned.

The Difference Between Advertising and Service

Deutsche Bahn wanted to sell me that card. I know this because they spent money putting an ad in front of me on Instagram. And it worked. The sale happened.

It just happened through a channel that costs money, rather than the one that would have cost nothing for them. And through a channel I happened to be on, rather than the one where I was demonstrably about to spend money.

The difference between those two channels is not technical. It is organisational. The ad comes from marketing, which is measured on conversions. The booking flow belongs to a different team, probably measured on drop-off and in that logic an extra message at checkout looks like friction before it looks like anything else.

The result is a system where the one piece of information that saves the customer money is missing from precisely the place where it would have saved them money.

The Reply

I wrote to the business service. Politely, with all the documents attached, asking whether they would consider a goodwill gesture. I knew I had no claim. Super Sparpreis tickets cannot be cancelled and a retroactive discount is a discretionary decision, not a legal one. I said exactly that also in the email.

The reply took a long time and ran to three sentences. That redeeming the discount retroactively or offsetting it was unfortunately not possible. That they hoped to welcome me back on board soon. And then a request to help them improve their offer and their service by filling in a survey. 😂 Oh the irony …

I had just described, at some length, how the offer and the service could be improved. The answer was a link to a form where I could describe it again(!), this time in predefined categories.

Two Things I Am Not Claiming

First: I was not entitled to that money. I am aware of this. Deutsche Bahn is under no obligation to tell anyone about a running promotion and none to refund anything after the fact. Turning me down was within their rights. Sure.

My problem is not with their decision. It is with a system that creates the situation in the first place and with a reply that does not acknowledge the point being made!

Second: this was not a new-customer offer. The discounted BahnCard was available to everyone, me included! That makes it worse rather than better.

If the promotion applied to me and nobody told me about it while I was spending €562 with that exact company, then this is not a question of how a business treats new customers versus existing ones. It is simply that nobody thought to let the two systems talk to each other.

My Wish

One sentence in the basket. Something like: with a BahnCard 25, currently €69,99 instead of €144, this booking would cost €272,84 instead of €363,78.

That is it. No modal, no interstitial, no newsletter sign-up. One damn sentence in the place where it matters.

Anyone who designs or builds this kind of thing knows the objection. Every extra message at checkout is a risk to conversion. True. But this is not cross-selling and it is not an upsell.

It is a message that makes the basket cheaper and raises the average order value for the next twelve months, because someone with a BahnCard takes the train more often, right? ;)

Like I did for the first half of the year, here is my list of events I attend from August 2026 on. Some of these I help to organise, some are run by good friends, and at some of them you’ll find me with a camera in my hands. Maybe more to come, but those are the events – in chronological order – where I have travel and accommodation booked and where I’d love to meet you ;)

Forward Festival, Berlin

Forward Festival is a creativity festival that started in 2015. The Berlin edition takes place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, known from the good old TYPO events that have always been there. 50+ speakers across three stages over two days, mixing talks with workshops, an expo area, installations, side events and parties. The line-up leans towards design, branding, art direction and motion, with names like Stefan Sagmeister, Anton & Irene, Mr. Bingo, FutureDeluxe and Gemma O’Brien. Less “sit and listen”, more “wander, meet people, get inspired” and I am lookimng forward to meeting a lot of the above listed people, who have spoken at beyond tellerrand.

📆 27–28 August 2026
💰 €370 (Late Bird), Students under 28 €125, Day Pass €205
👉 Programme and tickets

Smashing Conference, Freiburg

SmashingConf Freiburg is a bit of a homecoming for me. Vitaly Friedman and I founded this conference series back in 2012 and Freiburg is where it all started for Smashing Magazine. This is already the 14th edition in the beautiful Historisches Kaufhaus right at Münsterplatz: two conference days, one track, twelve speakers, plus workshop days before and after. Expect design systems, AI, accessibility, CSS, animation and a lot of “this is how I actually work” live sessions rather than polished showcases. Speakers include Jake Archibald, Emma Bostian, Hidde de Vries, Eva Ferreira, Ioana Teleanu, Joe Natoli and a mystery guest.

📆 7–10 September 2026 (conference 8–9 September, workshops 7 and 10 September)
💰 Conference €770, Workshops €590, bundled tickets and team discounts available
👉 All information and tickets

Hatch Conference, Berlin

Hatch is Berlin’s conference for product and UX designers, hosted at Silent Green – a former crematorium turned cultural quarter (also home of Berlin Letters), which gives the whole thing much more of a design festival feeling than a corporate conference. Two stages, around 15 sessions and a line-up curated for topics rather than follower counts: Paula Scher (Pentagram), Randy Hunt (Notion), Sara Vienna (Metalab), Nicole Michaelis (Pleo), Mehmet Aydın Baytaş (Attio) and others. There are also full- and half-day workshops on the two days before the conference.

📆 18 September 2026 (workshops 16–17 September, onsite only)
💰 Onsite sold out – Online €75 (+ VAT), 5 passes €300, 10 passes €500
👉 Programme and tickets

Kirby Konf, Mainz (GER)

Kirby Konf has a story. The first one was supposed to happen in 2020 – venue booked, tickets sold out, hotels reserved, catering ordered. And then the first lockdowns hit two weeks before the doors were meant to open. Six years later, the team is giving it another try and I’m happy to be part of the crew organising and helping with it. Two days at the Gutenberg Hub in Mainz for everyone building websites with Kirby. Developers, designers and people who just love a CMS that stays out of the way. Confirmed speakers include Matthias Ott, Bruno Meilick, Fabian Michael, Thomas Günther, Johanna Hörrmann, Yoshie Agata, Justus Kraft, Markus Denhoff and Sascha Bregenhorn. If you work with Kirby, this is the place to be this year.

📆 25–26 September 2026
💰 €159 (sold out – waiting list active)
👉 Speakers, schedule and tickets

Craft & Work, London

Craft & Work is run by my good friends Keir Whitaker and Craig Cooper, and it’s the opposite of a big stage event: 50 people in one room at Wallacespace Clerkenwell, a mix of short presentations, hot-seat interviews and group discussions with plenty of room for actual conversation. The audience is made up of soloists, founders and leaders. Many from the Shopify partner ecosystem, but also people from ecommerce, SaaS and consulting. No gurus, no formulas, just honest talk about what it takes to build and run something. The ticket also includes “The Amuse Bouche”, a relaxed evening gathering the night before. I’ll be there taking photos and looking forward to good conversations. As always.

📆 9 October 2026 (pre-event evening on 8 October)
💰 £235 + VAT (~€270)
👉 All details and tickets

Storyblok JoyConf, Mainz

JoyConf is Storyblok’s own conference and Storyblok has been a partner of beyond tellerrand for a while now. Last year’s edition brought together 750 attendees from 35 countries with 70 speakers and the 2026 edition moves to the Rheingoldhalle in Mainz, 25 minutes from Frankfurt Airport. The theme is “Content Confidence. Human Connection.”, aimed at developers, marketers and digital leaders working on content systems in an AI-driven world. Speakers announced so far include Dame Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Keelan Leyser, Stefan Baumgartner, Sahil Gambhir (Lokalise) and Dominik himself. And the best part: it’s free.

📆 28–29 October 2026
💰 Free (registration required)
👉 Agenda, venue and registration

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Certainly there are more events around the world, but event budget – also with me – is tighter than it used to be. Less earning, less spending. Easy math done here.

If you need event photos or want to hire me as event consultant – with more than 25 years of experience in that field – to help you with you events, please get in touch

Apart from that: which events are you attending? Will we meet somewhere? Do you know of exciting new events that I don’t know of yet, but that should be on my radar?

Ana Rodrigues has transformed a past talk into a lovely read about how her personal website became her third-space. That place that is neither home nor work, where you gather, wander around and meet people.

She writes about chasing IndieWeb perfection for years, about the pressure she put on herself to build all the tools and endpoints and about how her blog slowly turned into a chore because of it. What helped was letting go: no over-engineering, a site that feels cosy rather than finished, rough code, personal posts instead of a polished professional persona. And carving out time to actually visit other people’s websites again, sign guestbooks, send emails that feel like postcards.

Her takeaway is one I like a lot: everything takes time to build, understand, realise and appreciate. Ten years in, she has an archive she can link to, quote and browse through. Plus she is fairly sure that if she had binned it all in 2015, she would never have known what she was giving up.

Read her post. And then maybe go and work on your own little corner of the web again. ;)

Chris Shiflett turned 50 in May and wrote a piece about it that I keep thinking about and that I kept marked as “unread” in my RSS reader to come back to it later. Now I found the time to reflect on what he has written.

It is the story of a life spent with the web: BBSes and dial-up, the accidental slide into being a web developer, security work in the years when the standards we all still use were being written, eDonkey in New York, and then Brooklyn Beta, which he says is still the thing he is proudest of. I understand that part very well. ;)

In the middle of the post he gets honest. He lost his spark somewhere along the way (and I can relate, like many of you, I guess). The web got rebuilt and stopped working, experimentation turned into extraction, the giants built their walls. He mentions that some of the people he admired most simply got quieter. He gave blockchain and Web 3.0 an honest chance, but none of it brought the feeling back.

What did bring something back, he writes, was curiosity. And eventually AI, not for learning new things but for reviving old projects he had let go. Not utopia, he is clear about that and he does not pretend the problems away. But he stopped calling himself a “former whatever”. His line for it: depth doesn’t expire.

Well, I turned 50 two years ago and much of this felt familiar. The same waves of technology, the same disillusionment, the same question of whether the good part is behind us. My answer has been events and rooms full of people rather than tools, but we land in the same place: experience matters, curiosity matters and a lot of people who quietly counted themselves out still have something to give.

Go and read Chris’ post.

Exactly what VFX Supervisor Marion Spates says here.

[…] I mean I hope everyone is excited as I am about what I do. The one thing I try to encourage every day is for us all to have fun. If people aren’t having fun, you are not going to get best work out of people.

This was the second talk I recommended as part of the beyond tellerrand partnership with TYPO3. They invited me to curate a few slots at this year at their Developer Days.

André Michelle agreed to join and I was happy that his talk was so wonderfully received. A great mixture of tech and audio. The version he gave at beyond tellerrand can be found here.

As part of the beyond tellerrand partnership with TYPO3, TYPO3 invited me to curate a few slots at this year’s developer days.

For one of the slots we picked Matthias Ott. Great talk once more, reminding us what creating with the web actually means and why this is important.

Here is the recording oft his talk from beyond tellerrand.

A few days ago, right after I posted my write-up of Head in the Cloud, my friend Sacha Judd, who spoke at beyond tellerrand three times already, published a piece called “What makes a conference great”. Reading it felt a little like hearing my own talk played back to me instantly. Coincidence from the other side of the planet. ;)

She comes at it differently than I did. Where I told stories from fifteen years of running events, she writes almost like an inventory of care: the website and communication that respects you before you’ve bought a ticket, the code of conduct you actually mean, name tags you can read without squinting, coffee that’s there when you need it. But underneath the details, we’re circling the same thing and content and statements overlap.

A few places where our two posts agree:

The real programme is the hallway – I keep saying the actual event happens in the breaks. At the tables, in the conversation that starts over coffee and continues at dinner. Sacha calls it the hallway track and lands on the point I always try to make: you can’t schedule the magic, you can only design the conditions for it. Generous breaks are an event’s way of saying it wants people to talk to each other.

People don’t come (just) for the information – she puts it more sharply than I did on stage: “Information is free and infinite and at home with better snacks” People come to be in a room with their community. That’s the bit you can’t download.

Curation is the product – I talked about independence being a question of attitude rather than legal form. Nobody at mittwald told me what to say or asked to see my slides. Sacha makes the same case from the programming side: a single track is an act of editorial conviction, a person with taste deciding what the whole room needs to hear. The opposite is the (badly planned) sponsor slot that’s secretly a sales pitch — the thing we both quietly can’t stand (which does not mean sponsors can’t do great talks!)

The talks that change you are the ones you’d never have picked – Sacha remembers the talk about grief when she’d come for design, the one about typography when she’d come for business … the talks nobody chooses for themselves. And that is exactly why the events I care about put grief and burnout and failure on the same stage as the technical stuff.

And then, without planning it, we land on the same last note: buy the ticket to the small conference and buy it early! While the organiser is still awake at night worrying about the numbers. I said more or less the same thing on stage: stop wondering and grab your ticket, because the community that shows up is the community that keeps these events alive.

That line of hers isn’t new, as it turns out. She first wrote it last November, in a newsletter called “hope rises” — written from beyond tellerrand in Berlin, where she’d just spoken and where, she mentions, she’d watched me open the whole thing the day before. And there she takes the idea a step further than I did on stage. Keeping these small events alive, Sacha argues, isn’t only about the events. It’s about holding on to a sense of hope about the internet itself at a moment when the platforms we live on are tuned for conflict and fear and the people doing independent, trustworthy work are often the ones getting throttled. Gathering in a room, learning from each other, just hanging out: that is part of how we remember that a better internet is still possible. Her image for it: “If platforms are going to dim the room, then we’ll bring lamps.”

Go read Sacha’s post and the newsletter it grew out of. They’re better than any checklist and even have a lovely FAQ for events.

Well and then, you know, buy the ticket. ;)