Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2025 and Why Real-Life Conferences still matter

What’s “beyond Tellerrand” and why am I writing about it? Beyond Tellerrand (literally “beyond the edge of the plate” as in thinking outside the box) is a conference event series connecting creativity and technology.

Why Conferences are still relevant

Are conferences relevant at all? Yes, they are, although different people might attend for different reasons, be it talks and performances on stage or networking during hallway conversations. I work in the mostly digital business of web development, so I could find knowledge and inspiration online without going anywhere. I still enjoy attending conferences and meetups once in a while. This year, I attended Beyond Tellerrand again after skipping last year. This is is what I learned and how real-life events still expand my horizon:

Beyond Tellerrand events keep reminding me why it’s a good idea to leave an open space inviting potential new friends to join our conversation when standing in a group. Also known as the “pac-man rule” for the shape of a circle with a missing slice, this has inspired several artists to graphical illustrations and visitors to make new friends in the breaks between the talks. They also keep the event small and united, limiting the number of attendants to about five hundred and never split up the audience into multiple parallel tracks of talks. Every sentence spoken is transcribed to readable text on a screen in real time by a human captioner, Andrew, who keeps mastering even difficult technical and cultural topics. Tobi Lessnow famously mixes samples of the conference talks into his live music sets at beyond Tellerrand. Another small, but important detail are the beyond Tellerrand conference badges, combining the current artwork with a name tag and an upside-down schedule so that you can read it when looking down, while others can read your name when looking at you.

Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2025 Conference and Side Events

At the main event, there is a stage, a garden, several booths of sponsors and partners like Smashing Magazine, who run another conference series for tech and creative people. There is free tea and coffee, and sometimes free drinks after the last talks, sponsored by Kirby CMS this time, and a raffle where you could win an ASUS computer. Starting days before, several side events around accessibility, music, and activism added more oppurtunities for inspiration and meeting new people, like Alex Wolf speaking about narratives and system change during the warm-up event at dies&das.digital in Kreuzberg.

Concerning their content, most talks at beyond Tellerrand are less about news or specific technical details but rather about inspiring and reminding each others about advice that you can still quote ten years later like “get the core right and the resilient code will follow”, as Andy Bell put it. Don’t ask for too much at once, be precise, and follow a multi-pass approach both in human communication and collaboration and when outsourcing jobs to AI. Jo Franchetti showed how to replace costly prompts to a remote language model beyond your control by API-compatible alternatives on your own machine thanks to LM Studio and reducing refinement effort by prompting for JSON output that conforms to a typed schema. Social media influencer Lucy Blakiston was interviewed by another speaker who had also come to Berlin from New Zealand: Sacha Judd (“Take back control of your scroll!”) had discussed different approaches towards fandom, politics, and independent content creation on the internet in her talk the other day. Lucy had just succeeded in making her followers subscribe to  her newsletter rather than rely on social media platforms, after Meta had threatened to restrict her Instagram account’s visibility for failing to comply to the company’s expectations. Sacha looked back in time to show how independent creators have always managed to find ways to publish and connect and presented projects like Open Doors, an Archive of Our Own, and the Tiny Awards, celebrating the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web. Sacha quoted Molly White: “We may feel as though we are trapped in a tiny, crowded, noisy space, but it’s only because we don’t see over the walls”.

## Reweirding the Web

Several talks were quite serious. Many were entertaining. Some made fun with words or mocked marketing clichés. Many quoted previous talks and followed up on common narratives like proudly reclaiming the words “dork”, “nerd”, “weird”, and “cringe” as positive expressions of independent and divergent ways of living, thinking, and exploring the world. Astrid Bin had even rewritten parts of her closing talk and renamed it “Dork Patterns: The Story of Little Character” consequentially.

Some talks were very personal and beyond technology and digital creativity, like renovating a kitchen as an analogy for refactoring legacy code (Ana Rodrigues) or building an aestetically appealing “solarian library” to provide more ecological energy to the Burning Man festival (Jared Ficklin). Some talks weren’t talks at all, like Brad Frost‘s multimedia performance playing bass and drums on stage. Adam Argyle mixed interactive live music demo with technical details like listening to MIDI signals using typed custom properties and ensure your computer stays awake while you do. Content lifetime, image optimization, and sparing use of web video are still valid ways to reduce carbon emissions, as is a critical stance on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) that “creates value based on the creative work of humans. But without compensation,” quoting Thorsten Jonas who shared his ideas about Sustainable UX (SUX) in this year’s opening talk.

Most talks featured quotes and QR-codes for further reading. Below, you can find a little recollection of spontaneous notes far from complete or authoritative. Check the speaker’s slides, videos, and websites and read other blogs for a bigger picture!

Some more Shit you might care about

These are just some takeaways and notes for my reading list that didn’t fit into one of the more elaborate paragrpahs. Maybe there’s some “shit you should care about” for you in there as well.

• Abby Covert: How to make sense of any mess
• BlackSky Society Network
• Nyokabi Kariuki: digital dance and body percussion art performance
• hyperfixed podcast
• Monika Bielskyte: “Who controls the fantasy controls the future”
• Tracee Worley, Radical Futures
• Kyle Chayka: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
• Sara Soueidan: Accessibility, the “Other” C in CSS (CSS Day 2024)
• Project Wallace, “the best CSS analyzer out there”
• CSS Stats: visualize your cascading style sheets
• web-platform-dx/baseline-status
• Stark contrast/accessibility checker for Figma
• Little Character typeface font in tribute to LITT.CHR
• Paul Boag: Clicks without the shady tricks (a book about ethical marketing)

Past and Present: Remembering what else to care about

Cabeza Patata jokingly announced that they would just repeat their talk from 2021, because they’d become parents and didn’t have that much time for work or even prepare talks anymore. “Exhausted, but still excited,” they still do. “The positives of saying NO” and not giving up one’s agency was exactly what I needed to hear back then. After my detailed post about beyond tellerrand Konferenz Düsseldorf 2022, and Takeaways from the Never Code Alone Testing and Refactoring Conference (apart from the T-Shirt), I became a little lazy about blogging. I posted some notes about meetups and several pictures on social media. Events and conferences in the following years inspired me to the thoughtful post about ecology, ethics, and aesthetics, but a lot “only” happened in real life: making contacts, collaborating on projects, exchanging ideas, and taking notes on paper that nobody could yet discover online.

I attended border:none 2023 in Nuremberg, FairDay 2024 in Karlsruhe, Prototype Fund Demo Day 2024 in Berlin, and Urban Utopia 2025 in Berlin without blogging about it. I will only add a few impressions here. If you get fear of missing out, make sure to sign up for future events. As you might not have all the time and money of the world, choose well where you want to spend it. What are you curious and excited about? What feels most important or inspiring to you?

beyond Tellerrand 2023 Impressions

Pictures from the past: beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2023

Mastering In-Person Conferences

I admit I have mixed feelings about conferences and meetups. Really! As the years go by, we might ask ourselves why go to real life conferences anyway when you could just watch a video, research knowledge and search for inspiration online? Occasional technical details, further reading links, entertainment, and motivation might be enough reasons to visit a conference in real life, and I absoultely recommend that you do it – not only, but especially if you’re a junior and haven’t been to many such events yet. Nothing beats reality! Conincidential encounters and spontaneous coffee queue talks and overheard audience whispers, atmosphere and the feeling of being welcome. I don’t make new friends or business partners at every event that I attend, but I did at all of the events that I mentioned in this article.

Networking Tips for Tech Events

Don’t expect too much! Have no fear of missing out and don’t stress yourself trying to network productively every single minute. Relax, keep an open mind for surprise! Don’t over-optimise!

I’m not completely introvert. I love meeting people, but I need some calm and quiet moments as well. So I enjoyed eating my lunch all alone under a sunny tree on the second day, focusing on myself and letting the recent experiences and impressions settle down in my mind.

I’m not always in the mood to talk or listen, so I have made new business cards, printed on cardboard, that I can hand out to other people, with a QR code on the flipside, in case they might prefer the digital version. That way, I can still connect with people even when I’m taking a break. And while I wear glasses and hearing aids, I still prefer a place in one of the front rows, making it much easier for me to follow a talk and understand what is said. I still love scribbling in my sketchbook, but often it’s faster to take a picture with my smartphone and complement my written notes later.

More Reality, more Diversity

How to choose which conference(s) to go to? Seek diversity! I found I get more inspiration attending conferences and meetups beyond my professional area, like Urban Utopia 2025 at Holzmarkt Berlin. I met gardeners, landscape architects, innovators and academics researching about ecology and urban development, and saw the legendary documentation film Natura Urbana. We discussed, sang, and celebrated together. Black in Fashion, a panel talk at the fashion design studio by Buki Akomolafe and Emeka in Kreuzberg during Berlin Fashion Week 2025, was so crowded that I could hardly get into the venue. Online, I participated in JSConf Africa 2021, during the pandemic, thrilled about finally exploring a more international developer community. There are bigger and more commercially focused conferences like We Are Developers or Freelance Unlocked (2025 with Zsike Peter’s Thinkbait talk and useful workshops about accessibility with Alexandra Frey – barrierefrey – and CV tuning with Nicolas Kopp: “Recruiters are also just machines”). In comparison, beyond Tellerrand and similar events are still quite diverse and independent. They are less prone to causing mansplaining fatigue and conference burnout with thir unusual focus on fairness, accessibility, creativity and human communication that has become rare these days.

Let’s go beyond: bye bye Berlin 2025

Leider wird es keine Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2026 geben.

Beyond Tellerrand 2026 oder wohin sonst?

Es wird aber eine Beyond Tellerand-Konferenz 2026 in Düsseldorf geben, in meiner ehemaligen Heimatstadt. Vielleicht werde ich dort sein. Außerdem wird es 2026 etliche andere kreative und Tech-Konferenzen mit ähnlicher Ausrichtung und Publikum in anderen europäischen Städten wie London und Amsterdam geben, darunter die Smashing Conference und der CSS Day 2026. Und mit Blick noch weiter über meinen Tellerrand hinaus, wann werde ich endlich mal Afrika bereisen? Die Welt wendet gerade ihren Blick und starrt nicht länger auf Amerika, das jahrzentelange Hoffnungziel ambitionierter Menschen nachdem Europa vor gut einhundert Jahren selbst seine offene Kultur der “goldenen Zwanziger” zerstörte. Wie ich hörte gibt es eine lebendige Tech-Szene in Lagos, Nairobi und Kigali. In Korea war ich bisher auch noch nie. So viele spannende Möglichkeiten!

Also, wohin zieht es uns 2026 und in den Jahren danach?