This edition drew a strong turnout with nine speakers and a full house. The format is the same as always: each speaker gets five minutes and is then politely cut off.
Ruben on Jujutsu
Ruben demonstrated how Jujutsu, a tool built on top of Git, makes rebases and conflicts more flexible and keeps commits more organized. You can undo everything you do, and you can squash changes without separate `git add` steps. Ultimately, it remains fully compatible with Git, so everything fits seamlessly into existing workflows and pull requests.
Mathijs on Protocols, Strategy Patterns, and Interfaces
Mathijs demonstrated how to add functionality to objects and classes in a clear and organized way. He started with a vague if-else approach and then moved on to inheritance, which offers more structure but can sometimes become confusing due to over-inheritance.
Mathijs’s main point, however, was the use of protocols and dependency injection. This makes modules testable and flexible, and allows you to easily swap out different implementations. For example, you can send messages via email, text message, or carrier pigeon.
Laurens on dynamic styling with @container
Laurens shared his experience building customer-customizable pages in Next.js. Whereas he often used React Context in Gatsby to apply light/dark themes to components, he tried to find a solution without using React Context in React Server Components.
His solution involves using @container in combination with CSS variables. This way, a component’s style determines the color based on the nearest parent container, allowing customers to easily set background colors or themes.
For those interested:
@container style(--content-theme: light) {
--content-theme: dark;
}
Coen on Python 3.15 alpha-7
Coen demonstrated that Python 3.15 alpha-7 has some cool new features, such as FrozenDicts, which cannot be modified, and Lazy Imports, which ensure that modules are loaded only when they are actually needed, thereby reducing startup times. There’s also a new way to unpack lists and dictionaries, and a PEP for d-strings, which makes it easier to work with multi-line strings.
Finally, here’s a tip for syntax highlighting of strings in PyCharm: # language=LANGUAGE-ID
Mark on Umami Analytics
Mark explained that Umami is a self-hosted analytics platform that doesn’t use cookies and is fully GDPR-compliant, allowing you to maintain control over your own data. It runs easily in Docker or Kubernetes, and you place a tracking script in the head of your page to immediately collect visitor data such as visits, bounce rate, devices, and regions. In addition, you can set up custom events, and everything is clearly displayed in a dashboard—without end users having to click away multiple cookie banners. This way, you maintain control over your data and avoid complex cookie banners.
Jordy on Bootstrap vs. Tailwind
Jordy explained that Bootstrap is easy to use for standard layouts, grids, flex, and buttons, but has many limitations: for example, you can’t customize fonts, colors, or other styles per screen width the way a designer might want, and it quickly leads to large files that harm performance.
Tailwind solves this by making everything modular and responsive (@container, hovers, focus, active, disabled, font sizes, fractions, etc.), allowing you to work much more flexibly and with less extra CSS. For their projects, this means Tailwind causes far fewer frustrations, is easier to extend, and is therefore a better fit.
Esper on Home Servers and Digital Sovereignty
Esper shared his personal experience with home servers and privacy. His goal: to be less dependent on American companies like Google or Tailscale.
He runs his own home server with various Docker containers, a NAS, and reverse proxies, all configured via code so that in the event of a crash, everything is back up and running within a few hours. External internet traffic (such as podcasts or viewing photos) goes through a European VPS at Hetzner, combined with a WireGuard VPN and a bastion host to ensure secure and reliable access, even in the event of IP changes or a router reset at a family member’s home.Everything is managed with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code: no manual SSH configurations are needed. This guarantees privacy and security, reduces the hassle of dealing with routers and open ports, and makes the setup reproducible with other providers.
The key message was digital autonomy and full control over one’s own data and network, with a security-first approach, without relying on big tech companies.
Franklin on Cloudflare Tunnel
Franklin explained that he runs all sorts of servers and applications at home, but didn’t want to deal with manually setting up reverse proxies, open ports, and firewall rules. That’s why he uses Cloudflare Tunnel, which allows his servers to be securely accessed via TLS and VPN without requiring complex network configurations.
This way, he can easily access his home servers without having to host everything publicly, while still maintaining control over his own devices and privacy.
Martijn on LSP
Martijn explained that he has delved into the Language Server Protocol (LSP). He wrote a plugin for Sublime LSP, an extension for Sublime Text. This led him to fully immerse himself in the world of LSP servers, and he wanted to share his experience.
LSP helps editors understand programming languages and provide feedback, such as warnings, code formatting, refactoring, and suggestions while coding. He explained that the entire process behind LSP occurs via a standardized JSON-RPC format. The major advantage of LSP is that you can use the same tools in your editor, CI, and even AI agents without version differences or inconsistent results.
In closing
Thanks to all the speakers and attendees. Without you, there would be no Lightning Talks! The next editions are:
Friday, September 4, 2026
Friday, December 18, 2026