Goatmire 2026: Through My Lens

I feel like I just went through some bootcamp, my body aches, my brain is melted, but my heart is singing.

Others (Lars, Ellie) have written great recaps of this year's Goatmire. This is my personal experience of it, through my lens, and it's changed my life.

Program Committee

It all started with an innocuous message from Lars late January.

Of course I said yes. Review submissions and attend a few calls? EASY! And for a time, it was easy. It could have stopped here. I would've been so happy to be a part of what was an amazing line-up of speakers. But it was just the beginning.

Programming Language Nerd

I'm not sure how it happened, but come August, Flora was looking for help doing the things Flora does. Could I help with some music? Sure, I said! Flora's talk moved me last year, and I'm a semi-theatre kid, so how could I say no?

She had this idea of building out a Nerves orchestra and had some prototypes of solenoids hitting pots and pans. It was pretty clear to me, if we could have a melodic instrument and a few drums, we'd be all set to play music. She had the "wires and pumps" stuff (yes, I'm not very good with hardware) and I would handle the code part. So I got started to write some Erlang code to parse MIDI. Available at: https://codeberg.org/ellyxir/midi

This made me so happy because I'm a language nerd and it was the first time I got to write Erlang code and I also got to learn MIDI 1.0 specs.

(Erlang ain't half bad! Give it a shot and works so easily with Elixir.)

Musician Lyricist Hat

I also needed to get actual music into the vignettes. Luckily Tom (Flora's husband) was available to write us two songs, and Sam Aaron made a third one. So we had 3 original songs. I did some arrangement changes for some of them, added vocals, lyrics, and percussions. Here I am being a musician. What the fuck. When I told people what I was working on, the inevitable response was, What? This is a tech conference?

Here are the songs. You'll need MuseScore to open them, but don't worry, there's a Nix Flake in all these repositories. Nix solves all problems. https://codeberg.org/ellyxir/music_nordic_folk

Singer Hat

So, Flora, how about I sing during some of these, just vocalisation?
YES, that's what I always had in mind!

I sing in a few choirs, I love singing. So, why not? I added the vocal harmonies to the songs, but I wanted a partner in crime. I immediately thought of Saša Jurić. I've seen him play the guitar, so he must sing right?

What a champ, he answered right away:

(You should also see the Karaoke debut of The Supervisors, there's a video somewhere)

We had a second singing scene, but we showed up as puppets. Bryan Hunter and Ben LostKobraKai created them for us as a last minute prop. (I think Saša was most excited about taking the prop back home with him!)

Funny story, we rehearsed for the second song, I realised I had never sent Saša the lyrics before. I originally told him it would all be just vocalisations, no words. He was a little outraged, but it was all an act:

I also got to sneak in the word "Fuck" into a song, so that's a clear win.

Puppets

I grew up loving puppets, whether it's The Muppet Shows or Mr. Rogers. Here was the chance of a lifetime to do some puppetry with my sensei Flora and classmate Stina. I was Urd who shapes fate.

Did I mention I got to stay at Chez Lars while practising puppetry? The harvest moon came up and it was magical.

Stina and I trying to test out how this might look on the theatre screen. Flora giving us lots of good instruction. (Btw, Stina learns way too fast, it's scary!)

On stage with Jon holding the flashlight, I think it looked quite nice!

Showrunner

They made the mistake of giving me a headset that let me communicate with the theatre staff (who are AMAZING!).

I sort of let it get to my head and started calling light cues and getting speakers prep'd and mic'd. For vignettes, I'd cue the people to come on stage. I generally pretended to be in charge.

Fake it 'til you make it!

For a moment, I had the schedule in my head and knew where things were at. The little theatre kid in me was ecstatic. I was on the equivalent of the Limitless pill and had the power of Greyskull in my hands.

I was also the Goat wrangler. We had 10 members of the community play goats - the every-person programmer. I worked with them to get them up to speed and rehearse with us. We slipped in the rehearsals in the few minutes we had prior to door opening. I think Lars made the joke that we were adjusting the show in real-time. It sure felt like we were just trying to stay ahead, sometimes by an hour or two.

I've no idea what I'm telling Sam here, but I'm sure it's VERY IMPORTANT.

The Orchestra!

We don't talk about the orchestra. I think it's a running gag. There were wires, soldering irons, and Raspberry Pis and pot lids. Most of the work was done by others way more skilled in stuff. But Lars, Flora, and I wrote the "conductor" code that, well, conducted the orchestra. It used my MIDI library and some NTP code I wrote up to do synchronisation, and Voilà it all worked.

The wonderful thing was that we were able to take songs from raw MIDI and just play them on the orchestra once we remapped instruments to the limited set we had. That Glock was a BOSS playing songs it had no right to play well! Thanks to James for the idea of playing "We Built This City"!

Dancing Queen!

Last day of the conference, I knew I was going to play the Goat for the last scene. Everything else seemed to be going well, so I took a breath and started to think about what I wanted to do with the scene. Sam wrote the music for it. I wanted to do something special with it. So, I thought.. perhaps I could do a dance? Would that be crazy? I'm not a great dancer, but I've done some...a decade ago. So why not. At noon, I started working on some choreography, and by 3pm it was in good shape. I love working under tight time constraints.

I've NO idea what people thought of the dance. I did kick Lars' laptop while doing a turn across the stage, but so it goes. (Thanks Stina for magically fixing it!) Still, sometimes it helps to not have stage fright. At least some of the still photos look nice.

Closing Thoughts

In what world can someone experiment, stretch, and try things out like this?? I've heard from so many people that Goatmire really pulled them out of their comfort zone. But they mean this in a very positive way. Whether it was singing Karaoke for the first time, playing a Goat, giving a lightning talk in a full bar, there were occasions for everyone to try things out in a safe environment. That's how it felt to me. My ADHD just said, let's GO and it was open season to dabble in everything. It wasn't limited to "tech" things either. It was our passions.

Thank you Flora and Stina!

Many of these wonderful photos by Petter Boström

B-side

If you're still here!

Saša and I working on our debut appearance!

Joined by the talented Sanne to fill out the team. Honestly, this is when we really gelled.

There were moments of tears also. Flora and I cried several times. Here we are after taking a much-needed walk. Things feel better after touching grass.

Time to walk off into the sunset