Neos Conference 2025

This year's Neos Conference was once again a very special event. Many volunteers turned a simple conference room into a colorful event location where the Neos community celebrated the release of Neos 9 after years of development work. AI was of course a theme that also ran through many of the talks. However, the focus was on presentations about the current future possibilities of Neos.

Flownative the company supported the conference again this year as a gold sponsor and was represented with several presentations.

Ceremonial opening

As in previous years, the conference started with a specially composed piece. This time, the Neos Chamber Orchestra consisted of Lorenz Ulrich, Jan Kürfürst, Robert Baruck, Bernhard Schmitt and Florian Seidel aka Klaus.

The effort that goes into this is always impressive. In addition to the music, there is of course the right light show and animations programmed for the occasion on the screens on stage. If you missed the opening, I highly recommend you take a look at the video.

The elephant in the room

I started the keynote with the "Elephant in the Room". Because what I noticed in the preparation in the weeks before the conference and in conversations in the evening is that AI is of course an overarching topic at the moment. It is unclear where our guild, software development, and the market for the WWW will develop.

Will there even be websites in the future if research and searches only take place via the dialog of the preferred AI solution? What impact will agentic AI tools have on the work of web developers - how can they be used effectively or will vibe coding make us redundant? How will entry-level professionals learn their profession when entry-level jobs are taken over by ChatGPT & Co and what about the actual impact on our planet? (spoiler: from today's perspective, we will no longer be able to achieve the 1.5-degree target simply because of all the new data centers for A.I.).

And yes, the general economic situation in Germany was also reflected in the discussions. Although the economic forecasts don't look bad at all at the moment, the general uncertainty has left people in a bad mood. After all, most people believe that Neos has a lot of potential and that this order valley will soon be crossed.

Otherwise, the outlook is rosy

But apart from that, the atmosphere was great. Anyone attending the Neos Conference for the first time could feel the community vibe. Kristina Schneider, CPO of Cobot, wrote on LinkedIn: "Neos Conference 2025 was by far the most welcoming and lovingly organized tech event I've attended in years".

You can find a recording of the complete keynote here on YouTube.

In addition to the keynote, the Flownative team contributed two other talks to the program.

In his talk "It doesn't work", Karsten dealt with persistent bugs and strategies for solving them. He talks about numerous projects and why an inaccurate problem description can lead developers down tedious wrong paths.

In his talk "Neos can help save the planet", Markus looked at the impact of web projects on the climate. A topic that is of great concern to us Flownatives, not least because there is widespread hope - even among developers - that everything will somehow work out.

To round off the conference, we took a look at the future in a panel discussion. Nadja Meyenhofer, Social Media Manager at the Lucerne Central and University Library, also took part. She therefore brings the user perspective and can look back on experience with a range of content management systems. Most recently, the largest university library in Central Switzerland decided to migrate from TYPO3 to Neos. This is how Nadja described it during the panel:

"I'm really glad we chose Neos because even though the support [we have to provide] hasn't gone down to zero, it's a lot less. The people who work in our library are now trying to think of new things they can do with the website and can actually focus on the content rather than trying to understand the system."

As always, you will find recordings of all presentations on YouTube, and there is once again a playlist with which all videos can be viewed conveniently.

Preparing for the Neos Conference is a huge effort, weeks are spent organizing, planning the program and researching and writing for the presentations. But it's worth it every time. When I got back home after the conference to catch up on some sleep, I had many conversations and great moments running through my mind and I can hardly wait to dive back into the community at the next opportunity.