Goatmire 2, announced

Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version.

Goatmire Elixir 2025 was a very dense success. The second one just got announced.

I say dense. Because massive success would make it sound large. And it wasn’t a large event. 150 attendees, with speakers and volunteers we were around 200 in total. And it went incredibly well. The feedback, the surveys, the outpouring of love and appreciation were all way above what I dared hope for. People have been graciously giving me space to consider a second one but it has also been the single most requested thing ever.

September 30th to October 2nd, 2026. You can sign up to be notified on the website. In our little town of Varberg in Sweden.

Unchanged

Lots of things will be the same as last time. Venue is the theatre. Lots of the practical bits that worked will be kept the same or be iterated on a little bit.

You may notice that the visuals have changed though. You can still see the Goatmire 2025 website and compare it to the new one. Part of what made Goatmire special is that people knew I intended to make it a bit different but they didn’t know what to expect. And I believe that one of my more important tasks is to be a creative influence and encourage speakers to take things a little bit further than they might typically do. And to scrub every ounce of sense that this is a corporate or commercial event. There are commercial aspects in terms of making the budget work out. That is not the focus. This is to be an experience for the community. I want to reinforce the connective tissue of the community. Have people connect and make memories. Feed the enthusiasm and appreciation that I see in so many spots around the Elixir space. Most of it is thematic, creative and abstract. Very hard to know if you hit the mark.

I feel fairly confident about the theme for this one. I’m not going to be putting it into words because it hasn’t been stated more than what you see on the website. Everyone can start interpreting what it will be and I’ll try to shape and mold that as we go forward.

Some of the “tricks” I pulled for the first one can’t be the same for the second one. Or at least that’s how I’m wired. And considering how many people have said they want to do a repeat visit I’m probably right to not make it too similar. And lots of things can only be done in collaboration with the speakers and their creative intent. I don’t know what we have to work with yet. It’s all very exciting.

From 2025 we had some talks that stood out in concept and character. And the Nerves Car is now well-known. Saša Jurić has already told us a story. Zach Daniel has already broken time and space using Ash Framework. We’ve done the distributed system murder mystery and we’ve ended on a phenomenal live-coded musical number. So all of those are out. Not necessarily the people. Just those presentations. I’m sure we’ll have a different mix of speakers as well though I certainly hope to see many of these in the CTF when we launch that.

I also still plan to co-locate NervesConf EU with Goatmire Elixir because it worked really well. The double-branding is a pain in my ass and I don’t have a clear answer to how I want that to work. Maybe NervesConf EU doesn’t get as much visual space this year. I don’t know.

Changes

We know catering will be different. Things have changed at the venue. Because the lady that had the contract on the food for the venue cancelled it and left to do other stuff. We’ll probably make similar choices. Maybe communicate more aggressively up front that the food is vegetarian so if that’s not your jam you might need to look around. But we don’t know much about the catering situation at the moment.

We plan to have more tickets, more people. The venue can theoretically absorb 350. But I think like 10 of them wouldn’t see the stage. We want more people to be able to attend. From the first one it seems like interest is very high. We have more people on the interested mailing list than we had tickets last year. People have suggested it will sell out like Woodstock and we just have no way of knowing what to expect. Compared to last year, I’m not worried about reaching my minimum number of attendees to run the event. But the space has limitations for how many people can comfortably hang out and socialize outside the seating area. I’m excited about upping the headcount because it ensures that we’ll have people that weren’t at the first one and it should boost the social aspects. It still won’t hit a size where it is an intractable mass of bodies and people become anonymous to each other I hope. I don’t think that’ll be an issue.

Also at 350 I imagine we’d choke to death. Just upping the headcount by 50 will mean that door discipline becomes more important to ensure air flow. It is an older theatre and while Taun Chapman actually put a (Nerves powered) air quality sensor in there during the event and it was never particularly bad it does get a bit toasty. It isn’t typical for theatre to be a full day where people are in the seats for most of it. Gotta not put everyone to sleep.

Another plan is to tweak the contents in various ways. We got some feedback that requested more technical contents and deeper technical contents and I think that’s appropriate. Some of our balance shifted due to speakers not being able to show up and others stepping in. Some talks end up not as technical as one had expected. It’s tricky. I think we can tweak that balance. The feedback felt applicable. Anyone who noted that they wanted more technical depth and who skipped the NervesConf EU day made a gross miscalculation though. NervesConf was crunchy.

We also had a very packed schedule. More than 30 speakers across 3 days, single track. We will probably leave more air in the schedule this time. This means the selection process for the CFT will probably be brutal for us in the committee and competition pretty intense for the spots. We said no to more than 40 talks last time. If interest is higher this year and slots are fewer.. oof. Good content requires good editing though and this is editing. Good talks will be rejected.

Weird and creative shit. Gonna wanna do things. Not the same things. Not gonna tell you what.

Hopes and aspirations

I want to run things on the dates leading up to the proper conference. Many conferences have training days. And I’ve personally organized a few satellite events for Elixir and BEAM conferences where we gather and hack on Nerves stuff. They are always a ton of fun. Hands on keyboard is a very good social environment for some devs. It also helps some people get their first PRs in or maybe try a project they wouldn’t have tried otherwise. So what I want to try and do is pull together about 2 days of workshops that are some mix of trainings, project sprints, getting-started and weirdly specific things. Free or at cost and to whatever level of ambitions the community maintainers and collaborators want to put into it. And I hope that local students will show up for these as well as conference attendees getting a few more days off work to get free training from the most knowledgeable people in the ecosystem. I think it’d be rad. Plans are still early.

My hope is that we have more satellite events. Like we had Ash Summit 2025 after Goatmire Elixir last time. It was very neat. Happy to repeat that and happy to have more variants.

I want to support speakers in making their best presentations in a few more ways. I’m happy with the mix of newer, less known speakers and big names we had. There are certainly ways to improve the mix. And I want to surface more folks that I’ve heard of that others have not that do cool stuff. But I also want to help people that might play it safe to take bigger swings. Ideally we can help people with polish, practice and such. I have some plans. It is a tricky topic but I think we can do more to ensure great presentations. And I’m very happy with how talks were in 2025. I just think we could potentially do more.

Closing

That’s it for now. Goatmire Elixir 2026 has a date. Sponsorship prospectus is currently being drafted. If you know you are interested in showing up as supporting the event, feel free to reach out. If you have questions, concerns, ideas or plans and want to discuss, I’m also very available. I look forward to making another one of these things. Big thanks to the community for the beautiful support of last year and of the announcement of the new one. Deeply touching :)

Thanks for reading. I’m available as email lars@underjord.io and socially @lawik@hachyderm.io.

Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version.

Note: Or try the videos on the YouTube channel.