Coldstart 2026
Two days · one track · nineteen talks
Zero sponsor talks
Two days, one track, 900 engineers, and nineteen talks about systems that actually broke. Every speaker shows real graphs from a real incident or they do not get the slot.
Early 340 · standard 420 · corporate 690. 120 pay-what-you-can tickets, no questions asked.
One track. Everybody sees the same talks, so the hallway conversation is about the same thing all day. This is the whole point.
900
Engineers
19
Talks
0
Parallel rooms
Four of nineteen · full list in September
01
Marlies Boone
Payments infrastructure, Adyen · 35 min
02
Tarek Idrissi
Data platform, Kettleworks · 35 min
03
Priya Raman
Core services, Backbase · 25 min
04
Joris Vandenberg
Platform engineering, Faravel · 35 min
Fifteen more talks announced in two waves. Every one of them ships a graph, a timeline and the commit that fixed it — no slideware architecture, no roadmap keynotes.
Sponsors get a table, their logo on the wall, and zero minutes on stage. Three of them still came back this year.
No sponsored slots, no logo-led lightning talks, no "partner keynote" wedged in before lunch. The programme committee reads submissions with the company name removed.
08:30
Doors, coffee, name badges written by hand
De Doelen, Rotterdam
09:30
How we lost 40 minutes of writes and got them back
Marlies Boone
10:30
The queue that was actually a memory leak
Priya Raman
11:30
Hallway track
One hour, deliberately unscheduled
13:00
Nine years of one Postgres
Tarek Idrissi
14:30
Incident clinic, first sitting
Four staff engineers, twenty minutes each
17:00
Close, then the bar downstairs
No sponsor stage, no branded lanyards
09:00
Deleting our service mesh
Joris Vandenberg
10:00
Workshops, three rooms, ninety minutes
Postgres, tracing, on-call design
12:00
Hallway track
Same talks, same argument, better coffee
13:30
Two incident retrospectives, told live
Speakers announced in October
15:00
Incident clinic, second sitting
Bring the diagram you are embarrassed by
16:30
One last talk, then we all go home
Nineteen down
18:00
Venue closes
Slides and graphs published the same week
01 — Hallway track
Two full hours of nothing programmed, because the single track means everyone is arguing about the same failure at the same time. Tables, whiteboards, and a wall of open questions you can write on.
02 — Incident clinic
Bring your worst architecture diagram to the incident clinic. Four staff engineers, twenty minutes each, brutal and free.
03 — Workshops
Postgres · tracing · on-call design
Ninety minutes, thirty seats each, included with every ticket.
Prices in euro · VAT included
340
Early
Gone when they are gone. No countdown timers, no fake scarcity.
420
Standard
Both days, both clinics, every workshop, lunch that is actually lunch.
690
Corporate
For the expense system. It funds the pay-what-you-can allocation below.
120
120 pay-what-you-can tickets released in two batches, no questions asked, no proof required. Same seat, same badge, nothing on it that says which kind you bought.
Batch two opens 12 September, 10:00 CET.
Full code of conduct, three named enforcers with photos, and a contact that reaches a human during the event.
During the event, 24 hours
Reports go to Ilse, Femi and Dana — photographed on the wall by the entrance so you know who to look for. Reports are acted on the same day, and sanctions are published in the post-event write-up without naming the reporter.
Coldstart · 4—5 Nov 2026 · De Doelen, Rotterdam
Nineteen talks · one track · zero sponsor slots