Monkigras 2026

Monkigras is my favourite conference of the year, sorry to all the other conference friends I have, and it is not even truly my industry. Every year the conference has a theme and this year's is about being prepared.

Topics

The Monkigras conference is attended every year by folks in the tech industry, in the early days it was the days before FOSDEM and now the days before Kubecon Europe so that the attendees of those events could just come earlier. The Talks while delivered by folk in the tech industry are generally very meat and not actually tech talks.

Trans Lives

There were 3 talks this year about Trans lives:

• The first about what it's like now in the US traveling to different countries, the speaker spoke about how they now had 2 extra passports a Canadian one and an Australian one and when moving between the USA and Canada they used an ID card and not their passport.
• The second was a their story about growing up, how they felt at different times in their life and the thoughts and opinions of their family.
• The final was by a father who has 2 Trans children what they learnt and witnessed at different times within their child's development.

All of these talks were very emotional and their were tear both on and off the stage. The bravery, openness and honest of all these speakers was just truly amazing.

Data

One of the actual tech talks was about 2 things:

• npmx and the forming of the community around it.
• AT Protocol the technology behind BlueSky which allows the users to own their data rather than that data being owned by the closed corporate owned network.

Communities

There was a brilliant talk about how communities:

• How in Oaxaca state Mexico communities work together when disasters happen.
• How in Minneapolis communities formed and came together when ICE agents came to their City.

Preparing

The theme of the conference this year was Preparing and there were talks loosely connected to preparing:

• One on being prepared when the power goes down and how you might get water out of your well so tou can flush the toilet.
• One on being prepared for when you fall off a ladder, shatter your wrist and what happens when the hospital is 45 minutes drive away.

Food & Drinks

Drinks

Wine

• Bobo Wines

Beers

• Small Beer
• Gun Brewery
• Kernel Brewery
• Mills Brewing

Low Alcohol

• Fresh IPA Cloudwater
• Clear Head Bristol Beer Factory

Food

Breakfasts

For breakfast each day there was a selection of great pastries, fruit and nuts.

Lunch

On the first day lunch was Turkish there was a choice of kebabs:

• Lamb Koftas
• Lamb Shish
• Chicken Shish
• Halloumi

The second day there was Vietnamese chicken and coconut curry with rice and a selection of Banh Mi:

• Chicken
• Pork Belly
• Tofu

Evening Meal

The even meal on the first day was exceptional as always there was:

• Indian Curries, I had chicken tikka
• Essex Oysters
• The infamous Cheese Mountain