In this episode of the beyond tellerrand podcast, Marc sits down with Andy Bell, the founder of Piccalilli and the design and development agency Set Studio. The two caught up live in Berlin back in November 2025 and this time they go deep into what it actually takes to build something independent and principled in an industry that feels increasingly uncertain.

Andy explains how Piccalilli grew from his personal blog into a small, four-person team (alongside Leanne, Jason and Vicky) producing high-quality, pragmatic education that’s rooted in real client work at Set Studio. He talks about spotting a gap in the education space – somewhere between framework crash-courses and genuine, transferable craft – and why his courses teach things like planning and communicating with designers, not just syntax. There’s a lot here on the philosophy behind the courses: keeping them affordable (the £249 ceiling, “anything above that and the boss has to buy it for you”), building their own publishing platform to give each author their own space, and the editorial process behind working with guest authors like Scott Riley and Mat Marquis.

The conversation then turns to AI, where Andy doesn’t hold back. He lays out why he’s been against the technology from the start – models trained on stolen content, the environmental cost, the harmful material it can produce, and the more-than-a-trillion-dollars of investment chasing a product whose output he considers poor. He makes a financial case for why he believes a bubble deflation is coming, why he turned down a wave of AI-startup branding work over brand risk, and offers some blunt advice: if your employer is mandating AI use, “unionise — they’re not mandating you to use AI for fun”. He and Marc also reflect on what this means for web standards, why taking progressive enhancement and accessibility seriously has always meant swimming against the current, and why keeping standards high matters more than ever.

To close, things get more personal: Andy’s record collection and his goal to be off streaming services entirely by year’s end, his heavier-and-hip-hop leanings, his background as a drummer who “wanted to be in music, not tech” and fell into the industry by accident and his open, in-progress rebuild of his own website. A reminder that owning your own corner of the web is one of the best things you can do for yourself.

A different viewpoint, honestly shared and well worth a listen.

Podcast (Audio-Only) Version

Full Transcript of this Episode

[Marc Thiele]
Welcome to another episode of the beyond tellerrand podcast. My name is Marc Thiele and I’m your host of this podcast as well as the event series. Today’s guest is someone whose work you’ve almost certainly come across already, even if you don’t know his name yet. He’s the founder of Piccalilli, one of the best places on the web for honest, no-nonsense front-end education. He’s also the founder of SET Studio, a design and development agency doing some excellent work.

Next to this, he might be one of the most outspoken voices in our industry right now, particularly when it comes to web standards, progressive enhancement, and the direction the industry is heading with AI. He spoke at beyond tellerrand and I’ve been wanting to sit down with him for a proper conversation ever since. Please welcome Andy Bell.

--- Partnership Note Start ---

[Marc]
Hey, just a quick note before we get into this episode. This episode is supported by mittwald and I want to take a moment to properly introduce them because they are not just a sponsor. They are my hosting partner and my global gold partner for 2026 for beyond tellerrand. mittwald is a German hosting company based in Espelkamp right in the heart of Germany. And what makes them stand out is that they build everything around the needs of agencies and freelancers. Their own data center, their own platform called M-Studio and a team that actually listens and is there when you need them.

Their hosting is 100% climate neutral, fully GDPR compliant and runs on renewable energy. For anyone building web projects, mittwald gives you the infrastructure and the flexibility to do it properly without having to worry about the bits underneath. The fact that they are our Global Gold Partner for 2026 says a lot. beyond tellerrand has always been about working with people who genuinely care about what they do. And so does mittwald. Well, and that’s why they fit perfectly, I guess.

You can find more about them at mittwald.de. Thanks a lot for supporting beyond tellerrand!

--- Partnership Note End ---

[Marc]
So here he is. Andy Bell, hello.

[Andy Bell]
Hello, how you doing?

[Marc]
Good seeing you. Last time in November live and then now you’re in my... Yes! In my little freak show.

[Andy]
You too. Out in Berlin. Yeah. What a conference. It was amazing.

Had a great time. Yeah. Yeah.

[Marc]
Did you? That’s good to hear.

I mean, it’s the stuff I do for like 15 years. Can you believe it nowadays? Like 15 years. Crazy.

[Andy]
You can feel it though when you’re there. Yeah, like you can tell you’ve been doing it for that long. It’s everything runs so well. So yeah, you do a good thing,

[Marc]
Well, glad you say that so you didn’t see all the mistakes and the things behind the scenes that didn’t work out.

[Andy]
When I, yeah, I walked past backstage like this so couldn’t see behind the curtain.

[Marc]
Well, yeah. Well, I mean, you talk about production, ⁓ you do some pretty tough stuff as well with your Piccalilli, right? With Piccalilli, which is like, it’s independent, right? It’s ⁓ ran by you as a single person. Is it true? Like, that correct?

[Andy]
Mm-hmm.

Me and a team of, so there’s a team of four of us all together. Yeah, so yeah, a little handful. So we’ve got me, then we’ve got Leanne who runs our tech stuff, Jason who runs our design stuff, and then we’ve got Vicky who’s producer, organiser. Yeah, good person, Yeah.

[Marc]
Really? Who’s to rest?

Mm-hmm.

Okay, great, cool,

So, I mean, how on earth and why the heck did you start another video ⁓ course platform? ⁓ What’s your aim? What drives you to go through all the pain?

[Andy]
I think something that I believe in and I will continue to believe in no matter what the industry does is if you get good education from someone that’s got a lot of experience in the industry, it’s worth more than any, you know, any number of other sources. So I saw a bit of a hole in the education space and decided, yeah, let’s fill it with more pragmatic stuff rather than …

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
… a crash course on a specific scale or a specific framework. is more, let’s give people a broader, a broader education. So for example, on my course, it’s a CSS course, but a good portion of the course is actually teaching how to plan properly, how to communicate with designers properly. And then we’ve got Scott’s mindful design course, which teaches all about how the brain works first.

And then teaches you how to apply your design skills to work with how people’s brains work. So yeah, that’s what we wanted to target really was a deeper understanding of the job that we do.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

And you said there was a hole that you’ve seen. What do you mean with that? Is it like... There’s lots of platforms out there, right?

[Andy]
I think it was just, yeah, of course. Yeah.

And lots of great courses out there as well. I just think there was a niche formula in my brain and I thought we, know, AIO were not an American platform as well. I think that’s quite unique. And then we, I think certain publications like CSS Tricks on it’s back now, it dropped off for a while.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm. True, yeah.

[Andy]
And then we, and the sidebar newsletter, for example. And so there’s these sort of holes that I thought we should probably fill actually, ⁓ with, you know, producing really good articles and then later doing the courses too. And then the newsletter and yeah, I feel like we thought did that and continue to do that. Yeah.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I have to say I’m a really, really big fan of the newsletter in particular ⁓ because it’s a great mix of stuff that you always have in there. like not just really one direction. As you know, my event is all about this, right? Not just being completely niche. But no, get some good stuff, some good tech stuff, you get some good inspirational...

[Andy]
good. Thank you.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

[Marc]
… links that you can see and sometimes very personal ones as well, right? Some redesigns of websites and stuff. I’m really, I have to say like in actually nearly all every newsletter, I find some links that I can take and add to my like list of bookmarks really.

[Andy]
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s the

Yeah, that’s the Like it’s five links twice a week. And even, even if you don’t like follow through all of them, like it’s still opening you up to what’s going on without you having to troll through timelines and you know, and that that’s becoming increasingly difficult for people with, you know, everything going on right now and

[Marc]
Yeah.

[Andy]
Having that sort curated source, know, we go into the mines for you and find the good stuff. then, yeah, the hope is, like you said, that one or two links in each issue you can store away and enjoy, and that’s good. And the personal sites thing as well, like surfacing people’s cool personal sites. Hopefully it’s inspired you to build your own personal site, yeah.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So ⁓ look back to the video courses. What’s the approach of it? Is it just you and your team creating the courses? Do you invite other authors to join you? And what’s the idea behind it in terms of the topics and the range of topics? mean, if you start more courses, it broaden to UX and this kind of stuff, or is it just really focused on development? Explain it a little bit, please.

[Andy]
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so it started off with me first as the canary. ⁓ We knew what we wanted to do. ⁓ So we knew we wanted to give each author their own brand. We knew we wanted like their course to feel like their space and both externally and internally. So we did mine first in 2024, mainly to get the system. So we built our own platform and our own systems behind that.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
We wanted to develop an editorial system. So we’re using me as the, the guinea pig did my costs. And then last year we got two different authors. We’ve got Scott Riley and Matt Markey. So Scott did mindful design and Matt did JavaScript for everyone. then, but they’re very sort of like close friends. Like we, we, known each for a long time and it was a safe, a safer bet because like, right, well, we know each other. We’re still working on our editorial process. So there’s going to be rough …

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
… around the edges at times, because they’re both so experienced, it worked really well. And then the future plan is to bring more authors in and like I say, we’ll expand. there is, we are talking to an author who’s wanting to do a UX course and an author that wants to do an accessibility course, for example, and even like design system. Yeah. So there’s, there’s, there’s more to come. But we, yeah, we, instead of rushing, we like to do it right because

[Marc]
Nice. Great.

[Andy]
We want to produce like really high quality stuff. So yeah, we’re doing it. Try doing the right way. Yeah. I appreciate that.

[Marc]
Mm.

Yeah, I mean, I got two of the courses. I got the mindful design course and your CSS course. And I ⁓ have to say, it’s nothing that you can do between tea and lunchtime or whatever. So it’s like, really, you need to sit down. I mean, you can stop and start and everything, but ⁓ it’s a lot of stuff. And it’s good quality. It’s good fun to do it. ⁓ But you say, well, OK. …

[Andy]
Hmm.

Yeah.

[Marc]
… we want to focus on quality and go deep into topics. What did you think or what do you take the concept of a video course being one big video course instead of chopping it up into 10 small snippets that you can buy, whatever, like this? What’s the?

[Andy]
Hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I think you could possibly do that with Scott’s course. But I think that so like mine and Matt’s are very linear. So like, for example, you couldn’t you couldn’t pick up my course from the middle of the course because you you miss out on all the sort of stuff that builds you up to that place where you currently are. Scott’s is similar to that. But I think …

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

[Andy]
… it’s something we’re exploring and it’s something we’re thinking about is like, yes, we’ve got these sort of headline courses that are longer, more in depth, like you say. And the idea of them is like, you take that course and your career opportunities by doing that should increase like massively because you get the depth of knowledge that you’re getting and the experience that you’re getting from doing them should really set you out …

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
… from others if you are wanting to move up in your career. But the skill sets are important, specific types of things that people want to learn. The problem is, that that’s a crowded space. So it’s not somewhere that we’re sort of aiming to wade into in a rush. ⁓ Really, I want to see how the next few months pan out in terms of…

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
… the way the industry is currently going. ⁓ And then, yeah, things to say on that, Mike. ⁓ But yeah, I’m one of those annoying, boring people that’s just very programmatic. And so I don’t like to rush into things. So like we did these courses and they’re really good and they’re going really well. And it’s just like, right, let’s just see what we can do next and do …

[Marc]
yeah, yeah, absolutely. We get to this point later.

Yeah, yeah.

no no

[Andy]
… and doing it at decent pace. We’re lucky that we’ve got the, obviously the agency as well, but it’s a good way of working. It feels very punk at the moment to work like that, which is good, yeah.

[Marc]
So and how do you approach the production? Do we have a studio where people come to? Is it home recorded for them? Because then you need to make sure that they have proper quality hardware to record stuff, video and also audio is very important, think. Maybe even more than video, actually.

[Andy]
Yeah, it’s gonna depend. So we were quite lucky with Scott with his video course where he had a lot of gear already and knowledge. So he did all of that in his own space. But for another author who didn’t know in that position, then the production would look different where we’d have to do a lot more pre-production and then a shorter recording run in, like you say, like a third party space. So it varies per …

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
… per author on how they like to work too. So the way I did it was a long, over a very long time, short bursts. And then like I basically vanished for two months and wrote all the drafts and then re-emerged again. Matt was very consistent in terms of he just like churned through it piece by piece, like a marathon runner.

[Marc]
Hmm?

[Andy]
And, just delivered it, but then, you know, the published what? Three books at this point. So, you know, he’s got it in him and there, and then Scott did. Cycles. So why every unit he did in sort of like a two week burst each time, and then had a break and then did another unit and then had a break. So it’s all going to depend on what the author, how the author likes to work. And the, the sort of guard rails we’ve put in place is more of a system. So it’s like…

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
… a piece of content for a course has to go through this process in order to be released. So it’s like various editorial passes and asset passes and stuff. And to make sure that that piece of mark down that it starts as turns into something that’s publishable in the course itself. So we try and keep it flexible because you never know what author’s requirements are going to be. So forcing them down a specific route feels suboptimal. It is, it’s the reason why I built our own platform. The options out there just work flexible enough for us. We wanted authors to have the ability to do some long form pros, but then if they wanted, they could do a module in video or, know, like the opportunities are sort of endless for them. And that was really, really important to us.

[Marc]
Okay, we’re back after a little video accident, whatever happened there. Sorry. But yeah, I mean, that’s great. Yeah, I think it’s a great approach and you can certainly feel the quality. From the price point, how did you come up with the... Yeah, how do you say, finding out what the value is, what people are prepared to pay for it and...

[Andy]
Hmm.

[Marc]
Is that something where you say like, oh shit, we should have made it more expensive because now we see like how big of an industry that is and how many people are involved and yeah, many questions. What’s the price point, first of all?

[Andy]
Hmm.

So like for the cost is the 249 pounds full price. And we based that on a bit of research people and also like huge amount of research across the industry in terms of like where pricing is and then where we thought the costs were relative to that. But the main thing also was it has to be affordable. Like there’s premium content, but then it has to be affordable too. like that 249 was like the ceiling …

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

[Andy]
… as far as I was concerned because anything above that, the boss has to buy it for you.

[Marc]
Yeah. So that you mean there’s a sweet spot of like, okay, I could be able to pay that myself or I’m willing to pay that myself if my boss wouldn’t. Yeah, that’s true. And I mean, if you look at the actual workshops that happening like in person, I haven’t seen any of that price point, to be honest. Like they are most likely at least 100 euros or 100 pound more expensive. Plus you have to travel there and you have to get food for the day and all that kind of stuff. Well, if the workshop isn’t catered.

[Andy]
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

[Marc]
Yes. mean, I’m always a big fan of in-person, but when it comes to workshops, have to say ⁓ it works both for me. you just someone who really wants to learn stuff and a workshop is not so much exchanging with people in the breaks, know, like you have that, but like, it’s not the focus. It’s not like as any, like a conference where yeah, you have a talk and then you have a break and then you have the evening stuff where people mix and mingle.

[Andy]
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Hmm.

[Marc]
For the workshop, it’s more about learning, understanding, and asking maybe the author or the coach of the course some questions. But that’s possible with you as well, I guess, right? You’ve got some kind of...

[Andy]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. We’ve got Discord and stuff. Yeah. And I think that’s a, like, because a workshop’s quite intense for both the sort of teacher and the people that are attending, because like I say, even a remote one is like, you know, I did the smashing comp ones and it was five two and a half hour sessions. and, and …

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

[Marc]
… you know, twice a week for three weeks. So it’s quite an intense amount of learning for someone to do. Yeah. And in person, you know, eight hours of just intense learning, often a day after you’ve just sat and watched a lot of conference talks, do you see your brain is already full of knowledge already? So I think causes are a good way of doing it in your own time, right?

[Marc]
Absolutely, yes.

Yes.

[Andy]
Doing it as any person is comfortable. we often get asked, well, how long does it take? And it’s gonna vary depending on how deep you wanna go. But also like, you should be able to do a couple of hours and then walk away for a few weeks and then come back and then do another few hours and sort of slowly do it. And of course it gives you that opportunity. I know if you attend a workshop or a video workshop, then you get the videos back at the end but yeah having that sort of self-paced learning is really important I think.

[Marc]
True, yeah. Is the plan working out for you guys? mean, how long? It’s two years now, right? Is it true? Nearly two years now? Is it working out in terms of people booking it financially? Is there any surprise where you feel like, wow, I haven’t seen that coming? ⁓ Whether it be how many people come or mistakes you’ve done or whatever.

[Andy]
Hmm.

I think so.

Yeah.

Hmm.

We, so last year was a lot quieter than we wanted it to be. Um, I remember writing a post about it and it picked up, but we, they did the industry as has changed considerably over in a very short amount of time. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there’s a last year into this year, there’s, been shifts, AI, et cetera. And, and, also.

[Marc]
I can prove that, yes, can certainly second that.

[Andy]
It’s easy to blame it on that, but there’s also been like economic shifts as well. So there’s, you know, the industry has been in a period of decline for a long time. ⁓ Layoffs that come from ⁓ the opposite of decline, right? They are a symptom of decline. And there was a of that last year and a lot of sort of geopolitical instability this year started even more so. So in terms of …

[Marc]
Yeah.

[Andy]
… it is going to plan in terms of what we are aiming to produce and our principles on content we’re Absolutely. Is it going to plan as much as we’d like financially? Probably not. But then we are, like I said earlier, we’re lucky in the sense that we’ve got the agency too. there’s not the pressure to make this thing work for the entirety of the business’s income.

We’re in a position where we can sit back, do what we do best, which is produce good stuff and see what happens over the course of the next few months and for the rest of the year. then I think if you move at the same pace that the industry moves, then you’re destined to mess up. Right. So it is better to sort of hang back and observe it as neutrally as possible as well and like research the facts. So I’ve spent a lot of time learning about finance, not because I’m interested in finance, because I want to understand the AI bubble more from a sort of financial perspective. And the math doesn’t math. doesn’t, it’s not there.

[Marc]
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I find it really interesting the whole, whole, you know, how you say, how brave someone is to like, come up with like an idea like this, because it’s not just like you like sitting in front of the camera and recording some stuff, right? So it’s like, proper courses, other people are involved. You’re responsible for that and …

[Andy]
Mm.

[Marc]
… is that something that you’ve learned through running your studio, SET Studio, which is also running for quite a while already? Is that what made you confident that this will be working out for you?

[Andy]
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. there’s an intrinsic relationship between the two ⁓ in terms of one of the things that benefit, that’s a benefit of Piccalilli is like the education is rooted in actual experience, right? Like we are every day working with clients and building real stuff for real people. ⁓ I think with other types of education,

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
It’s not as much rooted in that. and, then it’s six, that type of edge case. So like the bleed and edge stuff, like it’s demo demo demo, because that’s all you can really do. Right. Whereas we tend to try and loop everything back into like, yes, it’s all this amazing stuff. Right. But this approach works really well. So like for the, the way I approach layout, for example, it works really well. And we know it does because we’ve built huge projects with it, you know, for clients.

And that is that sort of assurance that we, we, we’d like to sort of provide with, with our approach of, yes, we’ve got this agency and it, and it works with clients all the time. And we’ll share what we wanted to do is share that knowledge. So Piccalilli has existed a long time, but it existed as my sort of personal blog for a long time. And then at the start of 2024, we all like got together and it was like, what do we, what do we want to do this year? And I was like, I’d quite like to bring Piccalilli back.

Um, but if we do, we’ve got a lot of work to do because it was in a mess that the way I’d left it. So we did a full, well, just because I built it and, Billy is like a hobby thing. So it was, it’s just like sticky tape and dreams. Uh, the system, like, you know, um, I was editing a big compiled CSS file because I couldn’t get the SAS to work anymore and stuff like that. But then it was, it was an old code base, you know, it 2018. it was an old code base and …

[Marc]
really?

Yeah.

Yeah, true,

[Andy]
Yeah, so we did a full rebrand on it and everything as a client. So like we treated as a client, we wrote about that on Piccadilly as well. we, yeah. And yeah. And so we always, we always knew it would, it would do well. It’s done better than we thought it would do for sure. ⁓ and yeah, we just got to keep going with it really. was just, that’s continuity and consistency is like that. That’s, that’s what we know we can do. So that’s what we carry on doing with it. Yeah.

[Marc]
Very good. Very good to hear.

Yeah. And SET Studio, that also running well? Where do position your studio? Is it ⁓ most likely ⁓ consultant work these days or are you still building websites for people, really?

[Andy]
Mm-hmm.

Oh yeah, we’re building. Yeah, for sure. We tend to come from a, yeah, design. So we’re design first at the studio. So for example, I would do in a branding project at the moment, and then that’s kind of moving to a web redesign project and design system. they’re like the sort of three things that we specialise in, is our branding, design systems, and website stuff. And yeah, it’s going really good. Again, like...

[Marc]
Nice, good to hear.

and

[Andy]
Last year was quite quiet. ⁓ but it was quite because we, we, we got a lot of inquiries last year, but it was for AI startups, chat, GPT rappers, and we just have no interest in that world. ⁓ and well, there’s a, there’s a, I think something that you need to consider in this situation. So if you’re an independent or a freelancer is the brand risk of working with such companies.

[Marc]
yeah, okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, interesting, right?

[Andy]
especially with technology that’s already affiliated with encouragement, people to commit suicide, for example, like there’s a lot that can go wrong. And then if you work with these people and produce brand for them and produce all the, the marketing assets, then. Yeah, there’s a complicity there that you may or may not. So yeah, obviously you need to the bills, but at the same time, just remember the brand risk and that I just wasn’t really willing to do that. ⁓ risk. So.

[Marc]
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, true, mean, those of the listeners or viewers who know you know that you have a strong standpoint to that topic, right? I guess you see a tension between making the web for everyone and AI’s industry’s current direction, right? So tell us more about this. What’s your thinking of that? I mean, it’s pretty obvious that AI won’t go away anymore. So what’s your perspective on that?

[Andy]
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

No.

So like I earlier, I knew I didn’t like this technology from the moment it arrived because of the means of how it arrived. was models trained on stolen property, stolen content. ⁓

[Marc]
Mm.

Yeah, we’re talking about the, especially talking about the generative, like artwork or music or whatever like this.

[Andy]
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s incredibly resource intensive. He’s current environmental damage. And it’s also used to produce materials that should never be produced today, such as like the CSAM stuff with croc. there’s sort of like four main things there underneath it. sorry. Five. They now over a trillion dollars of investment has gone into it. So there’s, there’s those points there.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

[Andy]
And then, then you look at the quality of the output and it’s poor, really. Even I think even a sort of enthusiastic AI user will concede that in general AI is poor. Unless you really hamstring it into doing what you need it to do. And then it’s still reasonably poor. Yeah.

[Marc]
Mm.

Hmm?

So … you think it would need time until people recognise it’s not as good as the first impression gave them? do you think, well, no.

[Andy]
Well, yeah, this is the conflict. So there’s so the technology is not ready. So for AI companies to be able to run the need to make money off of this technology in order for that to happen, need mainstream subscriptions, right? that what I mean by mainstream is not people in the tech industry. Now we know people are using AI tools a lot because they’ve been pushed on them and B, they can use it for free. So …

[Marc]
When they don’t.

[Andy]
… they’ll mess around with chat GPT for free. They’ll mess around with Facebook’s, whatever it’s called for free. When they’re having to pay, and it will have to be minimum hundreds a month from ⁓ at the best level, hundreds of thousands for businesses ⁓ for a year ⁓ on their teams for these companies to even get close to making the right sort of revenue.

But then these companies also are now huge amount of debt assigned to them as well. So already billions invested in them. There’s infrastructure, more billions, chips, more billions. Infrastructure is going to take time to build. So they’re going to have to build the demand during that. the demand is just not there. Yeah, it’s just not currently there. So they had

[Marc]
yeah, yeah. And I see that the technology and the infrastructure they use nowadays is old and times when people might start to use it, like, you know.

[Andy]
Yeah.

Precisely, yeah. So it

takes you two years to build a data center and you’ve already bought chips for those data centres. And then the data center’s finished, but then those chips are no longer the best chips. So you fill the data center with different chips, more billions. And then, yeah, it’s, the finances just don’t make sense when you actually look at it from a sort of pragmatic viewpoint.

Unless there’s a unbelievably monumental shift across the everyone at the same time, which is not going to happen. So the technology is never going to work. I mean, we saw it on tellerrand, you can run it locally on your, on your laptop, right? So I don’t think so the tech industry where we’re best, I think it’s going to be a developer tool forever, but

What is almost certainly going to happen is there will be a bubble pop. Maybe not pop, maybe it’s a deflation like the dot com bubble was a deflation. It went on for around three, four years, isn’t it? The dot com crash. I think similar is going to come. In fact, I’m pretty convinced similar is going to come. ⁓ And the impact is going to have.

Just not just on the tech industry and just economically in general is pretty severe. ⁓ And yeah, I don’t want to get behind that. Yeah.

[Marc]
Yeah, I think so as well.

I have the feeling that from a standpoint of an organizer of events in person with people coming to it, that those people who usually pay for the tickets when it comes to agencies or companies, and they are missing at the moment for me, to be honest. It’s individuals buying, but it’s not the... I used to have teams of 30 people being sent by their boss to say, make it a team experience, go there and be at the event.

[Andy]
Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

[Marc]
two days and then come back energised and stuff. It’s not happening at the moment. And I have the feeling, I don’t know if it’s true or right, but I have the feeling that those ⁓ agencies and teams ⁓ or the bosses of those agencies and teams, they’re sitting there and just waiting in this kind of like, yeah, what’s happening? how, when they’re unsafe, unsure, uncertain about like, so what’s next? Do I sit on that horse? Do I wait? Will it be worth

[Andy]
Hmm.

What’s gonna happen? ⁓

Hmm.

[Marc]
So it’s like, that’s the kind of like strange silence. I don’t know. It feels like a vacuum we’re in right now, for me at least, right? I have no idea either. So I go like, OK, I’m certainly not going to jump on the AI hype train and push all the AI stuff on my stage because it doesn’t interest me, to be honest. But surely there will be topics covering or touching AI topics, right? And that’s OK, right, if it’s in the right way and direction. ⁓

[Andy]
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

[Marc]
But really, for me, it’s like this kind of like, so what’s next? I mean, what’s next? when is it happening? Like, is it like, don’t know how to describe it. It feels like a big lump of stuff is in the tube, right? And at some point it goes like, ah, yeah, finally we are back, not back to normal. That’s wrong, but we now have a way to deal with it and it’s okay to be at events again. And it’s important to me.

[Andy]
Yeah.

[Marc]
people in real life and exchange and learn from each other. Right. So this kind of stuff. I think that’s missing and it ⁓ first dates me to be honest. ⁓

[Andy]
Hmm. Yeah, I I mean, there’s a, there’s a cynicism as well with a, with a lot of companies at the moment, like the sort of AI mandates, like I think I was to give a lesson that one piece of advice is if your company are mandating that you use AI, then unionise because they’re not mandating you to use AI for fun. They’re mandating you to use AI because they want you gone. Um, so it’s simple as that.

There’s no more positive way to look at it than that. So unionise. ⁓ and that’s the cynicism that they’re like, but then it’s just, it’s just, that’s just companies in general. They just run by assholes. Yeah.

[Marc]
Yeah, mean, yeah, that’s the problem with most of the fast expanding tech and stuff where people go like, wow, right? So that’s big issue in general, not just of AI, to be honest. It’s talking about social media, it’s done and broken nowadays, right? Because it’s not for the people anymore. It’s not meant for the people. It’s just meant to make a lot of money for other people. Yeah, true.

[Andy]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

No.

and create a lot of

[Marc]
⁓

[Andy]
influence, yeah.

[Marc]
Yeah. So for coming back to the AI topic, does it also say like, ⁓ how do I put it? ⁓ Do you think progressive enhancement in web standards, talking about AI and what we spoke about before, ⁓ fear now counter-cultural at the moment? ⁓

[Andy]
Mm.

Do is have this recently where like, think if you in the web, well, especially since like 2010s, if you’ve taken progressive announcement seriously and web standards and accessibility, you’ve been swimming against the current of the industry. Um, where, you know, I mean, the typical output from a LLM, unless you sort of steer it, otherwise it’ll default to using.

[Marc]
You know?

Mm-hmm.

[Andy]
Next.js and Tailwind because so much of the industry hype and sort of writing and content from that era up into the sort of early to mid 2020s was specifically those frameworks, right? And then the React ecosystem around it. So by process of popularity, then...

[Marc]
Hmm

[Andy]
the probability machine, which is what an LLM is, is gonna produce you the most likely ⁓ outcome that you want, which is a Next.js system with Tailwind providing the UI on it. So I do think AI is at odds with web standards. I know things are getting better. We always hear, things are getting better, but things are getting better. Something you gotta remember though with that is things may well be getting better.

[Marc]
Hmm?

[Andy]
But there’s already thousands, probably millions of websites that have been produced with this technology already, which are not, and they’re there forever now, or they’re there for a long time at least. And they’re there, they are now continuing to produce a bad user experience for people unless you’re on a high spec Mac on a high speed connection in San Francisco. You know, like everyone else, yeah, not a, not going to get a great experience, but then that’s not unique to AI. think that’s a.

[Marc]
Yeah. ⁓

[Andy]
There’s been a decline in standards, I think, for a good half a decade at this point ⁓ in the industry. And I think the AI hype cycle that we’re in is only accelerating that. So I what I would say to sort of listeners not into the idea of declining standards is to make sure that the standards are kept high.

And that any sort of influence to, know, it’s fine. Just do this, just do that is, is cut out because if you allow them to carry on declining, then the sort of baseline experience for people is going to be just dreadful. ⁓ so yeah, well, the, think it’s just not helping in general, really, I think in summary.

[Marc]
Hmm?

[Andy]
Yeah.

[Marc]
True. Would you be brave enough to have any prediction where this is all going to to? ⁓ Or what your position is in there? Because you say, okay, well, it’s not going to go away. So do you see yourself as someone who needs to educate people about it? No? Because you’re the enemy then. Because it’s dangerous, right? As soon as you go like,

[Andy]
I don’t want to know. think because it’s...

Yeah, guess so. Yeah, it’s until I see some serious regulation, until I see some serious environmental changes. I mean, the toothpaste is out of the tube, right? So you can’t put it back in. But like I said about when we’re talking about the course and stuff earlier, there’s plenty of people talking about AI. our principle is we’re just not going to do that.

And we’re going to set out our standoff. Look, we’re not into this. We’re here to be produce human content for humans. Right. And we’re going to carry on doing that. And if I was to predict then look, wait until the sort of quarter four numbers start coming in from the AI companies. Maybe, maybe some might have already come in and then the Q one for this year.

[Marc]
Okay.

[Andy]
Open AI, for example, need to have made a impossible amount of revenue in order to unlock the next round of funding that they need to grow. If I was to predict anything, I’d say one or two of the bigger AI companies, they’re to struggle this year. And I think that’ll have a domino effect on the software as a service industry in terms of producing AI capabilities. I think that’s as broad as I’ll go with the prediction that the 2026 at the moment feels like there’s been a surge in AI popularity. I don’t, I don’t think that’s a genuine surge. think that’s a manufactured surge. And my advice to people that holding on, keep on holding would be my advice. Because yeah, you don’t have to hold on for much longer. I don’t think.

[Marc]
Mm.

[Andy]
But in terms of it being a tool for developers, that’s never gonna go away. It’s gonna be here forever. ⁓ So it is gonna be part of people’s tool chains.

there’s probably gonna be a necessity to at least understand it for the job market. But again, unless you’re being mandated, like you can’t really be left behind with AI because it’s changing all of the time. So just like the frameworks were once upon a time, you can get yourself up to speed with these tools very, very quickly. So don’t worry about being left behind. Just wait until you have to use it and...

in all likelihoodness, that’ll only be a short term thing. yeah, play ball as it were. Yeah.

[Marc]
Yeah. Well, however direction or whichever direction it takes, interesting times ahead. And I hope it’s going to be, and I’m not just talking about AI, it’s going to be less grim, less pessimistic, and a bit more sunshine in our lives again, right? looking at the whole overall surrounding. Yeah, in general, we do, yeah. But yeah.

[Andy]
We need some something, don’t we? Yeah, we need something. Yeah. So yeah, let’s hope so,

[Marc]
Talking about digital AI and all that kind of stuff, I see you sit in front of a shelf with a lot of what is it behind you. The younger people who listen or watch this are records, right? Why not? Are you a big collector?

[Andy]
Hehehe.

boss of records.

Yeah

I Wouldn’t say a massive but it said but then every time I look at it it’s getting bigger and bigger So it’s yeah getting there, but it’s great. I it lies. I came in for music. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, yeah ⁓

[Marc]
So you’re still buying? You’re still buying Wiener, yeah? cool. So what’s the music direction? Is there any direction or is it just general interest in music or you have like any specific?

[Andy]
Yeah, general. Yeah, I mean, I’m probably more into heavier stuff. If you were to and hip hop are probably the two sort of top genres for me. But yeah, I really like to mix it up. I’ve got the whole collection. It’s on the summer side. So yeah, I it. I keep a sort of record of everything on there. So it’s very eclectic. But yeah, I’m a massive music fan. Absolutely huge. And having the tangible collection.

[Marc]
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

cool. And how do you listen to them these days?

[Andy]
So the vinyl’s got a little turntable down there, the stereo, then the, I’ve got a CD player on there as well, but then I rip everything digitally as well for myself. So yeah, I like building this. Yeah, the aim for the end of this year is to be off streaming services for me completely.

[Marc]
Okay.

Mm-hmm. Well, I said it.

I said it to you earlier and it’s just like randomly dragged somewhere. I Vinyl as well still, right? Like see? Yeah!

[Andy]
Yeah, a black flag, amazing.

Yeah, proper punk. Exactly, yeah. That’s how it starts. You get like a, you get a soft, collection like that and then you blink and then suddenly you’ve got an entire calax full of it behind you. So, I love it though.

[Marc]
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it’s
one shelf of like 30 centimetres. So it’s like a meter of LPs that I still own. And oftentimes they’re like, will I throw them away? And I was like, no, why? mean, they don’t take much space, I have to say also, right? it’s like for them and it’s like so many, music in general, I think, are so many memories. Oftentimes you track, it’s played in the radio and you instantly …

[Andy]
Hmm.

Never.

No.

Hmm.

[Marc]
… taken back to the time when you listen to that song for the first time. Same for me with looking at covers of albums. Look at it and go like, oh, that was like 1986, blah, blah. This kind of stuff where it instantly gives you flashbacks, positive flashbacks most of the time.

[Andy]
Yeah.

Yeah, I love that.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s nice to sort of read the notes and yeah, appreciate the art. And that’s something that people got to do more is appreciate the art, And find, there’s a lot of bad going on in the moments. Find something that you really like and really lean heavily into it for a while and enjoy yourself. Yeah.

[Marc]
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm?

⁓ Are

you also creating music yourself? Are you playing in a band or producing any music at home or something?

[Andy]
No, I used to be like musicians, like drums and stuff, but I don’t play much anymore. I want to, but probably not in a band again. I’ve done that, been there, that, done the touring and stuff, but definitely play more and yeah, do more with kids and stuff like they’re learning instruments as well. yeah, maybe build a little band from that. yeah, it’s just, yeah, in terms of pretty, the bells.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. The bells.

[Andy]
But yeah, that’s cool. Now, big fun. I wanted to be in music, not in tech. So I ended up falling into tech by accident via music. yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[Marc]
Well, there’s like similar thing for me as well, right? So, being like … 14, I started playing bass and we always had a band back in school. well, that dream was, yeah, pretty quickly it was like dreamt and it was over. You recognised, well, okay, like so many want exactly that, right? So, and I haven’t been in a position, I don’t know. Yeah.

[Andy]
Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s a lot of work, yeah.

[Marc]
Yeah. And also it sounds like this

[Andy]
You have to put a lot of shells, yeah.

[Marc]
kind of blah, blah, you have to be at the right place at the right moments. You have to like network a lot and meet people and ⁓ similar to what you have to do nowadays with certain like businesses. But well, yes. And then I got into, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[Andy]
I don’t know how bands do it now, yeah. Because so much competition now, and so much noise. Yeah, yeah.

[Marc]
Yeah, and less and less concerts, to be honest.

Back when I was playing in a school band, ⁓ there was a concert every week somewhere in our little village or little city. Three places where you could play. ⁓ You’d always bring the ⁓ class and all that kind of stuff. It always was quite packed. There like 200 people, affordable. People were just coming without knowing your music. These days it’s like so...

[Andy]
Hmm.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

[Marc]
Like people are so picky about what band they’re going live to and concerts are like so expensive. Even the one we played in November here in Krefeld, they charged 23 euros for the entrance. Yeah. I was like, what? I mean, we were four bands, but still 23 euros. And then on top you have a couple of beers as well, ⁓ Or drinks in general. Not necessarily beer, but...

[Andy]
23 euros. Man, how expensive.

Salaam.

Yeah, yeah.

Hmm.

[Marc]
In my case, was beer and then you pay for that as well, right? So if I imagine like beers now, what is it? Four or five euros, pint over here. And that’s, that’s quite some money for the evening, just to see some band that you don’t know. mean...

[Andy]
Yeah. Yeah.

Crazy, innit?

Yeah. I used to live in Leeds. I used to be able to go to, you pop the crash records on a Saturday and you spend a fiver on a ticket to like the cockpit or Leeds Mate Uni or somewhere around there, Broodingdale Social Club. you get, I’d watching shows every week, you know, like literally every single week we’d be going and watching shows five years ago. And yeah, mean, 20, 23 euros for yours. mean, you go and see any sort of signed, signed band now it’s minimum 40.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Hmm

Yeah.

[Andy]
quite quick these days, know, and yeah, big part of the experience, but I mean, watching a show every week definitely gave me permanent titers too. you know, I think it’s

[Marc]
yeah, me too. mean, I have a little wooden box down in my basement where all the tickets are still in, right? That I got from back in the day. So recently we had a conversation with the band and I photographed some of them and someone else on Facebook posted some old ticket to their own band’s concert. And I thought like, I have plenty of those as well. And I got the folder with all that. And so I’m going to build a website nowadays, like what’s this an archive of that stuff that hasn’t been digital back then, right? Like for those bands.

[Andy]
⁓ nice, yeah.

resin

Yeah, yeah.

[Marc]
Pretty unknown stuff, …

[Andy]
Good on you.

[Marc]
… but just for your own sake and for your own archive and let’s make it. Yeah. Yeah, true.

[Andy]
Yeah.

It’s just a nice thing to do, it?

It’s just a wholesome thing to do. So yeah, good on you.

[Marc]
Coolio! So what’s up next for you then?

[Andy]
I think 2026 is a year of seeing what happens. I think I’ve asked to explain it. We’re busy at the moment in the studio doing some really cool stuff at the moment. So we’re just enjoying doing that right now. ⁓

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. You’re rebuilding your own website as well? From scratch in the open?

[Andy]
I’m doing my site.

Yeah. So I would chip in a way that for the, I’ve been busy last few weeks. So sorry, everyone. I’ve not really had a chance to get on it again, but yeah, I’ve, I thought it’d be a great time to sort of open the door and say, all right, okay, this is how I would go right from start all the way to the end. And in that sort of …

[Marc]
Hmm?

[Andy]
… pragmatic as possible way. And then hopefully it will inspire people to say, you know what? Yeah, I could do this and get into it themselves. And owning your own website and maintaining your website is the best thing you could do for yourself right now. I think it’s also punk as hell doing that because you own your space, you have your own voice and you don’t have to sort of conform to the norms of …

[Marc]
Hmm?

[Andy]
… blue sky, Macedon, whatever, LinkedIn, and the other place. And so, yeah, it’s just a great way to be able to express yourself. Mine looks like shit at the moment, and I don’t care, it’s fine. And it’s gonna look like that for months and months and months. Yeah. Yeah. I’m still trying to talk Jason into helping me do the design, but he’s not letting me at the moment. He’s told me I have to do it myself.

[Marc]
Mine always has been and it works. People can read text on there and see some of the photos I take. Well, that’s it.

[Andy]
Yeah, which is not fair. I said, can you at least find me some nice fonts? ⁓ but yeah, he’s ⁓ so i’m chipping away him in the moment to to help me with some creative because he’s so good and I am not so good these days. So But I do want it to look amazing and by the end of this year I hope it will but i’m just gonna keep chipping away at that series as time goes on and yeah by the end of it will be a lot of blog posts that you can just read through and

Yeah, hopefully learn to do stuff yourself.

[Marc]
Cool. Any events you plan to attend in 2026 that you already know of?

[Andy]
So, well, as you know, I had a busy year on the events last year. I think I did nine talks at conferences last year. And yours was the last one, beyond tellerrand. So that, this year, I’m slimming it a little bit. So I went to stay at the browser last week. I’m going to All Day Hey’s last conference in Leeds, very good. Not gonna get to beyond tellerrand, I’m afraid, this year, mate.

[Marc]
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

[Andy]
But I’ll go to FF, I’ll go to FFConf in Brighton as well. yeah. Yeah. Good. Good to see you. ⁓ I missed FFConf last year because, ⁓ I was planning on going, but when I landed back from Berlin, could barely keep my eyes open. was like, you know what? I’m going to take it here. Cause I’d literally have to set off like 40 hours later and I can’t leave my family again. So yeah, but this year I’ll go down and, yeah, I’ll have, I’ll have a trip to Brighton in November for that.

[Marc]
trying to make that as well, yeah.

Yeah, true. I’m in Brighton next week. ⁓ no, not week. we’re recording. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I’m going to go down tomorrow. It’s like a of a trip these days. It used to be quite easy. And now it’s like, ⁓ with Heathrow, or like the tunnel, right? And it’s like a long trip. So easily takes eight hours and longer these days. But well, it is what it is. Have to plan accordingly.

[Andy]
Yeah, that’d be good. Yeah, Web Day out, of course, isn’t it? It’s out on Thursday, it? Yeah, a of days. ⁓ good.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s good fun though, isn’t it?

Yeah, should be a good event that one as well. Yeah. Good.

[Marc]
Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it.

Wonderful. I mean, was a pleasure having you here and chatting about it. I will put all the links in the show notes, like the Piccoli stuff and ⁓ everything we’ve been talking about. made some notes and ⁓ hope that people will get something out of our chit chat.

[Andy]
Yeah, thanks mate, thanks have me.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, I think if anything, it’s just a different, listening to different viewpoints is useful. ⁓ Yeah, and challenge things. Yeah. Yeah.

[Marc]
Yes, exactly. That’s and then. Exactly, that’s what it is. Well, thank you so much, Andy. See you next time.

[Andy]
Thank you, mate. It’s pleasure.

Take it easy.

[Marc]
Bye bye.

[Andy]
See ya.

As I wrote in her speaker introduction, Marjan is a Dutch solar designer whose work asks a deceptively simple question: why does solar energy have to be ugly? Her talk in Düsseldorf gave a lot of answers.

”Solar Futures” begins not in a lab but in ancient history. Stonehenge, aligned to the solstice. The Pantheon in Rome, where a single 8.3-metre opening in the ceiling was designed so precisely that on the founding day of Rome, the sun would fall on exactly the spot where the emperor stood. Marjan called this “cathedral thinking”, building for something centuries beyond yourself. That, she argued, is the kind of long thinking the solar transition needs now.

She also showed what is probably the first solar rooftop installation in New York and asked the audience to guess the year. 1884. Before the car. Before almost everything we associate with modernity. Solar is not a new idea. It is a very old one that we somehow managed to make ugly and then put on the shelf.

The studio tour that followed moved through Current Table, Current Window, the Solar Pavilion at Dutch Design Week, where people ended up dancing on it in the evenings by the glow of the energy it had collected during the day and the Dutch Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo, a fully circular biotope drawing water from desert air, growing plants and mushrooms, every beam borrowed from local manufacturers and returned afterwards.

The talk’s emotional centre was Sunne. She described the feeling of watching a sunset, that instinct to hold the moment before it's gone. Sunne is her attempt to capture that: a solar light that charges in a window during the day and mimics natural sunlight at night. Someone told her the day before: “Basically you have 24-hour sun”. She said she quite liked that.

She closed where she began. Solar design is inevitable. Everything will be integrated with it. Not just buildings, but the small and non-obvious things too. The question is not whether it will happen, but whether we do it from necessity, or with beauty.

More information about Marjan van Aubel on her beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

He opened by saying he never considered himself an artist. That he just builds things out of curiosity, for himself. And that it sometimes produces slightly unhinged results. What followed was forty minutes of exactly that.

”The Web Beyond the Edges of the Browser Window” is about obsessions. Not the tortured kind, but the good kind: that period of clarity and focus where something grabs you and you just have to follow it wherever it goes. Niels has followed his obsessions into some very strange places. Clocks. Laser projectors. Oscilloscopes. Stage lighting rigs. CSS-controlled flamethrowers. And in every single case, the tool he reached for was the web.

The talk moves through several projects, each one born from something Niels saw or heard at a previous beyond tellerrand. A talk by Vasilis van Gemert about gradient clocks sent him head-first into a Raspberry Pi rabbit hole and the creation of badclock, which is a round touchscreen clock powered by a physics simulation so over-engineered it has gravity, breakable hands, a beam mode with 120 simulated ball bearings and a winding knob that will snap the gears if you wind it too much. It is completely impractical and completely wonderful.

Then there is the oscilloscope chapter, which is really several stories in one. The plan was simple: use the Web Audio API to steer the electron beam of a 1980s scope and draw a clock on it. What actually happened involved Niels building a signal generator, finally getting the scope working, playing with it for about an hour, and then — sparks, smoke, a mad scramble for the power plug, and a dead oscilloscope. Undeterred and on a five-hour train to a conference, he built his own oscilloscope simulator from scratch instead, doing a deep dive into electromagnetic force, phosphor physics, and Euler integrations before sensibly deciding he had a life and stopping just short of calculating how electrons excite phosphors. The simulator looked right. That was enough. Once the real scope was repaired, everything he had built just worked. Including Doom, a playable version of the original Asteroids, and Chrome’s offline dinosaur game, all running on vintage hardware via web technology.

The final act is about taking the web off the screen entirely. Niels wanted to control stage lights with CSS. Not as a metaphor – literally: write CSS animations, have the lights respond. He built a DMX controller in the browser using WebUSB, hooked it up to professional stage lights and a smoke machine, and then, almost as an aside, showed a flamethrower he had bought on AliExpress on a train to a previous beyond tellerrand and had some explaining to do about when it arrived at home. The talk ends with CSS animations running on a laser projector – SVGs drawn in light, bouncing around a darkened stage – and Niels quietly noting that he cannot put into words how much fun this is. You can tell.

What I love about this talk is that it never once tries to be more than it is. Niels is not solving problems. He is not building products. He is tinkering, in the very best sense of the word. Following curiosity wherever it leads, using the tools he loves best, and ending up somewhere genuinely surprising every time. He closed by thanking beyond tellerrand for 15 years of inspiration. The feeling, very much, is mutual.

More information about Niels Leenheer on his beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

"Why You Should Do It Anyway!" is part origin story, part hard-won lesson and part live demo. It starts in the 90s with a broke techno DJ who taught himself Flash because it was the closest thing to the music studio he had in his head. It moves through years of hacking audio out of a platform that was never designed for it. Generating samples from byte arrays, building Roland 909 emulations, sequencing tones in a browser years before the Web Audio API existed.

Then it becomes something else: 16 years at Audiotool, what it felt like to pour everything into something and then lose control of it, and how spite – yes, spite – can be a perfectly good fuel for starting over.

What I find most valuable in this talk is how honest André is about his own poor judgment. He doesn’t blame the people who terminated his contract. He blames himself for not seeing it coming. That kind of self-awareness is rare on stage and it makes everything he says about openDAW feel earned rather than promotional.

And openDAW is bloody impressive. No sign-ups. No cookie banners. No cloud lock-in. Half a megabyte, boots in 200 milliseconds, runs on any device including a school computer. André has been working with music teachers and professors to shape it and next semester it will be the software of choice at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. The live demo at the end with Bastian Allgeier playing guitar through openDAW’s effects chain at six milliseconds latency is a lovely way to end a talk about belief in what the browser can do.

There is a line in here I keep thinking about: "If everybody owns it, nobody can steal it." Simple. And true!

More information about André Michelle on his beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

For Berlin he suggested to do something a little different. Not a talk about the future of technology, but a talk about what he does on the side. About his hobbies. About what drives him as a maker.

Sure enough, he came back with “Art in Dusty Places” – a talk about almost a decade of bringing large scale art projects to Burning Man.

Art in Dusty Places

Every year a city of 75.000 people is built in the middle of a dry lake bed which is in the middle of the Black Rock Desert which is in the middle of nowhere in Northern Nevada in the USA. Black Rock City exists ephemerally on a substrate of an ancient lake bed that is an unhealthy and caustic mix of alkaline salts and fine minerals laid out perfectly flat for miles in all directions. The smallest movement of air raises the dust, a breeze necessitates eye protection, a wind creates a whiteout so complete you can experience vertigo. The dust coats everything and everyone.

It is an environment naturally devoid of the influences of contour, contrast, color, liquid water, animal or plant life. In this setting humans arrive for a month of building and 10 days of existing. Then in effigy it is all burned to the ground. With no other natural influences the emergent culture is unique and decidedly humanistic. Life can become so amplified that the world outside is referred to as analog. Any day at This Thing in The Desert is a practice between survival and self-actualisation and like no other day lived. And it comes with two constants: Dust and Art.

What followed was a tour through augmented reality porta-potties, a 100 yard long trailing soul, a solar power library for artists, giant gramophone horns playing eight hours of Stephen Hawking lectures and a whole lot more. Jared took us through every project from idea to prototype to scale, from sketching gears in the garage to bolting things to the playa so they don’t blow away. The whole talk is full of stories about serendipity, about his twin brother “the dude”, his crew, his daughter, and the community that grows around any creative endeavour you take serious enough.

What I love about this talk is that underneath all the dust and burning man stories, it is really a talk about making. About iterating. About trusting your idea enough to commit to it for ten years. About building three iterations until you reach 80% of your vision and knowing when to stop chasing the last 20%. About leaving no trace. And about the fact that, as Jared says, you don’t build on the playa – you set up on the playa.

There is a sentence in there I keep thinking about: “The dust always comes and it settles equally on everyone.” I think that applies to a lot more than Burning Man.

More information about Jared Ficklin on his beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

This year it is not the first time, he creates visuals and the design for beyond tellerrand. He first created the graphics and opening titles for beyond tellerrand in 2019 and seven years on I was lucky enough to have him do it all again for our fifteenth anniversary edition in Düsseldorf.

He started sharing his process on his blog in early April, beginning, as he always does, with pencil sketches before moving into software. “Scribbles without judgement”, as he puts it. Where in 2019 he had built everything in Houdini, this time he wanted to work in TouchDesigner with the goal of making the posters deterministic so each speaker poster came out unique, but with a reference code, so it could be re-produced when using the code in TouchDesigner.

Through April he was deep in the system: a series of posters (one for each speaker, plus separate ones for the event itself) and the animated opening titles. By mid-month the titles were close to done and he, once more, was working back and forth with Tobi Lessnow on the music.

Then on the Monday morning of the conference he and his wife Lisa flew over to Düsseldorf and the posters – generated by his system – got a small scramble at the end of Tuesday as people grabbed them to take home. ☺️

As he wrote afterwards:

There’s something quietly satisfying about watching an abstract system become an object people physically want to keep.

Well, what else can I add here. That, honestly, is one of the reasons, why I keep asking him back.

Thank you Brendan!

Final Posters

About Brendan Dawes

Brendan Dawes is a British artist and designer whose playful, code-driven work explores the relationship between data, technology, and the everyday. Rooted in remix culture, he blends code, found objects, and tactile interfaces to surface the poetry hidden in mundane moments and the structures hidden inside complex data.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including three shows at MoMA in New York, where his piece Cinema Redux became part of the permanent collection in 2008. He has also shown at ZKM, Somerset House, Disseny Hub Barcelona, and as part of Big Bang Data in thirteen cities around the world, with works auctioned at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

In 2024 he collaborated with filmmaker Gary Hustwit on Eno, the world’s first generative film – a documentary about Brian Eno that is unique every time it is viewed, with 52 quintillion possible versions. The film premiered at Sundance and was later shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Oh and I had the honour of hosting the German premiere in Berlin.

A Lumen Prize and Aesthetica Art Prize alumnus, Brendan is Visiting Professor of Computational Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and is represented in the UK and Europe by Gazelli Art House, London. You can find more of his work on his website.

A few years ago, he swapped helping hands for a camera and ever since, he has been quietly documenting what makes beyond tellerrand special: the speakers, the crowd, the small moments in between, and the unmistakable atmosphere that brings everyone back.

This year in Düsseldorf, Martin captured all of that across over 200 photos. Beyond the talks, his series gives a feel for the foyer chats, the laughs, the focused faces in the audience, and the community spirit that defines the event.

A huge thank you to Martin for once again sharing his eye and his time with us. Go take a look. The full set is well worth a slow scroll.

If you were at the conference, you know what Niels does: he takes the browser somewhere it was never really designed to go. Stubborn clocks on Raspberry Pis with round touchscreens and Box2D gravity simulations. SVG shapes turned into audio waves to draw on a 1980s oscilloscope using Web Audio. DMX-controlled stage lights, smoke machines and – for obvious reasons not brought on stage – a flamethrower, all driven from the browser via WebUSB. A laser projector running Asteroids. And CSS Doom, a full playable version of Doom rendered almost entirely in HTML and CSS, which has already convinced the Ladybird browser team to fix a CSS anchor positioning bug.

The podcast goes much deeper than the talk could. Niels explains the actual code behind the oscilloscope, how the gravity simulation works, why Chrome struggles with 10.000 textured 3D divs, and how newer CSS features like trigonometric functions, custom properties and stepped animations make CSS Doom possible. Oh, and the level exit is not a div. It is a proper button. As it should be.

A genuinely fun listen. This tim in English. It’s for anyone who loves the web and wants to be reminded of what it can do when someone decides to ignore what it’s supposed to be for.

⇾ Listen to Working Draft Revision 712

You can watch the whole presentation on our YouTube channel, as well as here and on her beyond tellerrand speaker profile.

The Act of Pressing a Key: The Journey of a Letterform on to Your Screen

We live in a world where we encounter letterforms every day. We type on our phones, read books, glance at advertisements on the train, follow signage to reach our destinations. Letterforms don't just carry information – they are a means of expression, shaped by history, culture, and context.

These forms have evolved over centuries, across regions and writing systems. One such script is Devanagari, used to write languages like Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit, and read by hundreds of millions of people.

Join Kimya on the journey of a letterform – from its conception as a drawn shape to its behaviour as digital text on your screen. Drawing from her own experience designing Devanagari typefaces, she reflects on what it means to work with a script that carries cultural memory while constantly being reshaped by new tools and contexts. What does it mean to design for a script you grew up with? And how can type design become a way of re-seeing and re-claiming what feels familiar?

More information about and photos of Kimya Gandhi on her beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

Sascha has been coming to beyond tellerrand for 15 years. Fifteen! That alone is a thing worth pausing on for a second, because it means he’s been part of this little adventure of mine since the very beginning. After last year’s Düsseldorf event he posted something on Instagram — a small offshoot of his side project Artifactor, inspired by Gavin Strange’s talk that year. I saw it, and at some point I just sent him an email: "Hey, wouldn’t you like to do something for my event?”

Turns out he would.

What the Tellerrandomizer Actually Is

If you’ve been to beyond tellerrand before, you’ll know about the lovely Audio-Sketch-Notes that wonderful project where Tobi Lessnow sits on stage with his funky setup, records the speakers, and remixes his tracks live using speech samples from the talk that just happened. Tobi started this in 2013 for beyond tellerrand and it is part of it. A bit unusual, a bit unexpected and it adds to the overall energy that exists in the room.

The Tellerrandomizer is, in Sascha’s own words, the ”visual counterpart to that”.

During each talk, photos are taken and quotes are captured. Everything is then assembled in Kirby together with information about the speaker and the session. Afterwards, the result is shown as a presentation that is deliberately chaotic, visually loud, and full of personality. The drawn lines and the wild typography in the names are a nod to the outstanding 2026 CI by Brendan Dawes, or, as Sascha calls him, The Master of Generative Data Art. ;)

It’s called the Tellerrandomizer because almost everything in the presentation is driven by random values. Behind the scenes there’s a whole pool of textures, graphics, masks and fonts. Their styling is controlled, very simply, by php rand(). As Sascha says: as simple as it is effective.

I totally love that. It’s the kind of project that looks elaborate and feels custom-made, but is really just one person, an idea and the discipline to keep it simple.

A Small Note about Kirby

Sascha built the Tellerrandomizer in Kirby and as he himself puts it, the Kirby community and beyond tellerrand have been linked for years. Bastian and the Kirby crowd have been a part of btconf for almost as long as bt has existed and this website (as everything that I create in the web these days) runs on Kirby also. Which makes all of this even more “full circle”.

There’s also a very practical reason Kirby was the right choice for Sascha. He was capturing photos and quotes live, in the room, on his phone. The Kirby Panel works flawlessly on a smartphone, which made the whole live-collection workflow possible in the first place.

Why This Means a Lot to Me Personally

There’s a thing I keep saying to people, and I’ll say it again here: support the small events. Support the people who put themselves out there with side projects, with little Instagram posts about something they built on a weekend, with ideas that maybe aren’t fully formed yet. You never know what comes from it.

In Sascha’s case, a single Instagram post that I had seen after my event turned into a collaboration. That collaboration turned into the Tellerrandomizer. And the Tellerrandomizer turned into one of the details of this year’s event. Something attendees genuinely stopped to look at, smile about and tell me that they really liked it.

That’s exactly the kind of thing beyond tellerrand is built on. Not big budgets, not big agencies. People. Side projects. Trust.

So, thank you, Sascha. For 15 years of showing up. For building something beautiful out of an offhand email and a meeting over a coffee in Düsseldorf. For trusting that our small project would turn into something cool and meaningful.

And to everyone reading this: go check out Sascha’s write-up of the project on n2.studio and follow his work in general. He’s the kind of person who quietly makes things better and those are the people we should be paying attention to.