We’ve just left Varberg after Goatmire 2026, and can’t emphasise enough how much we enjoyed it. We went to Goatmire last year as well, which was special because it was the first of it’s kind. But this year, it was on a whole new level.
The creativity at this conference, both from the team and the speakers is always outstanding. From the automated musical instruments to a fully fledged play acted out over the 3-day conference, Lars, Stina, Ellyse, Flora (and many others!) really went above and beyond to make this event super special. In this play, Odin (played by Lars) was a CEO overlord that wanted to create a subscription based model to Yydrasil, the tree of life. The goat was the poor developer, who had to contend with Mimir (a paper mache AI head) who was giving them a lot of slop (toilet paper). It was all very well thought out and cleverly weaved throughout the conference days. I got to play a goat on Friday morning and join in with the fun.
One of my favourite things about Goatmire is that it doesn’t really feel like a conference in the traditional sense. There’s something very different about an event where the speakers, organisers and attendees all seem to be invested in making the whole thing fun. People aren’t just turning up for talks and then disappearing back to their hotels. You talk to people throughout the day, get involved in things and then talk all night long. There was karaoke on Thursday night which was so much fun. I sang 500 miles by The Proclaimers with Sanne in my best scottish accent. It was my first karaoke experience and safe to say I loved it.
A couple of stand out talks for us was the Selberts’, a continuation of their murder mystery from last year. A whodunnit, where the audience had to guess who caused the production outage. The suspects were all people from the community and we were very blessed to get a shoutout. (Spoiler alert: we didn’t cause the outage… thank god). Quinn Wilson’s talk was also great. She spoke about a package that she has been developing (argus) to catch bugs in your code which will be especially useful now that AI is being used so much, and the rate at which we are producing code is increasing. James also did a fantastic talk about BEAM bots and even has two up on stage that were connected as part of a distributed cluster. So cool to see!
One of the funniest talks was Sasa Juric’s lightning talk given at a bar on Wednesday evening. It was a commentary on AI development and how we can avoid the AI slop madness. It was full of puns, and throughout the week he was wearing increasingly funny claude t-shirts.
Although we didn’t speak this year, we were lucky this year to be asked to give a couple of workshops. Although hard work, they were so fun to do. Those were our first workshops and they are complicated to prepare. We’ve given a couple of talks before, but a workshop is more involved. We created a storyline for each workshop. Docker 101 focused on the basics of Docker, from running containers, to writing images, using a Docker Compose file, and a real life Oban story. Terraform 101 focused on the basics of Terraform, HCL and how to create an infrastructure CD pipeline. In each of the workshops, we had created slides to go along with what we were saying, reading materials to follow along with, and then a repo full of exercises with the solutions and a validation script to say whether they had completed the exercises properly. Our idea was that we would first provide the theory and then the attendees would complete the exercises.
Although we had a lot of positive feedback and many people came up to us saying that they had learnt something new, or felt inspired to learn more, we realised that we probably could have slightly improved the way we delivered the content. I think a lot of people are more visual learners, and so providing some sort of demo along with our slides would have been useful. Similarly, a livebook with the code could be helpful. Although I do think that writing code yourself from scratch is much better than blindly copy and pasting. There’s something useful about struggling with the problem for a little while before seeing how someone else solved it. The workshops were a good reminder to us that knowing something and teaching something are two quite different skills. When you’ve been working with Docker or Terraform for years, it’s easy to forget which parts feel obvious to you but aren’t obvious to someone seeing them for the first time.
Goatmire won’t be on next year as Lars and Stina will be taking a very well deserved rest. All I know is that I’m thankful for all of the effort they put in this year and was so excited that we got to play even the tiniest part in it, both as workshop hosts, but also as sponsors. It took a lot of people behind the scenes for Goatmire to be the amazing time it was, so thank you to each and every one of you. Hopefully we’ll get to all be together soon.
Short and sweet this time, but thank you for reading and see you in the next one 💜.
All photo credits here must go to Petter Boström.