What interesting (and smaller) conferences are there in 2026?
24 points by veqq
24 points by veqq
It'd be nice to hear about interesting ones around the world. Particularly smaller ones e.g. for APL or Gleam.
BugBash is hosted by Antithesis in Washington DC in April and is a conference about software reliability.
BugBash is hosted by Antithesis in Washington DC in April and is a conference about software reliability.
Some of the presentations from last year were good. I especially enjoyed @mitchellh's talk on testing.
Software Should Work is an independent conference on software reliability. July 16-17 in Columbia, Missouri.
We hold EmacsConf every year, usually in early December. It's been primarily an online conference, but sometimes we also get one or more satellites organized by other volunteers around the world.
The EmacsConf 2025 talks are available at https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/ along with closed captions.
Thanks for helping organize these.
One of my favorite parts of December every year. I feel like the dev track has slowed down the past 2 years but that's probably less to do with organization and more to do with speakers volunteering.
Cyphercon is coming up in April. Always has lots of good talks. https://cyphercon.com/
One of my college friends gave a talk at Cyphercon last year! The DefCon chapter in Madison is also a really welcoming and cool community
I've enjoyed Stir Trek: a day of technical sessions, lunch, and screening a blockbuster scifi movie.
The Postgres community self-organizes small local conferences under the PGDay name and others. I'm helping out with two so far this year, PG DATA in Chicago this June, and PGDay Armenia coming up fast at the end of April. There's a community calendar with more!
Data in the D also has its second incarnation this fall in Detroit, with a more general "anything data" vibe.
There's almost certainly a BSides security conference nearby you, most of which are usually pretty small and incredibly community focused. BSides is an entirely distributed organization too, so if you don't like the one nearest you, the second nearest probably is quirky in it's own way (or you can even start your own)
Open Source Firmware Conference will be held this year probably in Europe, there is an Oxide and Friends episode about it https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/open-source-firmware
SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo, is happening in a little more than a week (March 5th through 8th). I'll be running a booth showing off the most portable distro, NetBSD :)
Web Engines Hackfest in A Coruña, Spain in June. It grew quite a bit last year going from I believe 80 people to roughly 120 people, perhaps? But it's still a small and pretty cozy three days, one of conferencing and two of workshops around various parts of web engines.
BazelCon is relatively small and niche versus all other conferences, but it has the highest concentration of folks who work in developer productivity field in all the buggest tech companies out there: faangmula, ai labs, jetbrains, hedge funds, rocket tech, self driving etc…
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/bazelcon/ It will be in Amsterdam Oct 13-15 and typically free to attend (sign up required)
28th German Perl/Raku Workshop (16th-18th March 2026 in Berlin)