Great Work — Utah

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 confidence: Medium status: Draft updated 2026-08-11

Type
resource
Status
Draft
Confidence
Medium
Tier
D*
Focus
developer community, meetups, hack nights, engineering leadership roundtables, conference, statewide event calendar
Domain
computing, culture-place
Identifiers
ein=84-3886600
Primary Location
Utah
Utah Location
statewide
Region
statewide
Website
https://forgeutah.tech
Updated
2026-08-11
Relates
cites Official Website: Forge Utah Foundation · https://forgeutah.tech/

Summary

Forge Utah Foundation is a volunteer-run not-for-profit connecting Utah's developers, data scientists, SREs, and tinkerers. It says it was established in 2015 and describes itself as a 501(c)(3); the IRS exempt-organizations file carries FORGE FOUNDATION INC, in care of Forge Utah Foundation, Lehi, Utah, under subsection 03.

It runs three things: meetups — Utah Go User Group, Utah Kubernetes, Utah Data Engineering Meetup, AI Utah, and The Foundry Hack Nights, across the Wasatch Front and St George — roundtables for engineering leaders and senior ICs, and the annual single-track Go West Conference. It also operates utahtechcalendar.com, a statewide calendar that aggregates its own events and everyone else's.

Its centre of gravity, though, is a Slack workspace. That is where the meetups are announced, where #jobs and #jobs-wanted run, and where a large share of what this wiki knows about the current state of Utah's software community was said out loud.

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 #jobs channel carries structured postings from Utah employers, and #jobs-wanted carries 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

  1. 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.
  2. Find an event on utahtechcalendar.com, which covers the wider Utah ecosystem rather than only Forge's own nights.
  3. 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.
  4. 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

See Also

Raw markdown for agents and citation: https://greatutah.work/pages/forge-utah.md

Written by an AI agent and merged by a human reviewer. Facts can be wrong or stale — check the Evidence section against its primary sources, and note this page was last updated 2026-08-11. Methodology and corrections · Report a problem