Date: 2026-06-10
Update: 2026-07-03
Writeup: Marco
Translation: Florian
Read the short version
Find attached our late notes to the last Berlin Kirby meetup. Marco went ahead and created a small recap article about it (sponsored by Florian).
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On June 10th we met up in Zammad's office Berlin Mitte, being around 10 developers from Berlin and Leipzig. The open agenda left a lot of room for exchange, informal show and tell presentations and everyday anecdotes.
Due to technical developments taking absolutely no break especially now, we quickly went into discussion: even the few minutes up to everybody's arrival went into a lively chat about – what else – AI tools. The overall perception was that of most people using AI intensively in their jobs – with fewer people holding back or even being opposed. It was interesting to see the extend of usage and application: some people are able to accomplish projects that seemed impossible before, as with an analytics tool tailored to own expectations. Others are applying AI for research/education. And for some, it is a central companion on all projects. Irritation was voiced about intransparent token budgets that are depleted all of a sudden although a project is supposedly covered for another half month. For many, it was not clear which models are useful for which tasks and how to safe up on tokens.
A security debate dominating the meetup last time did not take place this time.
Presentations were spread over the evening. Anthony Noel told about his Kirby powered newsletter editor and his long-standing exploration of newsletter HTML (everbyody like: “OMG”). Others recounted building or testing similar solutions.
Felix Niklas conducted a tour behind the scenes of Zammad's website, particularly previewing it's further multi-language development. We came to talk about Johann Schopplich's Content Translator Plugin and its offering to – next to DeepL translations – incorporate the Kirby Copilot plugin, providing more context information of each page for translations. We also spoke about Thomas Günther's new Language Access plugin and client's need of not instantly having to publish translations.
Alex Tolar showed off his complex panel setup for a register of musicians and instruments at akamus.de afterwards, issuing the challenge of allowing partial translation and references, e.g. between instrument names. His second showcase was about caching and pre-warming thumbs for fritzbrunier.de and filtered pages via custom caching on query parameters.
Finally, we were asked to solve a tricky “503 Service unavailable” puzzle having taken place at superrr.net. Spoiler: it was bot traffic scraping exponential combinations of filter combinations on the page. The solution was to simply reduce available combinations of filters. Keep it simple.
Progressing from multiple example in the show and tell, we followed up with a lengthy discussion on image optimization and formats finding a decent middle ground between loading times and quality. For many of us, it was relieving to realize not being the only ones wrestling with the topic and it was remarkable that everyone's best practices differed on a wide range. The most radical position of Florian proposing that one would not really need srcset and <picture> elements in manifold output formats led to some discussion. According to this approach it's sufficient to output JPEG photos of roughly doubled dimensions and reducing their quality to around 30%–40%, ideally further compressing them via MozJPEG (e.g. with ImageOptim). This would result in small file sizes and solves the problem of high-resolution smartphones not fit for downscaled photos. Florian referenced a 2012 article about Retina Revolution. The same concept is being described in this newer article by Jake Archibald.
As people were beginning to leave, we had a small round of exchange on handling offers and hourly rates. It was quickly apparent that, even after many years of freelancing, communicating reasonable hourly or flat rates is challenging and bound to uncertainties for many of us.
All in all it was inspiring and connecting to realize how we're occupied by many similar topics, even considering our different approaches on website building. Big ups to Felix Niklas who continues to reliably organize Berlin Kirby meetups and provides for a replenished fridge and snacks every time!
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