Halfstep is a two-day conference for product designers and front-end developers, and the first edition takes place at Pier Hall in Rotterdam on 18 and 19 March 2027. Designers and engineers keep talking about the same screens in different rooms. This time they get one room.
Two days, two formats
Thursday 18 March is Workshop day. Six three-hour workshops run in three small studios, with room for 30 people each, and every one starts from a real file: a token set that has to survive a rebrand, a form people abandon, an empty state nobody designed. You take one workshop in the morning, one after lunch, and finish with welcome drinks at 17:00.
Friday 19 March is Conference day. An opening keynote at 09:30, three tracks of 45-minute talks across Main Hall, Hall B and Hall C, and a closing talk at 15:00. About 600 people fit in the building. Lunch lasts an hour and fifteen minutes, so nobody eats a sandwich in the corridor.
Three tracks
Every session belongs to one of three tracks, and you can move between them from one talk to the next.
Design: systems, type and the decisions behind them.
Engineering: front-end craft that survives real users.
Craft: hands-on workshops, small rooms, real files.
The schedule lets you filter by track, switch to your own time zone and save the sessions you want.
What happens next
We announce the first twelve speakers on 8 September. Tickets open at the end of September, with an early bird price for everyone who books before 31 January 2027. Pier Hall stands on the water, about ten minutes from Rotterdam Centraal, and a travel guide follows in October.
If you would like to hear about each step first, write to hello@example.com and ask to be on the list. We send one short email per announcement and nothing else.
