by Ernie Smith
Hampton Roads DevFest highlights the rise of AI—and the challenges of building a local tech community.
If you found yourself at the Hampton Roads DevFest back in February, you likely spotted a couple key themes throughout the event. First, AI was everywhere, naturally. (A highlight was solutions architect Tim Banks explaining the limits of AI using one of his considerable non-technical skills: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.)
But secondly, there was this undercurrent in the packed crowd: Speakers and audience members alike wanted to keep building up a formative Hampton Roads tech scene. There were hundreds of people packed into the Zeiders American Dream Theater in Virginia Beach that day, but what would it take to get an even bigger event here?
Some have suggested the problem is a lack of direct flights to Hampton Roads, causing outsiders to skip the trip. But Kevin Griffin, the president of RevolutionVA, a tech-events nonprofit, and the organizer of DevFest and its sister event RevolutionConf, has a different answer.
“We need to build the local community back up,” he explained during a Q&A at a DevFest session. “We can’t support a major conference if our local community is not involved in it.”
In a post-event interview, he made clear that a big challenge facing the community is that user groups, the bread-and-butter of in-person technology events in Hampton Roads, struggled to recover after the COVID-19 outbreak. That led RevolutionConf, a larger event with more national focus, to take a backseat to the smaller DevFest.
“The worry we had coming out of COVID was an event like [RevolutionConf] is a substantial amount of money just in conference costs and food and beverage minimums, and all the details that go into an event,” he said. “We were worried about, ‘If we built it, would people come?’” RevolutionConf was last held in 2019.
Keyboards, keyboards, keyboards – Courtesy of Paul Chin Jr.
DevFest, which emphasizes bringing in presenters with a Hampton Roads background, offers a somewhat simpler path to financial success. But it’s not without its challenges, which can vary from getting local corporate and city support, to community outreach, to building a network of volunteers, to even something as simple as community members moving away. The 2024 edition, RevolutionVA’s first post-COVID event, struggled financially, per Griffin.
But when it clicks, as it did this year, it really clicks.
“There’s a variety of different challenges for just putting butts in seats,” he said. “And I think this year, we were super successful.”
Part of what might have helped draw attendees this year was the strong interest in AI among techies. During the event, speakers such as vibe-coding enthusiast Lionel Sapp and Thomas Nelson Community College economics professor Ian Taylor showed off their passion for emerging tools like the front-end development platform v0 and Microsoft Copilot. Even speakers without AI-centric backgrounds, like Banks and Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect Katie Novotny, emphasized the trend in their talks. (Griffin said that his team actually tried to avoid AI sessions, but found that most speakers wanted to talk about it.)
If the goal is to use DevFest as a way to rebuild the farm system, there are plenty of challenges to navigate—some of them created by AI. Griffin pointed to the risks facing junior developers, who might find themselves fighting for jobs with Claude Code.
Tim Banks using Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu moves to make a point – Courtesy of Travis Webb
“There is risk of losing jobs, but it’s going to be more of the junior-level developers, which is its own set of problems,” Griffin warned, while noting that more seasoned developers face a different challenge.
“I think they’re worried if they’re not embracing AI now as part of their workflow,” he added.
As a volunteer-driven initiative, RevolutionVA—and the Hampton Roads tech community in general—relies on a constant flow of new faces. That means that shifts in the talent pipeline (say, fewer junior developers, or workers that choose to go remote) could create deeper challenges for the community. Plus, there are other factors that might prevent developers from getting involved—like a lack of support from local employers concerned about poaching. (“Some actually forbid them,” he said. “We’ve seen that before.”)
Another significant challenge still hanging around from the COVID era is that many devs, some of whom work remote, now get technology training on YouTube and build community on Discord.
Griffin is working to solve this farm-system problem through awareness, including with the recent creation of 757tech, a landing page highlighting upcoming meetups and local user groups. It’s a tool that Griffin developed using vibe coding with Ted Patterson, a prominent figure in the local chapter of The AI Collective.
As Griffin sees it, the appeal of in-person events for tech professionals is pretty simple: There’s a natural pathway to future employment. “You’re never gonna think to give nacholover556 a job because you met him or her or them in a Reddit forum,” he said.
Even if you want to slink away in the background, Griffin said that showing up still matters. “Even if you don’t wanna talk right away, just be an observer,” he said. “Just being present is so much better than just being an online silhouette in Zoom or Meetup.
And it’s a point that locals who have built careers through local events are happy to make. During his DevFest presentation, Ryan Castillo, the founder of the brand-monitoring tool Knowatoa, explained how his own career flourished by attending and speaking at events like DevFest.
“Success comes from knowing people in person,” Castillo told the audience. “And the only way you can know people in person is to gather in person.”
