This year we were invited once again to run a TinyGo workshop at GopherConEU. I can't thank Natalie, Donna and the rest of the organizers and volunteers enough for making it happen.

After two years we went back to Freestyle Krunchberg Futsaal Krutzberg Festsaal Kreuzberg. One day I'll learn how to spell it without searching for it. I'm in love that place. The beer garden is topnotch even though this year it was a bit chilly on the first day.

CHIP GOPHER trying to solve the funding issues

Food-wise: all vegan, all delicious, plenty of snack (yeah, I've gained some kilos) and drinks. Papa Africa was back, which is a Gopher favorite, which is always good news. There was also a taco truck this year, which I think was new. Last year's Korean food was great too, so at this point I'm starting to think GopherConEU secretly competes as a food festival.

they taste as good as they look

Talks and speakers

What can I say about the talks and speakers? Just look at the schedule. You already knew they were going to be good. The talks I enjoyed the most were the ones about secrets, reducing binary sizes, TamaGo and the Dreamcast, because they were closer to the kind of things I spend my time on.

That said, just like at FOSDEM, I probably enjoyed the hallway track a bit too much. Enough to miss a few talks, actually. Let's keep that between us.

One funny thing was watching Andrea from TamaGo and Ron Evans from TinyGo talk about their respective projects. At some points it felt like they were both pitching the same "Go everywhere in the stack" vision, just from opposite ends. It had strong Spider-Man pointing-at-Spider-Man meme energy.

Andrea Barisani & Ron Evans

A signed SQL query

One of the nicest surprises of the conference came from Jesús Espino, who gifted me a signed copy of Deep Dive into a SQL Query.

Jesús Espino giving a lightning talk, this man doesn't ever stop

I don't know if there is a proper etiquette for receiving signed technical books, but I immediately moved it from the "book" category to the "object that now has a dedicated shelf position" category, along with the "TinyGo keebooks" I received from Sago-san.

Jetbrains, infinite cubes and questionable amounts of swag

The folks at Jetbrains / IntelliJ IDEA run a survey and after completing it, they gave me one of those infinite cubes with a gopher face on it. They also gave me quite a bit of extra swag, not sure why, but it might have helped that I stopped by towards the end of the conference, but I won't ask too many questions. They are super nice people and not for the gifts, they were answering all the questions during the conf.

As a side note, I'm a paying PhpStorm user, but not a GoLand one. Not because I don't like it, but because at some point your software budget starts negotiating back.

Talking Heads from the year 2053 - Episode 1

Ron did another episode of Talking Heads from the Year 2053, his new sci-fi-comedy-maybe-neither show.

Ron Evans, technologist for hire and human pet

The first "episode 0" was at GopherConSG, where three locally-powered AI heads from the year 2053 (yes, local, no cloud involved) and their human pet discuss how to avoid ending up in their timeline.

Setting up the stage for our new overlords

Not only was the episode great, but everything worked flawlessly. Live demos are already risky enough. A full show built around non-deterministic systems, multiple characters and audience interaction sounds like an excellent way to tempt fate.

Fortunately, Fate was busy elsewhere.

Hacksession

On the hacksession day I revealed my giant XIAO board, a fully functional 15x scale Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C3 that started as a word play on the tinygo part and the size of the (real) XIAO itself. Seeed Studio retweeted it, which was honestly not on my bingo card for the week, quite surprised.

Some of the devices you can play with at the hacksession

We recently added ESP32-C3 WiFi support and the XIAO form factor is perfect for all sorts of projects, so naturally I bought a few dozen of them. Which sounds excessive until you start a new project and suddenly need one more (wait for some news soon).My favourite part was watching people's reactions when they compared the giant XIAO with a real one. Even more when they opened the XIAO sensor kit and realised just how small the actual board is.

Gophers discovering the joys the embedded world

The XIAO sensor kit ended up being the most popular activity this year, which honestly surprised me. The second most popular was the NICE! Badge, the unofficial-official GopherConEU 2026 badge, followed by the TinyGo Keeb (already assembled).

Sensor kit, tinygo keeb, nice badge,... all in one table!

Only one gopher was brave enough to fly a drone this year. In previous years it attracted a lot more attention, so either people became more responsible or the sensor kit was simply too much competition.

Say Hi to Gotto, who made his debut at the hacksession

By the end of the day everyone seemed to have had fun, learned something new, and hopefully left with a better idea of what TinyGo makes possible on embedded devices.

Until next year

Another GopherConEU done.

As always, the talks were great, the workshops were packed, and I came back home with more ideas than free time to implement them. But that's probably the best outcome you can hope for from a conference.

Looking forward to the next one.