A volunteer-run 501(c)(3) that has quietly become the default meeting place for Utah engineers — and the hardest one to find on purpose.
Forge Utah
resource active confidence: Medium status: Draft updated 2026-08-11
Summary
Forge Utah Foundation is a volunteer-run not-for-profit connecting Utah's developers, data scientists, SREs, and tinkerers. Forge Utah provides a bounded benefit: Working technologists in Utah, at any level, and people trying to become them.
Who It's For
Working technologists in Utah, at any level, and people trying to become them. The foundation's own framing is deliberately wide: "If you write code, wrangle data, keep servers alive, or solder things on weekends, you belong here." Three distinct audiences are visible in what it runs:
- Practitioners looking for a peer group in a specific technology — the meetups are organized by stack (Go, Kubernetes, data engineering, AI) rather than by employer or seniority.
- Engineering leaders — the roundtables are explicitly small-group, no-slides, and pitched at people who have a real problem and want to hear how others solved it.
- People looking for work. The
#jobschannel carries structured postings from Utah employers, and#jobs-wantedcarries the other side. Over the six months to August 2026 those postings named 51 distinct employers, which is a fair proxy for who is actually hiring in Utah software.
The foundation states it takes no sponsor money in exchange for access and hosts no recruiter pitches.
How To Use It
- Join the Slack. It is the live layer; the website is a description of the foundation, not a schedule. The join link is on the homepage.
- Find an event on utahtechcalendar.com, which covers the wider Utah ecosystem rather than only Forge's own nights.
- Go West Conference is the annual gathering — single-track, priced low deliberately, no expo hall. It is the one thing on the list with a ticket.
- Meetups and hack nights are free to attend and volunteer-run, so the practical commitment is showing up.
Finding the site at all is the first obstacle, and it is worth stating plainly for anyone
following this page: forgeut.dev, forgeutah.org, and forgeutah.com do not serve a homepage as of
2026-08-11. The live site is forgeutah.tech, which is reachable from the foundation's GitHub
organization profile and not much else.
Open Questions
- How large is it? No membership, attendance, or Slack headcount figure is published anywhere located for this page. "Utah's community for engineers" is a self-description with no denominator.
- Why does the IRS ruling date say 2025-07 when the site says "est. 2015"? Both may be true — a long-running volunteer community that only recently sought federal exemption — but no located source explains the ten-year gap, so the reason remains unknown.
- What are its finances? The BMF row shows zero assets, zero income, and a filing requirement consistent with a small organization, which suggests it operates well under the 990-filing threshold. That is an inference from a filing code, not a statement of budget.
- Who runs it? Clint Berry is identified in the Slack workspace as president of the foundation and Derrick Laird as a Go West organizer, but no located public page on the foundation's own site names its board or officers.
- Are the named meetups (Utah Go, Utah Kubernetes, UDEM, AI Utah, The Foundry) Forge programs or independent groups it lists? The site presents them together; the distinction matters for whether each is its own atom here.
Evidence
- Official Website: Forge Utah Foundation · https://forgeutah.tech/
- Source: IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File, Utah Extract — EIN 84-3886600, FORGE FOUNDATION INC, Lehi UT, subsection 03, ruling 2025-07