The program for BOB 2026, Active Group‘s in-house conference, is set: On Friday, March 13, 2026, BOB - appropriately the thirteenth edition - will take place — as last year at the Scandic Hotel Potsdamer Platz.

We are proud of the program, although we had to reject many other great submissions to create it.

The opening keynote at BOB will be delivered by Stefan Kaufmann (stk) — it‘s about Digital Sovereignty.

As usual, there are four tracks — two tracks with a total of 16 talks, two tracks with a total of 8 tutorials.

Registration is open — the early-bird discount runs until January 16, 2026.

Our goal is always to make the conference contributions accessible to as many participants as possible. It is therefore possible to fill the entire day with English-language talks and tutorials. There are also some German-language contributions.

Talks

This year, what‘s striking is what‘s missing: talks about „AI“. Since all other developer conferences lately have been quite overrun with the topic, BOB 2026 is an opportunity for a break - and a reminder that there is still IT beyond AI.

As always strongly represented in the program: functional programming. Topics include OCaml (twice!, Scala, Java, functional software architecture and functional programming with SwiftUI.

Exotic programming languages (even by BOB standards) will also be present.

Also no surprise - formal methods with Lean, formal specifications and tests and refinement types.

We‘ll also see talks about accessibility, UI development, database joins, Domain-Driven Design and reactive systems.

Hopefully there‘s something for everyone - at least if you don‘t absolutely need „AI“.

Tutorials

The BOB tutorials are each 90 minutes long:

Specific technologies are represented with Agda, Scheme for 3D graphics, TypeScript, Multicore OCaml, Haskell as well as Mutiny and Quarkus.

We‘ll also talk about illegal states (and how to avoid them) and look forward to a tutorial on accessibility.

Registration

Registration is open online. Early-bird discount run until January 16, after that it becomes somewhat more expensive. There are also discounts and free tickets for underrepresented groups.