Wow! Two Three month really went by so quick. I am, right now, sitting on my couch (not anymore, it’s the kitchen table now) and thought “Let’s see how long I haven’t posted on my personal site anymore” and ouch, that was quite some time. Reason for this was that I have done a couple of things that kept me busy (and happy). Sure, beyond tellerrand in Berlin, but a lot of other things also.

Let’s see what it was …

SmashingConf New York (1–10 October)

In 2014 we organised our very first SmashingConf in New York. This year, 11 years later, we are still running the show, but taking a break next year. New York and running SmashingConf there always has been special in some way.

This loud and busy city has a certain buzz to it that I love and that energises me. Back in 2018 I took our two oldest children to NYC for the first time, 2022 my oldest son and a friend of him and this year my oldest daughter again. It always is fantastic, if that is possible and they are not in university or busy otherwise. The event itself was a success and proof that events in the U.S. are still possible and needed.

St. Johann in Tyrol (11–19 October)

For decades we take the family to a hiking trip to St. Johann in Tyrol. We always aim for the complete family, including my parents in law as well as my sister’s in law family. And while it is not always possible and we mostly drive with our family and my parents in law, this time it worked out and we went on longer hiking trips all together again. Pure joy for the soul.

Gastspiel

My friend Andreas Dantz has been to beyond tellerrand quite often. In fact we have been to quite a number of other events together also already. A longer time already, he decided to leave his career as a web design and wanted to focus on YouTube. Unter the label of “Spiel & Zeug” he produces videos around smart home tech and all things that somehow touch this topic and does a really good job in my opinion. Close to 400k subscribers might agree to me.

Lately he had the idea of running his first ever event for his channel and the people supporting him. He asked me if I would support him and his team and I surely was up for another event adventure. It was great fun being part of this and once more showed, that a person (or people) driven by passion for what he does is one of reasons why people follow a channel or a community builds around a channel/event/product.

beyond tellerrand Berlin 2025

11 years after starting a second edition in Berlin each year, this years marks the last one for now. It was such a fantastic experience once more and surely everybody who came was sad to hear that I take a break in Berlin. They are not the people responsible for the break and therefore they are not to blame for it and I was very sorry to tell them.

The years after Covid have been incredible tough for me. Mostly financially, but that also has an effect on me mentally. Not directly, but after a while and with steadily rising importance the more I worry about paying the bills for my family etc. Especially Berlin has proven to be a tough job. People buy tickets very late or get approval too late to get their tickets. Sponsors went down to 10% of what it has been before the pandemic and in parallel everything gets more and more expensive: flights, hotel, venue rent, staff …

2026 will be the 15th year since I started running the show under the name of “beyond tellerrand” and I want to focus and celebrate the 15th year of the show in Düsseldorf on 27th and 28th of April with the known friendly and positive vibe and a positive push for anyone in our industry.

SPOILER Concert

We started this band in 2002, I know three of my bandmates since I am 14 or 15 years old and I can’t repeat often enough how much joy every Thursday is, where we meet for a few hours of making music together and chatting about nonsense.

2025 marks the year when we started playing live again after a longer break and have written a whole lot of new music. We decided a while ago that we focus on a few gigs a year where we know the audience would like our music and are not younger than our children.

Skate-Aid Night

For a number of year I am supporting Skate-Aid, a charity organisation that helps to empower children through skateboarding. What sounds like a strange way to get children off the streets and give them a purpose works wonderfully. So far Skate-Aid has created more than 25 projects in 18 different countries around the world.

Part of the money we make with beyond tellerrand always supports Skate-Aid and during the last two years I helped bringing artists like Rob Draper and Salventius to the Skate-Aid Night where they performed live and gave 100% of the revenue to Skate-Aid.

TYPO3 Conference and Awards Gala

For two years TYPO3 is supporting beyond tellerrand as a Global Partner. Next top their input to beyond tellerrand, this partnership is a two-way partnership which means, I bring in myself also. In 2024 I spoke at their event, have been a jury member of their awards and was interviewed on stage during the awards gala show. This time I had been a more passive role and visited their well organised events. They improved the conference days with a different setup and had a police cover band playing in the breaks of their gala.

I once more can say “Congrats! Well done.” and hope that our partnership continues in 2026. 🙏

Christmas and Our Journey to 2026

Last but not least – and that is the reason for publishing this post 3 weeks after starting to write it – I took some well needed time off with my family. We had a calm and cozy time around Christmas and celebrated New Year with a few friends.

As this post marks the first one for 2026, I’d love to end it with a favour to ask you for: spread love and positive energy. Motivate each other, celebrate achievements and push everyone who does something lovely into the spotlight to share how great it is what they do or who they are. We need each other to multiply positivity against anything negative. And where one might be not strong enough, let’s support each other.

♥️

When chatting to my friend Basti recently, he asked me if I had see the latest Video of Rick Beato on YouTube and I had not to that point. Now I have and I simply agree to everything Rick says there.

Rick is a musician that I love to watch. I got to know his channel via his “What makes this song great” video in which he takes apart music and explains why he thinks that this song is great. Recently he got more into interviewing people. Big names. In his very down to earth way, passionated and his true interest in music, he also does this fantastically, I think.

He also records videos and live streams in which he talks about YouTube as his business. Struggles, how YouTube and life as a content creator have changed and all those things and I sometimes find it quite motivating what he says, as you can take is findings and advice to use it for the things you do – like me, running beyond tellerrand. This can be simple statements like this …

[…] posting things, YouTube videos, songs on Spotify, whatever, doesn't guarantee success. But not posting them guarantees failure.

… where he is just right. But I myself need to constantly remind me of exactly that, when I am worrying about what I do.

The next bit, in which he talks about sticking to something also reminded me of what Basti said to me a couple of weeks ago:

[…] the idea of sticking with something for a really long time. This is something that very few people unfortunately have the ability to do.

Basti recently finished the new beyond tellerrand website and with it comes a section with a catalogue of all speakers who ever spoke at my beyond tellerrand events. And he said that this was quite an impressive number when seeing them all listed at once. I mean, I run this show for nearly 15 years now. That is an achievement and he is right. But you, well at least I, sometimes have to be reminded of that.

Rick, when he continues after the quote above, also states that, of course it also does not only comes down to sticking to something, but also producing and creating good quality stuff and that you have to pour a lot of love and passion into what you do.

Then he touches another one of today’s challenges …

[…] the other thing that's competing for your attention now, unfortunately, is AI BS or AI slop, whatever you want to call it. Every time I open up Instagram, it's all AI videos. You know, these stupid disaster things where somebody jumps off a bridge, onto a trampoline, they bounce back up and they get on the bridge and then the bridge collapses or all these disaster things. A wave comes over and washes people away. I mean, obviously fake videos, one after another after another after another, and they are competing for your attention. And these platforms are promoting this stuff. They're promoting fake content made by computers that can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You're competing against that. That's the sad part of it.

I mean, I am not completely against AI. There are really good and useful use cases. But this bullshit Rick is talking about is real and he is so right about it. That is why we really need to write more, record more, meet more in real and create real content made of real emotions and not fake. Just complaining won’t help. Neither will doing nothing at all.

So, why don’t we all do the stuff we like even more and support each other even more to point people who might not know to it to multiply reach? That also counts for jobs and work. If you know someone who is doing good work, don’t get tired to promote them to other who, at some point, might need someone in that field and remembers your recommendation.

We really need to do this more again. And, you know, it can actually be fun!

That’s my wish for the upcoming year.

It was great to be back in London and met a few lovely people. Keir Whitaker managed to create another great day with his Craft & Work event. A full room, great conversations and an overall good atmosphere.

If you want to have proof, here is my set of photos from the day.

A quick note: I am moving to a new hosting partner. In case there are any dropouts, please stay tuned. We are working on it.

So far email accounts have been transferred, all .de domains are already on the new server and transfer for all international domains has been started, but still needs a while to be complete for whatever reason. The deployment chains have been edited and all websites are already deployed to the new server.

I hope that the rest won’t need too long to avoid downtimes, but in case you experience a few hickups, then you know why.

Big shoutout to Mittwald for their fantastic support and seamless tools which make the move as easy as possible. More about that at a later point.

I am with my current hosting partner since 1999 when they still had the name One-2-One. I usually was happy with them and they even sponsor two of my servers. One on which runs everything beyond tellerrand related and one where anything else, like this page, runs on.

Surely within 26 years there is the one or other thing that is not your most favourite decision, but in general I have been satisfied. Even in a way that in one year, when they started to sponsor the servers also, I agreed to be featured in a campaign with interviews and full page ads in magazines. Sadly a lot of the things I said back then are things I would not say anymore.

Obligatory Switch to Microsoft 365

During the years prices increased and decisions were made, I did not agree to 100%. 2016 they were acquired by GoDaddy and I was hoping that not too much would change. It did not so much for me, but beginning of this year Host Europe announced their switch to Microsoft 365. Obligatory. No other choice than to eat this or leave.

That is really sad. Not only because I do not want to use it, but I also would have to pay extra for any singe email account now. And that are quite some accounts.

The Sad Leave

I am now looking into other options for my domains, websites, and email. This is a painful decision as, like I said, I actually was satisfied, but also because it is an annoying act and work I do not need these days, to be honest.

I am not really angry about this, but really sad and disappointed that they don’t leave any other options and don’t seem to care about the customer. 26 years of loyalty (well, and my money) and they let you hang with “you can always quit, if you don’t want to use Microsoft 365”.

Sad and disappointing.

Another Smashing Conference in Freiburg in the books. This year we added workshop day before the main conference next to the one after the conference days.

I created these photos during our event.

When I mentioned, how my timeline looks on Facebook these days, when I visit it – which I rarely do really, Jeremy Keith gave me the tip to add “?sk=h_chr” to the URL, which removes all the crap like suggested posts, groups and so on and gives you a clean, chronological timeline.

Nice one and I thought I simply write it down for me and share it with you, if you didn’t know either.

So, instead of using https://www.facebook.com/ use https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr.

Ouh … quick! Today is the last day to grab your SUPER EARLY BIRD ticket for State of the Browser 2026.

Nearly forgot to remind you – phew. An remember: get your tickets early ;)

👉 https://2026.stateofthebrowser.com

Of course many will ask why even have a website these days? Well, I've had my site for twenty five years and it contains the entire archive of my work in that time. Nobody can tell me what I can and can't put on there. Nobody can switch it off. The platform it's on – the web - is not going to disappear because it got acquired by a big company. It's mine and I'm free to do with it as I please. It's also really useful too. Many times I've looked up how to do something, or how to write a certain piece of code and I've found it on my blog, having written it up in case it comes in handy later.

What Brendan says!

Based on the feedback I received, many of you enjoyed the newsletter recommendations I shared last time and Eric and Dan even followed up and added their readings. So, I’m doing it again. This time with a few more of the reads that regularly land in my inbox, whether daily, weekly, or somewhere in between.

How to Survive the Internet

I first discovered Jamie Bartlett through his books, like “The Dark Net” and “The People Vs Tech”, as well as his podcast “The Missing Cryptoqueen”. A while ago, he launched a newsletter called “How to Survive the Internet” and it’s consistently a great read.

👉 Check “How to Survive the Internet”

Design Reviewed

Matt Lamont is a collector of graphic design artifacts, dedicated to preserving printed materials that both inspire and educate about the history of design. His newsletter “Design Reviewed” delivers curated pieces from his extensive archive straight to your inbox. Well, and I find it absolutely wonderful and inspiring.

👉 Check “Design Reviewed”

CSS Weekly

With over 600 editions, “CSS Weekly” is one of the newsletters that exists for a longer time already. Zoran Jambor does an excellent job curating news and useful resources for anyone interested in web development and especially CSS.

👉 Check “CSS Weekly”

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That is it for this one. But why don’t you do what Eric and Dan did and also share yours? Would be lovely to get a few more recommendations ;)