Karel opened with a simple room survey. Most attendees worked on large-scale products, organised around specific components or functions. But when asked if this setup was actually efficient, almost no hands stayed up.

That was the central tension of the talk. Specialist teams feel logical. They seem clean and organised. But when multiple teams need to collaborate to deliver one customer-facing product, that structure creates queues, dependencies, delayed feedback, and work that may be locally efficient but globally pointless.

The garden fence problem

Karel described specialised setups as having separate gardens. Each team grows its own crops, works its own backlog, and protects its own territory. The fences between them aren’t accidental; they are a byproduct of the structure itself.

“And behind the fence, there is another team being specialised in something we don’t understand.”

Single specialty silos are everywhere: front-end, backend, UX, product management, database, or architectural. Even cross-functional teams that own only a fraction of the customer journey fall into this trap.

The dysfunction appears when a customer-facing feature needs several of these gardens to cooperate. A slow API becomes the backend team’s issue. The backend developers blame the database. The database team points to architectural guidelines. The architects mention Confluence. Nobody owns the outcome.

“Remember one thing, behind the fence, there is them. And they always suck.”

The structure encourages people to think in terms of “our work” and “their problem”, even when everyone is technically building the same product.

Coordination is not the cure

A typical corporate response to friction is adding coordination: product vision workshops, OKRs, demos, and large planning events. Karel singled out PI planning as a procedure designed specifically to manage multiple specialised silos chained together by dependencies.

Used well, PI planning can reveal the problem. It visualises an impractical structure, highlighting bottlenecks and underused teams. But used badly, it just keeps a flawed system alive.

“So you can have either going by priorities or have a utilisation of your resources. And then, organisation by single specialty teams, you must pick one. You can never have both.”

Business priorities rarely distribute evenly across specialist teams. If they appear to, Karel offered two explanations: a rare conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, or cheating. One is more likely.

Backlogs are queues, and queues are delays

The deeper problem is flow.

When work passes between teams, each maintains its own backlog. Every backlog is a queue, and every queue creates delay. The more silos involved, the longer the cycle time becomes before a customer-facing feature is complete enough to generate meaningful feedback.

This delay is critical because product development relies on real-world feedback. Research and market data are useful, but the ultimate test is customer usage. If the organisation takes five, six, or ten sprints to deliver something end-to-end, feedback comes too late.

He also warned against the illusion of making features bigger so that waiting time feels proportionally smaller. In queueing theory, larger batch sizes only make the problem worse.

Local efficiency can still deliver nonsense

A specialist team might be highly competent and complete its tasks quickly. But if their output isn’t attached to the highest overall priority, that local efficiency is useless.

“If the team working on the complete bullcrap is working three times more efficiently, they are still delivering complete bullcrap because they can’t have anything else which is important.”

He gave the example of banking teams split between lending and servicing. Servicing might deliver a useful feature, like premature instalment handling, before the actual lending flow is ready. The work is valid, but if the business can’t lend money yet, it isn’t the priority. Even full-stack units specialised around narrow domains suffer from this uneven distribution of priorities.

Redefining the product

For Karel, the path forward begins with redefining the product from the customer’s perspective. 

In e-commerce example, the product isn’t the website, mobile app,  API layer, CRM, or ERP. Those are components. The actual product is the entire buying experience: finding an item, purchasing it, receiving it, and handling any claims.

What end-to-end teams need

Next, define what “done” means. Not just coding or testing, but everything necessary to put a working increment into users’ hands: documentation, training, marketing materials, and whatever else the product requires. That definition then determines the skills needed inside each team.

End-to-end teams aren’t built around job titles. They are built around the ability to take valuable backlog items and deliver them fully. People contribute through their skills and experience, rather than hiding inside a narrow role.

Fewer backlogs, better flow

Karel wrapped up by contrasting agile frameworks based on one backlog per product with those that tolerate or encourage single specialty teams. Simply put, for one customer-centric product, fewer backlogs are better.

If you work in a larger product organisation, Karel’s examples, diagrams, and PI planning simulation make the structural problem glaringly clear. Watch the full recording including slides below.

What you don’t see is everything that happens before that moment.

At WebExpo, we have spent a lot of time thinking about that gap. That is the space between a good idea and a great talk. And over time, we have built something that looks a bit like a rehearsal, a bit like a meetup, and a bit like a support group. Or even a “polishing session”, as it has been put to us.

We call them feedback sessions. For four weeks, almost every working day evening, our team sits down with speakers in small groups.

The reality: most talks aren’t ready (yet :/)

One thing becomes obvious very quickly when you run these sessions. Most talks aren’t finished. Ask any speaker; even when it is “finished”, there is “one more thing”.

We ask for a “release candidate”, but what we usually get is a late beta. A speaker warning the room, “I haven’t finished this middle section, so just pretend there is a brilliant graphic here”, is completely normal. And that is exactly why these sessions exist.

Feedback that actually moves the needle

The format is straightforward: we put speakers into small groups. We try to match them by similar topics, but schedules don’t always allow it. And honestly, we love it when they don’t. A mixed room comes with unexpected perks.

Because sometimes, the most valuable perspective comes from entirely outside your domain.

A deeply technical speaker might expect feedback from peers in their niche. Instead, they get a creative director pointing out something far more fundamental: the story isn’t landing.

And occasionally, the feedback could be described as “it is not blunt, it is direct”.

That kind of honesty only works because of the environment around it: peer-led, respectful, and built on trust. The speaker in question later described it as “the simplest and best feedback they had ever received”.

Some small details can change everything

A lot of what happens in these sessions isn’t dramatic. It is practical, repeatable improvements.

Something as simple as pacing. One trick we suggest: “Have a planned moment to have a glass of water. You are giving the audience time to think.”

It sounds trivial. But it is about control, timing, and giving your key message space to sink in.

Then there is structure. Sometimes a talk works better presented in reverse order. Sometimes the detour in the middle should be the opening. 

These are small moves. But stacked up, they change everything.

It is not just coaching, it is collaboration

What makes these sessions work isn’t just the feedback. It is who it comes from and the intent and experience behind it.

Our speakers are of the highest calibre. Each one is an expert in their own right. And each one is there to improve. That creates something different from a solo rehearsal; it becomes a shared process.

Designers, developers, and business and product people looking at the same problem from different angles. You see assumptions challenged. You see ideas reframed.

As one speaker put it, “We need to test our ideas… as early as possible.” And that is exactly what these sessions are: a safe space to test ideas before they hit the stage.

And something awesome happens

What started as a way to improve presentation has turned into something else. Connection.

Speakers meet each other before the conference even begins. They quickly realise they aren’t alone. Everyone feels similar doubts and stress, no matter how much experience they have. Sharing those nerves openly changes the dynamic.

By the time they meet in person in Prague, the awkward introductions are gone.

From rough ideas to something that shines

The most rewarding part isn’t the session itself. It is what happens after.

Watching a talk evolve from a rough draft into a story that is confident, clear, and impactful. Witnessing someone grab the mic, some for the first time, or perhaps for the biggest stage of their career, and deliver a presentation noticeably stronger than a few weeks earlier. That transformation is undeniable.

And it is built from moments like:

• unfinished slides
• honest self-critique
• direct, sometimes uncomfortable feedback
• and small, practical improvements applied consistently

It’s practice, feedback, and support.

This is what we mean by “we care about our speakers”

We don’t just see them as people delivering content. They are experts who trust us with their work in progress. 

Caring means giving them more than just a stage. Whether it is their first talk or their fiftieth, there is always another angle to explore. Our job behind the scenes is to make sure they never have to figure it out alone.

When typography kills (or saves) your UX

I’ve seen many websites where the design was beautiful, but the text was impossible to read. That’s why I’m excited about Oliver Schöndorfer. He says typography is a key part of UX, but it’s often an afterthought, until a disaster happens. He will mention things like the IKEA PR fail or the Oscars mix-up. If you think typography is just about choosing a “pretty font,” Oliver will show you that it’s actually a tool that can either kill your UX or save it. This will be a fast and fun talk, and I’m sure we will all learn how to see letters differently.

Accessibility as a system feature, not a checklist

Then we have Peter Leško from Tatra Banka. Let’s be honest, bank apps are often a nightmare for accessibility. But Peter will share how they integrated accessibility directly into their design system. No more “adding it later” or just putting a link to WCAG in a document. They built it into every component. For me, this is the “gold standard”: when accessibility is not a checklist, but a natural part of the product’s DNA. If you want to know how to handle accessibility in a big, complex environment, don’t miss this.

Neurodiversity: Good design is a universal craft

Even though my expertise is deeply rooted in visual impairment and screen readers, I’ve always advocated for accessibility as a universal discipline that benefits everyone. That’s why I’m genuinely interested in the session by Irena Zatloukalová. She will cover how designing for autism actually improves the whole team. We often get stuck focusing only on the technical side of things, but there are so many “hidden” barriers that we overlook. Irena will explain why a clear and predictable environment helps everyone, not just neurodivergent people. In a world that is often too loud and chaotic, her take on clarity and structure is a perspective we definitely need to hear.

ARIA without the myths

For the “code lovers,” we have the legendary Eric Bailey. He will be talking about ARIA. Now, ARIA is a bit like a lightsaber. It’s very powerful, but if you don’t know how to use it, you might accidentally cut your own leg off. Eric will share an honest look at what he wishes he knew before he started. He’s known for his “no-nonsense” approach, so expect some hard truths and very practical advice on how to stop making things worse for assistive technology users.

Accessibility by the numbers: Real impact vs. compliance theatre

And finally, I will also have a session called “Accessibility by the numbers“. I’m a big fan of data because data doesn’t have “opinions.” I will look at the WebAIM Million study and examine about what actually matters to real users and what is just a “compliance theatre” that looks good on paper but doesn’t help anyone. We will also look at the gaps in WCAG 2 and what we can expect from version 3.

Tip: You can read interviews with some of the speakers on the Poslepu.cz blog during the next weeks.

Discussion: Accessibility in the “real world”

And here is something I’m particularly looking forward to. If you were at WebExpo last year, you might remember our panel discussion about accessibility in practice. It was a big success – mostly because we didn’t just go over guidelines, but about the real, messy world of implementation. This year, we are bringing it back! I’m currently picking the brains of some of the most interesting speakers to join me on stage. We want to move beyond the polished slides and get into the challenges we all face when the “ideal” theory meets the “real” deadline. It’s the perfect place to ask those tricky questions that you usually won’t find the answers to in a manual. No PR talk, just honest experience.

See you in Prague!

WebExpo is not just about learning, though. It’s about the community, the legendary parties, and finally meeting people face-to-face instead of through a Zoom window. I’m looking forward to seeing you all there and having a beer (or two) while we discuss how to make the web a bit better for everyone. Let’s make it happen!

You want to go. Your colleagues want to go. But someone needs to approve the spend, and “it’ll be really good, I promise” rarely survives a finance review.

Here is the thing: most people pitch conferences as “I’ll learn stuff.” That is true, but it barely scratches the surface. After 16 years of organising WebExpo, I have watched what actually happens when teams attend together. It goes way beyond the talks.

So here is your ammunition. Forward this to your manager, print it out, or just casually leave it open on their screen.

1. A teambuilding your company doesn’t have to organise

Planning a proper teambuilding is a nightmare. Someone has to book a venue, argue about activities, order too much food, and pray the weather holds up. At WebExpo, you get two days of shared experiences, three evenings that come with giant Jenga, pétanque and conversations that outlast the last tram, and a gorgeous venue in the heart of Prague. All sorted. Your team bonds over fresh ideas and heated debates about whether AI will replace us or just rewrite our job descriptions. Nobody had to create a spreadsheet for it.  

Hot tip: A team that genuinely enjoys spending time together tends to stick around. A conference ticket is considerably cheaper than replacing a team member.

2. Cross-pollination (the real kind)

Here is something that doesn’t happen in your Slack channels: your designer watches a talk about the most bizarre software bugs in history and suddenly gets why developers are obsessed with testing. Your developer sits through a session on the invisible design divide between Figma and CSS and stops arguing about spacing. Your marketer learns how agentic AI is reshaping e-commerce and comes back with ideas nobody expected.

WebExpo covers development, design, AI, product management, marketing, business and cybersecurity. There is something for everyone on your team, and we actively encourage them to wander outside their comfort zone. Turns out, one session outside your bubble does more for team dynamics than six months of retrospectives.

3. 1,600 professionals not on your org chart

Your colleague can discuss their trickiest AI adoption challenge with an expert from IBM. Compare product strategy notes with a team from Revolut. Ask a Red Hat engineer how they scaled without doubling headcount.

These are conversations that simply don’t happen within your own company. When 1,600 people in tech from different industries and countries spend two days together in one building, the quality of ideas in the room is something no internal brainstorm can replicate.

4. Safe spaces for the messy stuff

The talks are very carefully picked, but some of the most valuable moments at WebExpo happen in formats you won’t find at most conferences.

Discomfort Zone is our discussion format where industry professionals talk openly about failure, struggle and the moments when things didn’t go as planned. Fun to sit through, and even better to think about afterwards. For colleagues seeking advice on a particular issue, we have 1-on-1 mentoring sessions.

Need a place to air the work pain?

Welcome to the Discomfort Zone. @fczbkk is back with discussions that leave success stories for the social wall and go straight to the awkward, complicated, genuinely interesting bits.

Fun, honest & good for thinking through hard decisions. pic.twitter.com/B9fuPXlrbk

— WebExpo Conference – May 27-29, 2026 (@webexpo) April 6, 2026

5. Practise with industry leaders

The ticket includes short free workshops during the conference. Focused, practical, immediately useful.

On May 29, we run Premium Workshops with international experts who come to Prague exclusively for WebExpo. This year’s workshop topics include AI engineering, storytelling for business & innovation, React Server Components, and content design in complex systems.

6. Time to have fun and mingle

The fun starts the night before the conference. Three evenings in some of Prague’s best summer spots, perfect for soaking up the sun, processing the day and making connections that tend to last well beyond the conference itself.

7. Family-friendly event

Parents in tech know the drill: conference sounds amazing, but who watches the kids? We have had this sorted for years. WebExpo Kids offers workshops for children aged 5 and up (Scratch programming, 3D printing, LEGO robotics, AI tools) plus a supervised Kids’ Corner with professional au pairs for little ones from age 2. And every kid can bring their plus 1.

8. The loyalty effect nobody talks about

Let’s be direct. Employees who feel invested in stay longer at their company. Sending your team to a well-curated conference in Prague at the end of May, with summer evenings in the charming city, and a free 15-minute massage between sessions, is not just professional development. It is a statement: “We value you.”

That is the full picture. Now, let’s make it happen.

The copy-paste section

Forward this to whoever approves your budget:

Subject: WebExpo 2026, Prague, May 27-29

Hi [name],

I want to go to WebExpo this year and would love for the team to join me. Here is what one ticket actually covers:

70+ expert talks across development, design, product, marketing and AI
Free workshops
1-on-1 mentoring sessions
Three evenings of networking with 1,600 tech professionals
A teambuilding experience nobody had to organise
Kids’ program included for colleagues with families
Prague in May. Do I need to say more?

Btw, there is a nice promo for teams of 5 and more. With code GOTEAM26, we can get a discount of 1,000 CZK per conference and bundle ticket.

Thanks,

[name]

I can still remember the amazing talk Nick Fine had 2 years ago and I am thrilled he agreed to come again to Prague. This time, he will be tackling one of the biggest killers of product success: hope. He argues that most teams fail because they build on a foundation of opinions and unreliable self-reports. Nick will introduce Scientific Design principles for the AI era: a playbook that prioritises observed behaviour over hope and assumptions. Nick is a UX psychologist with many years of experience and a great speaker full of energy. I will make sure I won’t miss that. 

Then there’s Christiane Moser, who will focus on Product Experience Mapping. We all know the struggle of connecting what we build with how users actually feel. Christiane will introduce a framework designed to help cross-functional teams align on a clear vision so that outcomes are driven by user experience, not just a list of features. Her talk aims to be highly practical and actionable. Yay! 

One of the themes I’m most excited about this year is about better product decisions. Julian Della Matia will be talking about how to build an engine that turns scattered signals, like support tickets and usage data, into shared conviction. His message is clear: evidence-based decision-making is not just a “researcher thing”; it’s everybody’s game. If you and your team struggle with prioritisation (and who doesn’t), you need to hear what Julian has to say.

I’m always a fan of talks that provide a concrete tool I can immediately take home, and I am so happy we have several of these this year. One of them is by Katherine Corneilson from Wise, who will introduce the “Hourglass Analysis.” A pragmatic way to balance top-down and bottom-up thinking in qualitative data. She will share a recent case study about the Swift network and tips on where AI fits into the analysis flow.

If you feel like UX research has become a bit too “predictable,” Benjamin Rancic is here to shake things up. His talk is a provocative take on why the usual advice might be wrong. Should we sometimes ignore our users? Launch prototypes before they are ready? If you want to challenge your own biases and explore a contrarian path to success, you should not miss this one.

And as every year, WebExpo is not just about talks. It’s about great parties, networking, and meeting old and new friends. See you there!

Here are eight sessions for the people who measure everything.

The story is the strategy

Innovation does not fail because the idea was bad. It fails because the story was never built to land.

Some product launches gain immediate traction. Others slowly fade away. Susan Lindner‘s talk will get to the exact mechanics of why: what separates a pitch that generates momentum from one that sounds good in the room and goes nowhere afterwards.

She is also leading the half-day premium workshop Supercharge your storytelling for business and innovation, built for product managers, marketers, and founders who need a message that works. You will leave with one.

Revenue hiding in plain sight

The most common revenue problem is not the market. It is the pricing page nobody has touched in 18 months and the funnel nobody has audited properly.

In Raise the price! You deserve more, Dima Melnik will get into the mechanics of willingness to pay: how repositioning your packaging changes what customers are genuinely happy to pay, why most product companies leave significant revenue on the table, and what a thorough pricing audit looks like, using examples from Notino, Rohlík, and Global Payments.

Drop-off points. Messaging failures. Restructured nurture logic. Conversion numbers before and after. Vladana Bačová‘s talk Fixing a broken SaaS funnel: How we turned dead leads into paying users will walk you through a full funnel case from top to bottom, leaving you with a direct answer to where your ad budget actually goes.

Past the pilot

The most valuable AI lessons are not found in the initial plan. They are found in the transition from experiment to daily operation.

What happens when you build a voice agent that calls clients through a sales proposal using your own voice clone? In Voice isn’t an agent. It’s an interface, Anna Bohoněk will cover what worked, what did not, and why voice AI triggers genuine psychological attachment even when users know they are talking to a bot. She will also address where sales automation still needs a human in the loop and why.

The largest marketplace for experiences and travel in Czechia and Slovakia did not watch AI disruption from the sidelines. In From threat to tool: A practical lesson from Slevomat’s AI shift, Tomáš Braverman and Romana Trusinová will detail which processes actually changed, which resisted, and how a team under real competitive pressure built the organisational muscle to make AI part of operations, not a pilot that never made it past Q1.

Plan for what you cannot yet predict

The leaders who will win the next five years are not the ones with the best data. They are the ones already prepared for when the data turns out to be wrong.

The Six Tribes of AI Users goes well beyond the “adopters vs resisters” binary. In Fossils, Rockets, and Octopuses: A leadership framework for AI adoption, Senta Čermáková will lay out six behavioural archetypes and tell you exactly what to do with each, so you can apply it to your own team’s AI landscape and guide people through the adoption valley.

Your next product decision should not just be data-driven. It should be time-driven. Designing for futures that don’t exist yet with Jiří Devát will cover practical strategic foresight: mapping plausible futures, stress-testing the assumptions buried in your roadmap, and building customer segments that hold up when the market rewrites itself.

Ready to stop optimising the wrong things? WebExpo 2026 is where tech leaders and marketers benchmark their thinking against the people setting the pace. Secure your ticket and put Prague in your calendar for May.

At WebExpo 2026, AI is not a single track. It runs through the entire program, hitting developers, designers, tech leaders, and marketers from different angles. Here is a curated eight, matched by discipline. The full AI lineup runs considerably deeper.

Under the hood

For developers

The model is just the engine. What matters now is the context, the tooling, and the infrastructure you wrap around it.

MCP servers are multiplying fast, but there is a difference between wiring one up and understanding what is actually happening inside it. In Under the hood of AI: Building your own MCP server in Go, Ladislav Prskavec will build one from scratch, live alongside an AI assistant, working through tool exposure, API bridging, and what it takes to make your coding agent genuinely extensible.

Most AI integrations are a thin wrapper over an API call. The good ones treat streaming, rendering, and progressive enhancement as first-class concerns. In this code-heavy session, Taste: How performance and other factors make everything, especially AI, better, Tejas Kumar will get into the performance decisions that separate useful AI from forgettable AI.

Tejas is doubling down with a half-day premium workshop, Applied AI engineering: beyond the prompt. Context engineering, RAG, OpenClaw, and autonomous agents. Upgrade your path from AI user to AI builder.

The human layer

For designers and content creators

AI has made output cheap. Judgement has never been more valuable.

The generation part is solved. The evaluation part is not. In Don’t trust the bot: A human framework for evaluating AI copy, Michal Kessel Shitrit will give you a five-principle framework: clarity, next-step guidance, reassurance, user language, and value communication. Walk away knowing what to accept, what to rewrite, and where human input still matters.

Michal is also running a full-day premium workshop, Content design in complex systems for non-writers. If you work on enterprise platforms, dashboards, or data-heavy products, this is how you build a content design system that holds up and use AI tools without losing clarity or consistency.

Designing for AI agents is not the same as designing for predictable user flows. The system branches, fails quietly, and makes decisions you did not anticipate. In Designing the agentic era: Experimentation over magic, Lorraine Burrell will make the case for structured experimentation over perfect plans, and lay out what rigorous agent design actually looks like in practice.

The adoption problem

For tech leaders and PMs

The technology is not the problem.

As AI absorbs more of the routine, what makes a team high-performing shifts fast. In Partnering with AI: Building future-ready teams, Daria Rudnik will focus on the three capabilities that grow more critical as AI handles more of the work: adaptive learning, collaborative intelligence, and emotional intelligence.

You already know the adoption curve looks different across your company. In Fossils, Rockets, and Octopuses: A leadership framework for AI adoption, Senta Čermáková will introduce the Six Tribes of AI Users: from Fossils dug firmly in to Octopuses treating AI as a genuine strategic partner. The framework maps where each person on your team sits and what it takes to move the whole organisation forward.

The visibility shift

For marketers and growth professionals

Organic reach used to mean getting ranked. Now it also means getting cited, quoted, and cloned.

Your CTR is dropping, but your positions are fine. You have probably been staring at that gap in Search Console for a while. In From SEO to AIO: The new era of search visibility, Aneta Holá and Aleš Moravec will cover AIO and GEO measurement, how to track brand citations in AI-generated results, and what replaces traffic as your north star metric

The psychological reality of AI voice is something most conference speakers sidestep. In Voice isn’t an agent, it’s an interface, Anna Bohoněk will walk through practical cases, including a voice agent that calls clients through a sales proposal using her own voice clone, and address why people form genuine connections with AI voices even when they know the voice is not human, and what that means for branding and ethics.

The AI thread runs through nearly every corner of WebExpo 2026. If this article got you thinking, the conference will finish the job. Join us in Prague, May 27-29.

Some of those conversations start when you’re both determined to win the LEGO a little too much. Others become something that lasts longer than the conference. I’ve watched it happen enough times to want it for everyone who walks through the door.

Give it a try, or at least a read. Who knows who’s waiting to bump into you…

Gear up before you land

Schedule one meeting. The rest fills in around it.

The WebExpo app goes live a few days before the conference. Fill in your profile, look at who’s attending, and if there’s someone on that list you’d love to sit across from, message them and book a time. One real meeting scheduled in advance is worth more than ten accidental hallway collisions.

Browse the speaker lineup and pick the talks that answer a question you’re already stuck on, not just the names that sound impressive. Building your personal program in the app before you arrive is genuinely one of the best things you can do for the three days ahead.

And when you start meeting people, connect on LinkedIn the same day, while you still remember them.

Before the crowd forms

Show up on Tuesday. It’s the easiest social moment of the whole week.

Pick up your badge at the Warm-Up Party on Tuesday evening, at Apify’s offices at the top of Lucerna Palace. Every person in that room has just arrived. Nobody has found their people yet. The whole room is up for grabs.

At 21:30 there’s a venue orientation tour. Lucerna Palace has multiple halls and a layout that will surprise you. Take it and you’ll walk into Lucerna on Wednesday morning like you own the place.

The hidden program

The talks are the reason. Everything around them is the reward.

The main tracks for developers, designers, tech leads, and marketers are the obvious draw. They’re great. But WebExpo has a parallel layer of content that doesn’t live on the big screens.

Head to the Discomfort Zone, this is the antidote to LinkedIn. Riki Fridrich hosts the sessions where people admit when things go south. It is for the taboo topics, the failed launches, the budget meltdowns, and the technical debt you are too embarrassed to mention. If you are tired of hearing that every project is a perfect success, this is where the masks come off.

If you have a problem so specific that Google has given up on you, or you just want to hear how someone else navigated a career pivot, drop by the Mentor Café. You get time with experts who have already survived the nightmares you are currently overthinking.

Speakers do not vanish after their final slide. They move to Speakers’ Corner because they are excited to discuss their talk with you. Your reaction is the best proof that their months of preparation were worth it. Go and ask the question that has been bugging you since the fourth slide.

Our partners have swapped the brochures for challenges at their stands. These tasks are an easy excuse to talk to people. The conference game in the app even gives you points for visiting them. This is just the universe agreeing with this advice.

Look out for the total eclipse of the dart competition rotating through the conference. It is exactly as unserious as it sounds and it works.

The art of the open circle

Stand like Pac-Man and skip the boring job titles.

Most people stand in closed circles like a secret society protecting a treasure. It is intimidating for anyone on the outside looking in. Try the Pac-Man rule instead and leave a gap in your circle. This empty space is a silent invitation for a stranger to join the group.

Once they do, skip the usual “what do you do” and ask what problem they are currently trying to solve. That is when things get interesting.

If you see someone standing alone, go and say hello. You are both at WebExpo because you like the same things.

Need a nudge? Come find us. We’re always happy to make an introduction.

Where the best stories happen

Three nights to find your people.

The Wednesday Party is at Radlická kulturní sportovna, a legendary Prague summer venue where first-day conversations turn into three-hour ones and nobody checks the time. The After Party is at Mama Shelter’s garden bar, and it’s where nobody quite wants it to end. (The Warm-Up on Tuesday also counts.)

After the credits roll

Follow up while it’s still fresh.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said about…” sent within a week keeps a connection alive that most people let die. I have watched WebExpo connections turn into collaborations and friendships that outlast company rebrands and tool migrations.

And it doesn’t have to stay in your inbox. Share specific takeaways from sessions and tag the speakers. That does a lot more than “great energy at WebExpo”. It is how people find you worth following, and how conversations begin that sometimes run for years. Use #WebExpo and tag @WebExpo.

The conference is only where it starts. You decide what comes next.

The energy hits you the second you step in. Kids hunched over laptops, LEGO robots wobbling across tables, 3D printers humming away, and somewhere underneath all of it, laughter. Genuine, unscripted, infectious laughter. I’ve started calling WebExpo Kids attendees the happiest people at the conference, and I stand by it completely.

And here’s the part that gets me every time: I even know couples who met at WebExpo, started families, and now bring their kids to the very conference where it all began. Full circle. If that’s not a reason to keep building something worth coming back to, I honestly don’t know what is.

Every ticket is a family ticket

We live in a world where the tech stack keeps mutating and yesterday’s hot framework is tomorrow’s legacy code. Getting kids curious about technology, not just consuming it but constructing with it, matters more than ever. Not mindless screen time, but cultivating problem-solving muscles, critical thinking, and that relentless itch to tinker with how things actually work.

That’s why every WebExpo conference ticket includes free access for kids and a free parent ticket, covering WebExpo Kids, the Parents’ Coffee Lounge, and the Partner Zone in Lucerna Gallery. The parent ticket is valid for your partner, grandparents, or another guardian, and doesn’t include access to the talks. To get yours, just bring your kid(s) and their guardian to Info Point 1 or 2 together and we will sort you out on the spot.

You’ll squeeze every drop out of the conference program. Your child will accidentally become an innovator. Your partner will get a breather. Everybody wins.

No boring theory. Pure learning by doing.

Tech experts Jakub Balada and Tomáš Kapler will continue in the tradition and will lead the popular kids’ workshops.

Scratch programming (ages 6 and up): The ideal launchpad into coding, kids will architect their own animations and simple games using block programming.

LEGO BOOST & LEGO SPIKE Prime (ages 5 and up): Kids will assemble a LEGO robot, wire up basic commands, and watch it move on their own terms. Creativity and problem-solving, packaged as pure play.

3D printing workshop (ages 9 and up): From sculpting a printable model to watching it materialise layer by layer. Adults, feel free to join your youngster, nobody’s judging.

AI creation factory (ages 8 and up): Kids will get to conjure images with generative AI tools, chat with AI assistants, and train their own machine learning model.

And what about the little ones?

For children ages 2 and up who aren’t quite ready for the workshops, we’ve set up a Kids’ Corner with toys and supervised by au pairs.

For babies under 2, the Parents’ Coffee Lounge is your base of operations: a comfortable spot to connect with other parents, complete with a changing table and all the essentials.

We’ve got your whole family covered

If both you and your partner want to attend the conference while your kids engineer their first robots, we have a deal for you. Buy one full-price ticket, email us at info@webexpo.net, and we’ll hand over a 50% discount on the second ticket so your partner can join the fun too.

We want your whole family to get the most out of WebExpo. Because the best conferences are the ones you don’t have to miss.

We are skipping the “Hello World” tutorials. This year, we will reverse-engineer historical glitches, construct AI servers from the ground up, and wrangle the mess of modern infrastructure.

Here are eight sessions that will help you deploy better code and optimise your career stack this spring.

The art of the code

Development is not just about tickets and pull requests; it is a canvas.

Switch Angel (Jade Rose) will headline our program with a keynote that will blur the line between programmer and performer. In Patterns for restarting the world, she will wield Strudel, a live-coding music environment, to construct high-energy electronic pop in real-time. She will challenge us to view software not as a static tool, but as an instrument to be tuned, mastered, and played. Expect a session that will harmonise human creativity with machine logic.

If you want to dirty your hands with the mechanics of AI, Ladislav Prskavec will provide the blueprint. In Under the hood of AI: building your own MCP server in Go, he will bypass the surface-level hype to engineer a Model Context Protocol server from scratch. Ladislav will demonstrate how to securely bridge AI clients with real-world data and APIs, leveraging the raw speed of Go to extend what your coding assistants can actually do.

Frontend sorcery & accessibility

The browser is evolving, and so must you.

Brecht De Ruyte will spotlight the latest standards from the W3C in Select it! Styling new HTML UI capabilities. He will dissect the new customisable select element, teaching you how to fuse anchoring, transitioning, and scroll snapping into a seamless UI. Brecht will empower you to abandon hacky workarounds and embrace a future where native HTML elements finally look the way you want them to.

Meanwhile, Eric Bailey will illuminate the often-misunderstood world of ARIA. In What I wish someone told me when I first started using ARIA, he will decode the complexities of accessible rich internet applications. Eric will navigate the pitfalls he encountered early in his career, equipping you with the foresight to architect inclusive experiences without the usual headaches.

Infrastructure & velocity

Speed matters. Stability matters more.

Cedric Clyburn will demystify the journey from local host to the cloud in Going from containers, to pods, to Kubernetes. He will champion Podman Desktop as the tool to bridge the gap between your laptop and production. Through live demos, Cedric will illustrate how to wrangle containers and Kubernetes without needing a PhD in orchestration, streamlining your workflow from day one.

On the performance front, Tejas Kumar will confront the “just add AI” era. In this code-heavy talk, Taste: How performance and other factors make everything, especially AI, better, he will make the case that shipping great AI is not about slapping a prompt box on your app. Think progressive rendering, composing rich UI over chat windows, and the performance instincts that turn AI demos into tools people actually reach for.

Tejas is doubling down with a half-day premium workshop, Applied AI engineering: beyond the prompt. It is time to transition from “prompt engineering” to Context Engineering. Tejas will crack open the black box of AI, guiding you through the modern 2026 stack (including RAG and OpenClaw) to architect autonomous agents. If you are comfortable with TypeScript and ready to stop just using AI tools to start building them, this is your upgrade.

The weird, the broken, and the beautiful

Sometimes, you have to break things to understand them.

Krasimir Tsonev will invite you to embrace the chaos in JavaScript: weird by design and we it. He will catalogue the strangest anomalies and most hilarious quirks of the language we all love to hate. From illogical equality checks to clipboard hijacking, Krasimir will celebrate the beautiful mess that keeps the web interesting.

He will also helm a half-day premium workshop, Inside React Server Components, where he will guide attendees to build an SSR app from the ground up, deconstructing the mechanics of React 18’s streaming capabilities without the usual abstractions.

Finally, Mia Bajić will excavate the digital past in The most bizarre software bugs in history. She will chronicle the glitches that defied logic and interrogate our obsession with testing. Mia will pose a critical question: what do these historic failures reveal about the systems we trust? It is a chance to learn from the errors of giants.

Ready to reboot your perspective?

WebExpo 2026 is your platform to connect, argue, and evolve. Secure your ticket today and prepare to have your mind patched, refactored, and deployed.