ConFoo 2026, Montréal

In February 2026, I had the privilege of speaking at ConFoo in Montréal - my first time at the conference, and my first time in Canada.

The Talks

I delivered two sessions at ConFoo this year: Boosting Frontend Page Speed and Avoiding Déjà Vu via Idempotency.

The Q&A after both sessions was thoughtful, challenging, and genuinely curious - exactly what you hope for as a speaker. It's one thing to prepare a talk and hope it lands; it's another to finish and find the room wants to go deeper rather than run for coffee. That kind of engagement is very validating. It confirms that what you chose to talk about is actually of interest to people building real systems in the real world.

ConFoo has a really nice system for collecting attendee feedback. There is an online form which is live for an hour or so after a talk which a speaker can link to, and attendees can complete. This works well, but does require attendees to log back into their conference account. One thing the ConFoo team do which I've not experienced elsewhere is have the support team in each room hand out small paper slips, allowing attendees to give feedback there and then in the room. This is then gathered up, scanned, and emailed to a speaker within a couple of hours. Getting any kind of feedback is great for speakers, so these types of techniques to increase the feedback rate are great to see.

The Conference

ConFoo has a really strong technical audience. You can feel it in the hallway conversations, in the quality of the questions, and in the sessions themselves — people building serious systems and thinking carefully about trade-offs. That makes it a particularly rewarding place to speak, and a very interesting conference to attend.

I managed to catch some excellent sessions:

• Vagmi Mudumbai's deep dive into real-world voice agents was genuinely fascinating — practical examples of some very cool agent interactions, well grounded in the realities of building production AI systems.

• Christopher Harrison's introduction to Astro was high-energy and entertaining. Astro has been on my radar for a while, but this pushed it firmly to the top of the "must try this properly" list.

• Dave Liddament's talk on balancing the "Holy Trinity" of testing approaches had some great ideas on the compromises we inevitably have to make, and how to make them deliberately rather than by accident.

• Derick Rethans automating his house with Go and PHP was a lot of fun, and contained one of the best conference quotes in recent memory: "I thought it would be more fun to do this in C, because I like my programmes to crash."

• Florian Engelhardt demonstrating Rust extensions for PHP made a compelling case for how accessible this actually is. Looking forward to experimenting with this — it's one of those talks where you leave with a concrete thing you want to try.

• Daniel Scherzer walking through PHP 8.5 features was great. There's always particular value in hearing the thinking behind language evolution first-hand, not just the changelog.

The Hallway Track

As with the best conferences, the real magic was in the in-between moments: sponsor area chats, post-talk debates, social events. The kind of serendipitous conversation where five minutes turns into a new experiment you're itching to try on the flight home.

The technical density of the crowd made these conversations particularly good. Nobody needed to be caught up on context - you could go straight to the interesting part of the discussion.

Superbly Organised

From a speaker's perspective, the event was exceptionally well run. Clear communication, AV that just worked thanks to the tech team in the room, volunteers keeping everything on time, and a really fun speakers' dinner.

These are all signs of serious behind-the-scenes organisation — no mean feat at a conference of this scale. Huge credit to Yann Larrivée and the entire ConFoo team for putting on such a polished event.

Montréal in Winter

As a city, Montréal in February is something else entirely. The old town is beautiful - all stone buildings, winding streets, and centuries of history - though the snow is genuinely no joke.

The underground tunnel network is a neat way to navigate the city without too much cold exposure — a whole subterranean world of walkways connecting hotels and venues. Very practical when it's -15°C outside.

And the hills! I'd thought San Francisco had some serious climbing — Montréal has strong competition to offer there. Full credit to all the joggers who were out braving the snow and ice.

The conference hotel had a heated rooftop pool. Swimming outdoors while snow falls around you and icicles form in your hair is a genuinely surreal experience! Highly recommended, if slightly disorienting.

Final Thoughts

ConFoo is a fantastic conference — technically rigorous, brilliantly organised, and with a warmth that makes it easy to settle in quickly. If you're building software for a living, it's absolutely one to put on your radar.

Already looking forward to next year!