Monki Gras 2026 “Prepping Craft”
While the rest of the tech world is a firehose of generative AI discourse, last week I was in a quieter, more human room. I was back at Monki Gras, an annual London conference about the intersection between software, craft, and the tech industry.
This year’s theme was “Prepping Craft” – in a world where safety and normality are slipping away, how do we make our code, our communities, and our lives truly resilient? I loved the topic when I first heard it, and it’s only become more urgent by the day.
There was very little discussion of specific tools or technologies; instead, the event focused on the politics and human impact of the tech industry. Monki Gras has always been an interdisciplinary event, but this year it felt even more focused on humans over technology, and the politics were more pronounced than ever.
Despite the state of the world, the mood was constructive and upbeat. Everything is in a bad place, so how do we make it better?
Some particular highlights for me: Heidi Waterhouse and Kim Harrison describing how to create resilient, interdependent communities in Minneapolis and Oaxaca. Hazel Weakly gave a deeply personal, poetic talk about rebuilding a sense of self, and finding joy in your own existence. Adam Zimman made me cry when he talked about being a cis parent of a trans child, and what he learnt about supporting them. These are not talks you’d get at most tech events.
Three of this year’s talks were about trans experiences, at a time when the political winds are blowing in a transphobic direction. Some people would find that surprising, but I didn’t – Monki Gras has always felt like a safe place to be trans and to talk about being trans. I’ve always felt like I can be my full self there, and being trans at the event is a complete non-issue.
My one regret is that there’s never enough time to talk to all the cool and interesting people who attend. The community around this event is lovely, and I wish I had more time to chat. (Although after two days I was ready to collapse into bed; it’s as fun as it is intense.)
I was flattered by the number of people who expressed surprise that I wasn’t speaking this year. I did write a proposal, but James politely suggested that since I’ve spoken at the last three events in a row, I should step aside for new speakers. Months in advance, I knew it was a good call – preparing a talk is a lot of work, and it was nice to relax and just enjoy the event. Now the event is over, I’m even more glad I skipped this year.
Watching the talks made me realise that since I left social media, I’ve lost my nerve for talking about personal or political topics. I worry the talk I’d have given this year would have felt anodyne next to the other speakers, and I want to fix that. I’m inspired to be more personal and vulnerable in my public writing, and some of my talk ideas will get recycled as articles on this site. I’ve already published one (Dreaming of a ten-year computer) and there’s more to come.
Monki Gras was created by James Governor, and he and his team have done an excellent job of creating a thoughtful, inclusive event that explores the impact of tech on the world.
I’ve shared my notes and highlights below, but they’re no substitute for the real thing. If you’ve never been, I’d strongly recommend it for 2027.
Be prepared for more: data vs hype, by Laura Tacho
Storytelling can be misused: Laura opened with the story of Percival Lowell, who successfully convinced many people that there were canals on Mars. Any criticism was deflected back to the critic – for example, if you can’t see them, it means your telescope isn’t good enough. The burden of proof was shifted from the sceptics to the claimant.
“What could somebody with bad intentions get you to believe?”
The average impact of AI shows a moderate improvement, but there’s increase variance and disparity. These tools may be enhancing individual productivity, but that isn’t leading to an impact on the P&L.
What’s the value of innovation? NASA publishes Spinoff which describes the benefits of the space race; will AI be the same?
There is no silver bullet that will help you solve human and org-level problems.
Key takeaways:
- Be sceptical of extraordinary claims. “How does it benefit me to believe this claim?”
- Use good storytelling; narratives stick.
- Set goals and measure progress.
- Developer experience matters more than ever.
- Experiment by solving real customer problems.
Preparing to Win in The Age Of Robots, by Ana Hevesi
“What if the next model makes us irrelevant?” – is this fear grounded in reality, or is it a leftover from the initial shock of ChatGPT?
Focus on your impact on people.
What can you contro;?
- How much you know about how you’re serving people – metrics, user research, and s on
- Interaction patterns
- Docs and acquisition of mastery
- Mastery and meaningful personal experience leads to shared culture and community
Look for opportunities to do “cultural ratcheting”.
Trust Before Truth, by Ashley Rolfmore
Numbers are scary because they are real.
Their context gives them meaning. 400 means nothing on its own, but £400.14 is the maximum universal credit you can receive per week. That’s a real and scary number.
Trust in institutions has been declining over past decades; the tech industry is part of that. (Both causing the decline in trust, and having trust decline in it.)
Ashley talked about how double-entry bookkeeping was the foundational idea that eventually led to modern accounting.
Show your working. Help people understand where your numbers come from.
Be correctable, not just correct.
“Incorrect numbers disrupt your shared reality with your user.”
Railway time was a standardised time used on the railways to deal with the fact that different places in Britain had different local timezones. This is a precursor to the timezones we have today.
GMT is centred in England. “This system had caught colonialism from its humans.”
Imagine if you had to explain the history of railway time and timezones for every timestamp you shared; it would be impossible. Timekeeping standards on modern railways treat railway time as a historical footnote, not essential knowledge, and everything works fine.
Key insight: “Cognitive debt is not failure if you keep the context window intentional.”
Extend mental models, don’t rebuild them.
Fail safe: minimise harm vs maximise accuracy. Consider what will happen when the system goes wrong, and design for safe failure. 100% accuracy is impossible; don’t forget about failures in the pursuit of perfection.
“If your site URL ends with .ai, all website bugs are now AI bugs.”
Do your fingers remember how to code? by Sue Smith
What skills should devs be focusing on? Don’t know – this talk is about strategies and techniques for discovering what developer skills are.
Acquiring a skill is different to retaining it. Once you lose achieve a level of proficiency, it’s difficult to lose skill
Skills are repeatable. This means generative AI in its current form is not a skill; it can’t be used predictably.
Teaching means guessing where the learner is, and finding out where you were wrong.
The act of saying something aloud can help you understand it. [Alex: this is the production effect.]
Sue described a swimmer Terry Law (sp?), whose attitude was: “every time I get out of water, I’ll be a better swimmer”. He took copious notes after ever swim.
Semantic waves of learning: from a high level of theory to practical implementation, and back again.
“Where do you find value in the process and not the outcome?”
What to do when your passport is taken away, by Liz Fong-Jones
Preparation means acting on incomplete information, and preserving resources to be able to do that. In Liz’s case, that meant driving several hours to renew her passport after the news broke that the Trump administration wouldn’t issue new passports for trans people – but she was able to renew an existing passport.
Trans people are under greater threat than in a long time: existentially threatening politics in the US; bathroom bans in the UK.
Liz is good at resilience engineering because it affects her personal life: runbooks for personal threats, plans for leaving her home and country, and so on. She showed us a complex risk spreadsheet she uses to track personal risk; I didn’t have time to read it in detail.
Prepping Hazel Weakly – being intentional in life and in software, by Hazel Weakly
Hazel’s first memory is one of loneliness; she has about ten memories from before she was 26. She talked about dissociating as a child.
Axioms of self:
- I choose to love humanity
- I know what I know, what I don’t know, the difference
- Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but nothing is absolute
- I Embrace my shortcomings (maybe too much)
- I choose my addictions so they don’t choose me
Being deaf means questioning everything I hear, and never believing my own reality.
She had to learn “normality” – a combination of being autistic, trans, and ADHD.
Our past shapes us, but it does not have to guide us.
“I have thoughts. Lots of thoughts. They never stop thinking. Never stop thunking.”
Oxygen is vital to life, but it’s also poisonous in its pure form.
Purpose:
- Teach the world to build self-organising ecosystems
- Find (?) the infinitesimal spirit of chaos
- Dance in the rain
Desires:
- To help others feel understood and make them feel safe
- To build a world where nobody experiences my childhood again
Reception: what impression do I want to give? What do I want others to see in myself?
Fashion and makeup: “Vanity is a gift to myself. It is permission to live in my body with joy.”
“When I give myself permission to experience my existence with joy, then I give everybody else permission to do the same.”
“I rebuilt myself into a completely different person who is far cuter, and she’s more (entertaining? everything?) and has a spark in her eye she didn’t feel possible.”
“Build that community of belonging and you will be surprised at what life and the universe of chaos will bring to you in sparkles and fits of unmitigated joy.”
Atproto, federation, kindness, and resilience, by Daniel Roe
Daniel started the npmx project, an alternative npm browser that’s built in part on atproto. The project grew quickly, and attracted a lot of contributors – to the point the core maintainers took a week-long break as it was gaining traction, to prevent burnout.
There aren’t 10x developers, but there are 10x teams. They iterate together, and make each other better.
atproto allows you to get something akin to federated JSON. [Alex: the best explanation I’ve seen for this so far is Dan Abramov’s article A Social Filesystem.]
Standard.site is a schema for publishing blogs on atproto.
atproto is not a USP, it’s an implementation detail.
Running an app based on atproto means less responsibility, because you don’t have to run a backend – other people can look after their data.
Enshittification comes from asymmetry of power; atproto can help to level that balance.
Fixing the Open Source Bus Number, by Holly Cummins and Sanne Grinovero
This talk covered a lot of material I’m familiar with, so I didn’t take many notes.
The problems facing open source maintainers: money, time, burnout, boredom, user hostility.
“The value of people isn’t cranking out code; it’s being guardians of quality and performance.”
Other bad things: losing keys, losing the vision and meaning of a brand.
Resilience needs conscious observability, by Adrian Cockcroft
“Footprints on the sand of time”, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem A Psalm of Life.
“Why are you trying to make something resilient?”
Career resilience:
- Quality over quantity
- Prioritise what you want to do
- Make your work visible [Alex: see Julia Evans’ article Write a brag document]
- APIs allowed developers to do the work of dedicated ops and infrastructure teams; AI is the same thing but for developers writing code
Business resilience:
- There’s a lot of FOMO around AI; speed wins here
- Probe, sense, and respond
- When you get a new manager, ask them for stuff. “Your predecessor didn’t approve this interesting thing, do this and it will make you look good.”
- There are constraints that affect your choices
Systems resilience:
- What should users see when the system falls over?
- Test that your mitigation mechaisms work; an untested backup is broken
Risk = severity × probability × obscurity × delay
Preparing for unimaginable change, by Danilo Campos
If we’re entering a post-scarcity future, we should be more excited than scared.
“We prefer our world of toilets to open sewers. Think about this for a moment. This is a science fiction shit. You have a magic bowl where you press a button and whatever you want to get rid of is gone.”
A brief history of civilisation [Alex: reminded me of How to Invent Everything].
A heat pump and solar means that on hot days, air conditioning essentially free.
“The fruits of abundance are often captured.”
We can harness solar and improve energy infrastructure: it’s possible, but it needs work.
“It’s not as grim as we’ve always been told.” [Alex: London’s air pollution sprung to mind; it was initially projected that it would take 193 years to bring NO2 pollution to within legal levels, but it was achieved in 9 years.]
“Thought is fuel.”
There’s a crappy remote for the air conditioner and heating controllers; replace it with microcontrollers and a vibe-coded app in Python.
“Give me a context limit large enough and I can move the world.”
Mario’s grandfather is Fairchild Semiconductor, originally developed for military applications. This led to an era of compounding automations on semiconductors: modems, video games, programming.
LLMs and AI are the start of a new 50-year super cycle of compounding automation.
The person who created Mario was “not a video game designer” because that job didn’t exist yet. What new careers will be created in the era of LLMs?
We have abundant energy and cognition.
Modern warfare is different to what it used to be – widespread use of drones and automonous vehicles. But warfare is how we got the microprocessor in the first place.
We can have a positive vision for this abundance; we can counter the vision of darkness.
“We can assert a positive vision of how these strange discoveries shape our future.”
Story of a prepper, by Chad Metcalfe
When we hear the word “prepper”, we think of a doomsday-obsessed, right-wing obsessive with guns.
Attitudes to war have changed. Many of Chad’s peers from Texas joined the military, and they can’t walk 5 minutes before somebody thanks them for their service. His father fought in Vietnam, and didn’t want to talk about it when he returned.
“In a world that feels out of control, prepping is a mechanism to assert personal control.” This takes different forms and the meaning of “prepper” and “survivalist” has changed over time, but it’s the same underlying desire.
-
I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there’s always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there’s that :-)
Chad bought a 20-acre gold mine to turn into a self-sufficient space. He had to learn about water systems, power, sewage; he broke both wrists falling off a 12′ ladder; he had to navigate open shafts across the property (one over 150′ deep). [Alex: the pictures reminded me of Firewatch.]
This sort of living forces you to update your threat model.
Fire is scary! Half of the USA is protected by volunteer fire departments; they can’t be everywhere.
[Alex: this reminded me of the Lemony Snicket series; the concept of a volunteer fire department was completely new to me as a British reader, but I guess it would make more sense to a US-ian reader?]
After a lightning strike on the corner of his property: “A grass fire moves at 14mph. That lightning strike struck 800 feet away. That’s 39 seconds.”
We’re all prepping for something, so how do you react?
- Put your head in the sand and ignore it
- Outsource it and become dependent (as we are with GPS and maps), or
- You can prepare
CIS Parent: Transguide, by Adam Zimman
The talk was framed with art and typography from the game Silksong. It was a shared experience with their child; a way to connect with them.
Graphic of Infinite Combinations, from Seeing Gender by Iris Gottlieb.
Consider the character creator. There is no global “best”, there’s only “best for me”, the individual player. Some players even like “bad” combinations because it makes the game harder.
Act I: How I defined you. The parent defines who the child is (name, gender, pronouns) and what the child does (clothing, toys, colours).
The reality of parenting is very different to expectations, and you cannot prepare for it in theory – you need to figure it out on the fly.
About 1.7% of people are intersex, a similar proportion to redheads (although many intersex individuals will not know it themselves).
“Listen to your kid when they are young. Believe them when they tell you who they are. It can change at any time, but you should believe what they say to be their truth in the moment.”
If a kid tells you something, it means they trust you – show them that you’ve earned it.
Don’t assume that your lived experience is the same as theirs.
Act II: How I defined you to who you are.
Items you consider permanent are not. What do they want to do? Things like makeup, haircuts, friends and peers.
Picking a name. When his child first mentioned changing their name, he dropped a clanger: “Your name is the first gift I ever gave you”.
Their child’s reply is a model of grace: “You picked a name for me before you knew me. This is a chance for both of us to pick a name together now that I know and you know who I am.”
“When somebody is willing to share with you their true self, they are extending an aspect of trust to you.”
You will fail a lot. The important thing is that you keep trying.
Act III: Who I am to who I want to become.
How do I want to be seen?
“I didn’t feel it was fair to have everything that my kids were experiencing have them be the ones to explain it to me” – Adam went and found trans and neurodivergent communities to do his own learning, so he could be informed in conversations with his children (but not opinionated!).
“How can you support a human so that they feel comfortable being themselves and sharing themselves with everyone else?”
Who am I legally? Passports and paperworks.
Support vs dangers: being yourself vs being safe. For example, the family missed a bar mitzvah during the Trump administration because both children had X markers in their passports, and it was unclear if they could safely interact with TSA during that time. They now have passports that match their sex assigned at birth to make travel easier.
Knowing vs asking; failure vs trying. “Get good.”
“There are no shortcuts.”
Resilience in Communities, by Heidi Waterhouse & Kim Harrison
Case study of two communities: South Minneapolis and Oaxaca.
Change is good if it comes at the pace you’re expecting; right now change is not coming at that rate.
We’re protected by the systems around us. What is it like to participate in the creation and maintenance of those systems?
What are the properties of a resilient system?
- tested
- flexible
- responsive to shocks
- compassionate
- sustainable
Oaxaca: mutual aid tied to local resources. Kim explained the idea of [tequio][wiki-tequio] and several other practices whose names I didn’t catch; it’s collective work for the benefit of the community, not paid work.
“If all you have is a wheelbarrow or shovel, you show up because that’s one more than nothing.”
You can be kicked out of a community, lose voting rights and similar if don’t participate.
How do you build resilient systms? Decide on shared priorities.
Wendigo spirit means taking more resources than you need, and depriving others of them (aka capitalism). This can lead to people getting kicked out of communities.
We’re bad at understanding our needs and gifts; we’re not all the same, and we need/provide different things.
Minneapolis is under ICE occupation; how do you ensure people can still fulfill their basic needs?
There are two strands of work involved:
foot patrol driving resistance food aid “community” child care observation delivery demonstration bus patrol It’s not safe to cross sides; these need to be picked up by different people.
Mutual interdependence and support. They didn’t start from zero; they ratched up, learning from previous communities, preparing to help whose next. Previous examples: George Floyd, Portland, Chicago.
What do we owe to each other? “We exist in ecosystems […] we cannot all be rugged individual martyrs.”
“Mr Rogers stold children then when scary things happen, look for the helpers.” When scary things happen, adults look for the helpers, and then go help.
“Reaching out a hand and saying ‘are you okay’ is the foundation of interdependent community” – the last words of Alex Pretti before he was murdered by ICE.
Planning FOR Uncertainty, by Matt LeMay
In March 2020, companies were reluctant to change plans already in motion – which seems laughable now.
Strategic planning only happens once a year, even though it’s meant to align you with customers and markets.
Customers don’t give a shit about your “planning season”.
“Why are you making a five-year plan when the world doesn’t look the same as it did five years ago?”
How do you stop companies from treating planning as a (multi)-year planning exercise?
You can’t, but you can add a quarterly review… and a monthly review… and a fortnightly review. (Flashbacks to Hazel’s makeup tutorial the previous night.)
What if more planning makes us more adaptable?
Following a plan can help us respond to change, if we plan to change. If responding to change is part of plan, we’re more likely to do it.
It’s the difference between change as threat to the plan, and change as the plan. We can frame plans as resilient, iterative, and the way we change course.
[Alex: at this point I was reminded of some career advice from a previous manager: it doesn’t matter how correct you are, if you’re annoying, you’ll be ignored.]
The way you communicate a plan
is
[as important as] the plan.The way you communicate an idea is the idea.
“Planning is communication. Communication is craft. Let’s craft plans that make us less resistant to change.”