Gleam Gathering 2026

About the Gathering

Welcome - you've found the information hub for the Gleam Gathering 2026.

GLEAM GATHERING 2026 IS A GO! We will be gathering on Saturday 21 February 2026 in Bristol, UK! We are truly honoured to announce our first keynote speaker: Louis Pilfold The interest forms made it clear that a key attraction would be seeing the main Gleamlin in person and he has kindly agreed to join us.

Speakers & Panellists

9:20 - 9:45

Doors open

9:45 - 10:00

Welcome

10:00 - 10:45

Core Team Panel

Core Team

Get to know the core team.

10:50 - 11:20

Riding the Sour Train: Building surtoget.no with Gleam

John Mikael Lindbakk

Developers have a unique ability to shine a light on issues through their technical know-how. Surtoget.no was born from frustration (or mostly pettiness) with the Norwegian railway, and a simple site like it even made it into mainstream media. This is the story of how I ended up as the “train guy” for a worringly large part of Norway.

I’ll also share my experience using Gleam as a developer and architect from traditional enterprise environments, with a strong background in OOP: what felt familiar, what surprised me, and why Gleam proved both capable in production and genuinely enjoyable to work with.

11:20 - 11:45

Coffee break

11:50 - 12:20

10,000 Lines Later: When a Tool Became a Compiler (and I Became a Gleamlin)

Rob Durst

Many compilers are written in Haskell or OCaml to lean on type-driven development and the natural function composition that compilers demand. Fresh off listening to Type Theory for All, I was introduced to Gleam, which, it turns out, struck the perfect balance I had been looking for!

10,000 lines later, here are some of the key things I've learned:

• Micro-patterns: how to write Gleam like a Gleamlin instead of fighting my own language biases
• Ecosystem navigation: what it feels like to work in an enthusiastic but still maturing package landscape
• Productionization quirks: what CI/CD, testing, and versioning look like in Gleam
• Approachability: Gleam has just enough functional programming and type safety to feel like a “typical compiler-building language,” but without the intimidation factor.

12:25 - 13:00

Keynote

Louis Pilfold

TBA

13:00 - 14:15

Lunch

14:15 - 14:45

How I used Lustre to build the best Eve Online arbitrage tool

Guillaume Heu

This talk will discuss building the best current Eve Online system-to-system arbitration tool.

It calls the Eve Online API to fetch available buy and sell orders, computing possible trades, grossly simplifying a serious dynamic programming problem (which trades to pick based on available cargo, funds and trades profitability) and finally displaying the close-to-optimal trades in the form of several "multibuys" which allow for quickly buying all the items from the starting station.

14:50 - 15:20

Could WebAssembly be in Gleam's future?

Danielle Maywood

This talk will cover what a potential future could look like where Gleam is compiled to WebAssembly, and what would be needed to make that happen.

15:25 - 16:00

Lightning talks

You?

TBA.

16:00 - 16:30

Coffee

16:30 - 17:00

Inside the Lustre runtime

Yoshie Reusch

Ever wondered how Lustre really works under the hood?

In this session I'll give an overview of how a Lustre app runs, before diving deep into the internals of the rendering process. We'll explore when and how the runtime updates the screen, what a virtual DOM is and how it works, and how Lustre makes purely functional UI updates not only possible, but surprisingly fast as well.

We'll examine how Lustre's different APIs each affect the rendering pipeline, and the challenges we faced when adding server-components into the mix. I'll walk through the reconciliation algorithm, diff strategies and clever tricks that make it all work. You'll get insider knowledge from one of Lustre's authors on when to reach for each API and how they work internally.

By the end, you'll have a solid mental model of Lustre's architecture and some practical tricks we've learned along the way. Also, there will be trees.

17:05 - 17:35

Optimising the hell out of Gleam

Surya Rose

This talk is about the chess bot I made for IHH's Gleam chess tournament, and how I optimised it to be as fast and powerful as possible. I will cover how I optimised code to be faster, as well as various domain-specific techniques I used in my bot.

17:35 - 18:00

Closing remarks

Venue

We are really excited to be hosting GG26 at Origin Workspace in the heart of Bristol. A co-working space during the week, Origin was built to encourage innovation and community.

How do I get there?

Bristol is a really well connected city, with lots of opportunities to use public transport.

1. Coach - National Express and Flixbus run coaches to the heart of Bristol from London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Manchester, Heathrow, and more.
2. Planes - Bristol Airport receives international flights and has great connections to the city
3. Train - Bristol Temple Mead is the main train station - Origin is about a 30min walk from there. There's also a frequent local bus service between the station and the part of town Origin is in.
   • If taking the train anyone 30 years old or younger from the UK or European Economic Area can save 1/3 off a ticket price using a railcard. Please check the full details for your situation/train.

If you need any further information, please do check the Origin Workspace website for more details:

Buy tickets

We are also keeping this first meet relatively small, so numbers are limited - our venue maxes out at 100.

Buy Tickets

Tickets are still available. If you can't see the option to buy a ticket, please check your adblocker.

Please also note tickets are non-refundable, but can be transferred to another person if you can't make it.

Meet the organiser

Better known as Crowdhailer online, I've been coding for over a decade. As an early contributor to Gleam, I've always been excited about the possibilities that Gleam offered to the coding community and I'm thrilled to be able to organise this event for the first time. When I am not using Gleam in production, I'm working on my own language, EYG. Can't wait to see you all in Bristol.