Home to some of the most notable companies in tech, San Francisco and Silicon Valley largely remain at the vanguard of innovation. But the best product insights don't come from surveys or structured sprints, they come from the unexpected conversations that happen in the margins: at meetups, workshops, and community spaces full of people actually building things.

The Vonage developer relations presence in the Bay Area is a deliberate investment: showing up in person, running live demos, and building real relationships with the people who are shaping what gets built next.

These are some of the insights we gained from six months of Bay Area meetups and events.

In the first half of 2026, Vonage was on the ground and in the room with developers across a wide range of topics and venues and present in different roles: attendee, speaker, and sponsor. Across every format, one theme consistently emerged: AI. That alone wasn't surprising. What was surprising was the nature of the conversations around AI, such as what developers are building with it, what they're asking for, and what they still need.

AI is everywhere, and developers have real questions about it

Not surprisingly, AI dominated every event, from healthcare to agentic apps to job searching. AI has made some aspects of a developer’s job easier while creating friction in other areas like security, infrastructure, guardrails, accuracy, and determinism. At a monthly APIs and agents meetup, a talk from an AI-powered stock trading platform prompted the question, “But how can people trust this with their money?” The platform’s solution? SMS-based human-in-the-loop transaction authorization.

The numbers back this up: According to Sonar's 2026 State of Code Developer Survey of more than 1,100 developers, 84% use AI coding tools, but trust has dropped to just 29%. The adoption-trust gap is real, and it was front and center at every event we attended.

Security in the age of AI agents

As we expect AI to operate more autonomously as agents, we entrust them with more access in order to reason through and complete tasks on their own. This has the potential to increase productivity and to increase security breaches. At a Python meetup, we heard from a developer advocate at Okta, who recounted how granting excessive privileges to an AI note-taking app resulted in attackers gaining access to a major cloud platform's internal systems and customer secrets. New challenges like this present opportunities to fortify authentication workflows with tried-and-true methods such as multi-factor authentication.

Software fundamentals still matter

Despite AI’s expansion into all aspects of software, developers are still drawn to engineering fundamentals. As a developer-first suite of APIs with robust tooling, Vonage offers an opportunity to build hands-on experience integrating communications and network-based features programmatically. We used Vonage as a vehicle to teach software basics, such as the differences between HTTP and WebSocket. And we used mocks in unit tests, inviting audiences to try out the APIs themselves to see these concepts in action. These talks and workshops generated blog traffic and signups, demonstrating an enduring interest in learning the essentials, especially as the role of the developer evolves and adapts.

In fact, in the same Sonar survey revealing the majority of respondents are using AI coding tools, 48% of developers also worry about AI-induced deskilling. The skill they say will matter most going forward isn't prompt engineering; it's reviewing and validating AI-generated code. Fundamentals aren't going away. If anything, they're becoming more important.

Community, advocacy, and open source

A couple of the meetups and events we were at focused on serving specific communities and special interest groups in tech. This is where some of the most interesting conversations and use cases emerged, such as filmmakers interested in creating their own streaming platforms and parents teaching themselves Unity now that their kids are in college. These aren't your typical developer profiles — and that's exactly the point.

The communities that attract the most diverse builders are also the ones generating the most unexpected use cases for communication APIs. These events tend to enjoy repeat attendees who are just as engaged online as they are in person, building trust, loyalty, and evangelism. The success of our Vonage Community Partnership and Startup programs reflects this.

APIs, SDKs, and developer tooling

Whether it’s an AI agent or a human generating the code, developers want APIs that are composable, safe, and well-documented.

At a Python meetup we used Vonage Verify to demonstrate how our recent Python SDK overhaul makes use of Pydantic, one of the most popular data validation libraries in the language ecosystem, to make development with our APIs easier. This talk sparked further interest in other ways Vonage makes its APIs, SDKs, and tooling developer focused, illustrating how users engage most with code they can trust presented by people they can relate to.

What we've learned from six months of Bay Area meetups is that developer relations isn't about convincing developers to use a product. It's a feedback loop between the people building with our APIs and the people building the APIs themselves. There are many avenues by which a company can reach developers, including documentation, blog posts, and videos, but none of those offer the same opportunities to actually listen to developers the way that being in person with them does.

The goal of our presence at these meetups and events is not to sell, but to engage, help, and build genuine relationships so that Vonage becomes the first solution that comes to mind. Most developers are aware of the Vonage name, but the most effective explanation of how we can help them is in a live product demo that conveys technical depth as well as what Vonage can do for them.

In-person attendance and talks generate more community ROI than more passive methods, with higher visibility, deeper trust, and more follow-up and partnership opportunities. Investment in community builds high-value recurring relationships that compound over time.

Whether you prefer video walkthroughs, step-by-step tutorials, or learning by doing, the Vonage developer ecosystem has a path for you. Check out the Learning Center, browse the developer blog, or follow us on LinkedIn to catch us at an event near you. Either way, you’ll find something that meets your needs.

Happy learning!