Martin Helmich
Chief Technology Evangelist @mittwald | Board of Directors @TYPO3Association
Rahden, Germany
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I'm an Open-Source enthusiast from Rahden, Germany. I am currently leading mittwald's Developer Relations team, and am a Board Member of the TYPO3 Association. In my free time, you might find me coding on one of my open source pet projects, building random stuff in my home woodworking shop, travelling, or reading a good classic sci-fi book.
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How to annoy your hosting provider: Load testing at scale
Did your site just go viral on social media, had your product pitched on [insert your local variant of "Shark Tank" here], or did your festival site just launch its ticket sale? In these scenarios, no site survives its first contact with production traffic – and by then, it's too late to find out.
That's why it is useful to know in advance how your project will behave at scale under production workloads. In this talk, I will walk you through how to implement high-scale load testing with open source tools like Grafana k6: how to write test cases that mimic user behaviour realistically, what your testing infrastructure should look like to simulate 10–100k simultaneous users, and how to incorporate regular load tests into your CI/CD pipeline — illustrated throughout with real-world case studies.
AI is eating your CMS
AI is rapidly reshaping how we create, manage, and deliver content — and it’s starting to challenge the very foundations of traditional CMS platforms.
In this talk, I’ll explore how different CMS ecosystems are currently approaching AI, including a look beyond our own bubble into what’s happening in Drupal, WordPress, and TYPO3. What features are emerging? Where are platforms investing? And what can we learn from each other?
Beyond the product landscape, we’ll examine what you can already build yourself using open-source tools and APIs — from AI-assisted content workflows to custom integrations tailored to your editorial needs.
Most importantly, we’ll discuss which AI features actually make sense in a CMS context — and which are just hype. If AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) can generate, structure, and publish content, do editors even need a traditional backend anymore?
This session offers a practical, forward-looking perspective on where AI and CMS are heading — and what it means for developers, editors, and digital teams.
The history of trying to make PHP fast(er)
As long as PHP has existed, developers have tried various hacks to make it faster than it was at the time.
From good-old eAccelerator, through HHVM, to modern initiatives like FrankenPHP, Roadrunner and ePHPm — this talk gives a historical overview over how the community tried to squeeze more performance out of PHP, and what the PHP project itself did to make PHP’s performance competitive with other mainstream web languages.
The main focus of this talk is on modern approaches like FrankenPHP and the application server model, but on the way there, we’ll also look at how PHP actually executes code (from parsing and opcode compilation to the JIT compiler), so you’ll understand why and how these tools work.
The Art of Deployment
From an FTP upload to a containerized and horizontally-scalable deployment on Kubernetes (and everything in between) — in this talk, I will take you on a journey through the history and challenges of getting your code up and running on your infrastructure.
I will present different deployment strategies and tools, explain the benefits and drawbacks of each, and offer guidance as to which strategy should be used when — starting with the usual atomic-deployment tools and then make my way to building and deploying container images, all the way to a fully cloud-native and scalable deployment on modern container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
The Production Gap: How to prepare your AI app for the real world
Does your AI assistant tells its users to “add glue to their pasta recipe”, as well?
Installing an OpenAI client library and adding a few LLM calls to your code only take five minutes; but often enough, the real work only begins when you take your app into production and it starts hallucinating wildly. In this case, you’ll want:
1. insights into how users actually use your system
2. visibility into where things went wrong
3. confidence that your app produces outputs in the desired quality
This talk covers the essentials of running LLM-powered applications in production, focusing on observability and evaluations. We'll explore how known standards like OpenTelemetry can be adapted to trace complex LLM processes, surface meaningful metrics for monitoring, and continuously assess output quality. Along the way, we'll look at open-source tools that help you gain visibility into your AI systems and notice early when your app starts confidently telling users to add glue to their pasta.
CloudFest
"From Firefighting to Sleeping At Night": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/cloudfest-2026-from-firefighting-to-sleeping-at-night
WebCamp Venlo
"AI is eating your CMS": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNZ_ZmtIdq8&t=5247s
TYPO3 Conference
"AI Is Eating Your Servers... And Your CMS": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3con25-ai-is-eating-your-servers-dot-dot-dot-and-your-cms
JoomlaDay DACH
"Breaking Barriers: Why Accessibility matters for everyone"
TYPO3Camp Rhein-Ruhr
"Deploying TYPO3 projects with Infrastructure as Code and Terraform"
TYPO3Camp London
"Cloud-Native TYPO3": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3cl25-cloud-native-typo3
TYPO3 DeveloperDays
"How to annoy your hosting provider with load testing": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3dd25-how-to-annoy-your-hosting-provider
NEOS Conference
"How to annoy your hosting provider with load testing": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/neoscon25-how-to-annoy-your-hosting-provider
TYPO3Camp Mitteldeutschland
"Building TYPO3 Extensions with the Smart Extension Builder"
TYPO3 Conference
"Crafting Tomorrow's Tech Talent": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3con24-crafting-tomorrows-tech-talent
TYPO3Camp Berlin
"Load-Testing with Grafana k6": https://www.youtube.com/live/_eyRYMvWDo8?si=aLG3b6kbC6md-5Ac&t=12610
Contao-Konferenz
"Die Kunst des Deployments": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3dd24-the-art-of-deployment
TYPO3 Developer Days
"The Art of Deployment": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3dd24-the-art-of-deployment
"Hot to build your own Cloud Platform": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3dd24-how-to-build-your-own-cloud-platform
SLAC 2024
"1001 ways to (not) shoot yourself in the foot with on-prem Kubernetes"
https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/1001-ways-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-with-on-prem-kubernetes
WebCamp Venlo 2024
"Managing Code Quality in TYPO3 Projects": https://www.youtube.com/live/So15FX6EonQ?si=ELtNfbXdl71i3EJA&t=6754
FOSDEM 2024
This presentation addresses the significance of accessibility in modern web applications, emphasizing its importance as a legal requirement, a human right, and a fundamental aspect of inclusivity. It explores various barriers users may face, especially in popular content management systems, and provides actionable strategies for developers and UX designers to enhance accessibility, ensuring compliance with global standards and regulations like the European Accessibility Act.
https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2638-breaking-barriers-content-management-systems-and-accessibility/
TYPO3 Conference 2023
In this talk, I illustrate how the deployment processes of web applications and web infrastructures interact and depend on each other, and how the constant drive for automation has changed these fields over the years. I present a high-level view on different state-of-the-art methodologies and tools for defining your infrastructure requirements in a declarative way, and how to redesign your deployment processes to make infrastructure definition a part of them. You will also learn about the many new opportunities this unlocks for your software development process and how to make use of them.
https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3con23-breaking-the-knot-between-deployment-and-infrastructure
TYPO3 Developer Days 2023
Over the past few years, container technologies (like Docker) have become essential to many a developer's workflow -- be it for local development, testing, CI or production rollouts. In this talk, I will shed light on one of the underlying principles of Docker: the OCI image and distribution specifications. These describe the file format of a Docker image and the API of a Docker registry. Understanding these will help you understand what's actually going on when you run commands like "docker build" or "docker pull". I will also present a case study of a project in which we used these specifications to build a container image solution that implemented features that would have been impossible to implement using the regular tools.
https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/the-anatomy-of-docker-image
Contao Conference 2019
"Kubernetes War Stories": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/contaoconference19-kubernetes-war-stories
Meet TYPO3
"Ready for Lift-Off: The Future of TYPO3 from a Provider's Perspective": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/meet-typo3-18-ready-for-lift-off
Secure Linux Administration Conference (SLAC) 2018
"PHP In The Container Cloud" -- https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/slac18-php-in-the-container-cloud
SEROM2016
"Container Virtualization with Docker": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/serom16-container-virtualisierung-mit-docker
TYPO3 Conference 2013
"Web application development using Behaviour Driven Development": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/t3con13-web-application-development-using-behaviour-driven-development
Inspiring Flow Conference 2013
"Scalable Deployment Architectures with TYPO3 Surf, Git and Jenkins": https://speakerdeck.com/martinhelmich/inspiringflow13-scalable-deployment-architectures-with-typo3-surf-git-and-jenkins
Martin Helmich
Chief Technology Evangelist @mittwald | Board of Directors @TYPO3Association
Rahden, Germany
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