It may only be the second time we’ve been, but the annual TYPO3 Developer Days in Karlsruhe in the German Black Forest already feels like a bit of an annual ritual at Prater Raines.
Karlsruhe is a bit of a pain by plane, sited about an hour’s train ride from three different regional airports, and in any case Gary can’t fly, so we met once again in Paris for the comfortable 2½ hour train ride on the TGV Est. It’s a mantra of mine to take the opportunity to see the world when I travel for work which manifested as a couple of extra days in Paris (highlights swimming in the Seine, mixing perfume at the Fragonard museum) and a mooch around Karlsruhe on a Voi e-scooter (highlights also swimming this time in a 50m outdoor pool, the ZKM’s bizarre mix of high art and retro tech including web browser and video game exhibitions).
The event was as enjoyable and enlightening as last year. The drop to two tracks left a schedule slightly more heavy on TYPO3 specific and personal development topics and a bit lighter on other techs but it was still easy to find talks of interest. State of CSS stood out again and although there were slightly fewer new CSS tricks this year I’m interested in how anchor positioning can make for more elegant, simpler solutions to common design elements. Return to Kong Mountain was a timely reminder that there’s something a bit Emperor’s New Clothes about the whole AI revolution. How to be your own Developer Advocate had plenty of good advice on communicating more and better with non technical clients and peers. And Load Testing At Scale and What Have We Learned From 100 Upgrades? left me with very practical things to add to our own workstreams.
My favourite unique feature of the Developer Days is the TYPO3 Kudos board where attendees are invited to publicly praise their TYPO3 superheros for their work this year. Outside of an upvote on Stack Overflow or a LinkedIn lightbulb I don’t think there are enough opportunities for us to simply provide praise and kind words to our colleagues and peers so it was a special delight that my superhero this year, András Ottó, won the Kudos prize draw of travel funding to attend another TYPO3 event, and he’ll be joining us at the first TYPO3 Camp in London on 7 October.
Down time was covered with an arcade* and pinball room, nine pin bowling night, and plenty of pils and currywurst. All in all another great event. Bring on 6-8 August 2026!
* The fact that I kept losing is absolutely because Pac-Man was not emulated at the correct speed and nothing at all to do with my own lack of skill with the controller.
The talks
| A brief summary of the talks I attended | ||
|---|---|---|
| Keynote Benni Mack & Benjamin Kott |
In spite of all the AI hype, coding and writing good specifications remains an significantly human task. More than ever it’s everyone’s job to take ownership of projects, stay curious, and make things easier for those around us. Revealed the surprising fact that experienced developers think they are faster but are actually slower when using AI tools. |
|
| Support Group: Requirements Management Fabian Stein & Dex Vogt |
A pragmatic guide to real world application of agile requirements gathering with a terrifying post it note interactive bit at the end. The inverse relationship between level of technical detail and the influence of small p politics was enlightening. | |
| State of CSS 2025 Benjamin Kott |
Another interactive play-along demo, this year featuring animations from and to hidden display, anchor positioning, modals and accordions baked into the browser, custom formatting for select drop-downs and scroll-driven animation. | |
| Settings in TYPO3: Rolling Out a New Reliable Configuration System Benjamin Franzke |
Extending last year’s site set work into dashboard, system settings, and extension settings. Personally I think the solution is complicated and over-engineered and hope the validation approach gets massively simplified before release. | |
| Our Brilliant Plan to Avoid Learning Kubernetes: Moving Our Cloud-based CI/CD to Bare Metal For Fun and Profit Maik Peuser & Wolfgang Medina-Erhardt |
Advice for running CI/CD on bare metal which is particularly useful for us as we don’t use cloud hosting for any of our major projects, preferring to colocate our own servers in the UK. | |
| Return to Kong Mountain Christian Heilmann |
Using the century-long existence of a completely fictional mountain range in maps of Africa as an allegory for the AI revolution and pointing out trust in AI coding tools falls as usage rises. “We need a chatbot because everyone else has a chatbot!” – “AI all the things!” | |
| Content Blocks: Deep Dive André Kraus |
Presentation of a different way to build content elements and page types which aims to reduce the amount of boilerplate code over the classic approach. | |
| Editor First: Customizing TYPO3 for a Cleaner Workflow Ulrich Mathes |
Advice from the agency responsible for Der Spiegel on fields and elements to remove in order to simplify the TYPO3 backend experience. We hold similar views on overabundance of config options and it was good to see some other settings to investigate to make our websites even easier to use. | |
| What Have We Learned From 100 Upgrades? András Ottó |
A clear and solid approach to upgrading TYPO3 installations including useful tools to simplify the procedure and test the outcome. | |
| Dashboard v14 Benjamin Kott |
The backend dashboard has been completely rebuilt with better accessibility and more options for configurable and custom widgets. I think the dashboard has been historically weak so am excited to get started investigating this. | |
| Load Testing At Scale: How To Piss Off Your Hosting Provider Martin Helmich |
Detailed practical examples of how to test website performance under load. | |
| Introduction to DataHandler Internals Christian Kuhn |
An in-depth look into the refactoring approach that’s going on under the hood to make the data handler tool less stateful, easier to use, and improve performance. | |
| What the Hack!? How Modern Cybercrime Works Behind the Scenes Katharina Hoffman |
A reminder that in the period of intense cyber crime following the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the most common victims remain SMEs and the most common attack vector remains social engineering not technical vulnerabilities. | |
| From Holding Back to Stepping Forward: Taking Space and Owning It Dr Darina Schkolnik |
A manifesto for improving diversity in tech by encouraging existing minority groups to find their space and speak out. | |
| Speaking Rubber Duck: How to be your own Developer Advocate Kendall Litton & Tom Warwick |
Ways to improve communication between tech and non-tech people within your organisation, with your clients, and in the open source community. | |
| TYPO3 and the Internet of Things Jochen Roth |
How to do fancy things in the real world using code. | |