Finally: Frontend Meetup Freiburg

I knew about the Frontend Meetup Freiburg for about ten years. Ten years! And yesterday was my first time attending. We met at Café Hermann, close to Freiburg main station, at 18:30 and stayed for about two hours. The organiser is Emma Crowson, who – like me – specialises in accessibility. She works at Kultwerk here in Freiburg.

What took me so long?

Life, mostly. Family, job, forgetting about it for months until I'd remember again – only to have something else come up. The usual excuses. What changed? I honestly don't know. It just felt like the right time to finally show up.

A planning session

This wasn't a regular meetup with talks. It was a planning meeting to set the schedule for the rest of the year. Six people sitting together, figuring out dates, venues, and who might want to speak about what. Twelve had said they'd come, but six showed up – which is about what you'd expect. The group agreed it's normal to have just five or six people when there's no talk scheduled. For last year's Christmas market meetup, Emma, the organiser, already had low expectations and asked a coworker to join. In the end, it was her, her coworker, and one other person.

She was a great host by the way: friendly, welcoming, and generous enough to share the food she ordered with the group. If I remember correctly, she's been doing this for thirteen years now – which is an amazing feat to me. Double thumbs up.

The 2026 schedule

Here are the dates we settled on:

• 12.02. – at Virtual Identity, with Mario Hamann talking about "Documentation Driven Development"
• 12.03. – at La Pepa (the Spanish restaurant – tapas meetup!)
• 16.04. – at kultwerk, with Stefan Reifenberg talking about "Data Visualisation"
• 14.05. – at Jos-Fritz-Cafe (social)
• 11.06. – my talk on web performance at Grünhof
• 09.07. – Summer BBQ
• August – summer break
• 17.09. – at Grünhof, with Chris talking about "Cookies"
• 15.10. – at Blauer Fuchs (social)
• 12.11. – AI Lightning Talks at kultwerk
• 10.12. – Weihnachtsmarkt at Cafe POW

February is planned, and I'll contact La Pepa about the tapas meetup. Beyond that, I can't guarantee that all these dates are set in stone or that I wrote them down correctly.

I'll be giving a talk

It seems I agreed to give a talk at the June meetup about Web Performance:
11th of June – save the date.

I'll need to narrow it down because performance is a pretty wide field. Right now I'm considering four directions:

1. The structure in the head element and how that helps make sites faster
2. How to plan for performance before starting a new project
3. A case study of improving performance in an existing website
4. I can talk for hours on end about how to not use JavaScript entirely if possible, but I guess that isn't very helpful

More on that as I figure it out.

The AI conversation

Of course we talked about AI. Everyone at the table uses it while coding these days. I mentioned that I'm working with Claude, and Ilia said they're using Claude at Haufe too, where he works.

We all agreed that the results are positive when you know where you want to go. Proper prompting prevents poor performance, as they say – I guess that's just me saying this.

After a few positive stories, I brought up something that's been on my mind: there's a danger in AI usage for people with gambling tendencies. The random outcomes, the conversational and personal way AI responds, the feeling of "if I only prompt better, I can make it do what I want" – it has all the hallmarks of a slot machine dressed up as a helpful assistant.

It's not even a new concept or a sudden move to dark patterns or bad habits in and on the web. Social media works just like that. "Pull down to reload" is an exact digital equivalent to a one-armed bandit. Infinite scroll is just the same. So if you're in the money-making business and don't care about your fellow humans as much as about your bank account – make tokens expensive and scarce. Keep engagement high by giving almost perfect solutions for "just one more prompt". Engage with users in a very encouraging tone.

I could go on about this, but I guess it's something for another blog post another time.

The dancing revelation

Here's something I didn't expect: out of the six people attending, five are dancers.

Aaron is into Tango. Ilia did Lindy Hop and standard ballroom. Ema – originally from Sudan, now working in Staufen near Freiburg – grew up with dancing and music. Emma said she loves to dance too. And me? I've done Standard and Latin American, Rock'n'Roll, and later tried Swing with my wife.

We didn't plan a dance-off, but it was a close call. ;)

Will I go again?

Absolutely. The conversations were good, the mood was positive, and it felt like a group worth being part of. Ten years of hesitation, and now I wonder why I waited so long.

See you in February.