About Us | RevolutionVA

Our mission

RevolutionVA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose goal is to unite developers in Hampton Roads and all of Virginia through conferences, educational events, and other programs that benefit the community.

Hampton Roads is a region of roughly 1.8 million people spread across a dozen cities separated by water. That geography is the problem we exist to solve. A developer in Norfolk and a developer in Williamsburg can work on the same problems for years without ever meeting, because there is no natural place for them to run into each other. Large tech hubs solve this by accident — enough companies in enough proximity and a community forms on its own. Here, somebody has to build it on purpose.

That is what RevolutionVA does. We run the conferences, the meetups, and the newsletter that give the region's software community a shared calendar and a shared room. Everything we produce is open to anyone who writes software or wants to learn how, regardless of employer, experience level, or credential.

By the numbers

2,155 Event registrations since 2016

10 Conferences produced

10 Years serving the region

0 Paid staff

Registration counts are taken from our own event records. A full event-by-event breakdown is on the events page.

What we do

Our work runs on four programs. Each one reaches a different slice of the community, and each one exists because the others could not do its job alone.

Hampton Roads DevFest

A one-day developer conference in Hampton Roads, run by volunteers for the local software community. Held six times since 2016, it is the only conference RevolutionVA currently runs, and its most recent edition was its strongest.

RevolutionConf

A regional developer conference that ran for four consecutive years, growing from a single day in 2016 into a two-day event. Its four editions remain the best-attended thing RevolutionVA has produced.

Pop-up Meetups

One-off events built around a topic rather than a technology, a city, or a user group. When a subject matters across the whole regional community but does not belong to anyone in particular, it gets a Pop-up Meetup — hosted wherever in Hampton Roads makes sense that time.

757 Tech Newsletter

A free newsletter delivered every Monday covering upcoming tech events, open jobs, and community news across Hampton Roads. It keeps the community connected during the weeks between events.

How we got here

RevolutionVA's first event was RevolutionConf, held in May 2016. Six months later we ran the first Hampton Roads DevFest. For the next four years we produced both conferences annually — RevolutionConf in the spring, DevFest in the fall — building an audience that grew from 246 registrations at that first RevolutionConf to a combined 513 across the two 2019 events.

We held no events between 2020 and 2023. Hampton Roads DevFest returned in May 2024 with 182 registrations — level with the last DevFest before the pause rather than a leap past it — and ran again in February 2026, drawing 255. That second figure is the strongest in DevFest's history, though still short of what RevolutionConf was doing at its peak.

The pause taught us something we have built the organization around since: an annual conference is a spike, not a community. A developer who attends one day in February has no obvious way to stay connected until the following February. That gap is why we started the 757 Tech newsletter and the Pop-up Meetups program — lightweight, year-round, and not dependent on any one big event surviving.

How we are run and funded

RevolutionVA is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, EIN 81-0738973. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Our federal filings are public and can be reviewed on our ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer profile.

The organization has no paid staff. Every conference, every meetup, and every issue of the newsletter is produced by volunteers who do this on evenings and weekends alongside full-time jobs. That is not a temporary arrangement we are trying to grow out of — it is how we keep ticket prices low and keep the programs independent of any single sponsor.

Our funding comes from four sources:

Individual supporters — recurring monthly gifts from people in the community. This is the funding that covers year-round operations rather than a single event.
Event sponsorship — companies underwriting a specific conference, which covers that conference's direct costs.
Ticket sales — priced to cover costs, not to generate a surplus.
Merchandise — a small revenue stream from community-designed shirts and hats.

Funds go to venue costs, audio/video, speaker travel, attendee scholarships, the newsletter, and the operational overhead of keeping a nonprofit in good standing. If you want to fund the year-round work specifically, that is what becoming a RevVA Supporter does.