Narly, nerves and new faces: a last look back at Umbraco US Festival 2026
As I'm writing this, a few weeks out from the event itself, the blog posts from our friends who attended have now landed, and between them the community has told the story better than we could. So this is less a recap than a look at what made the festival feel the way it did.
An identity you can feel
Plenty of events have a logo, but few have a personality. The US Festival organisers built one around a narwhal and a tight blue-and-yellow palette, then applied it with real discipline. Narly was born at a US meetup, when Allen Smith wore a costume he happened to have lying around and it somehow became the mascot. Narly made a splash. The Codegarden mascot, the rabbit, was so jealous that it joined the US festival this year.
"We even managed to celebrate Narly's 3rd birthday in his very own clubhouse!"
- Trevor Husseini on Linkedin.
That consistency does something practical. It tells a first-timer they're in the right place and that someone cared enough to think it through. It also gives the community something to share: nobody needs a caption to know which event a blue-and-yellow photo came from.
A moment from the stage
On the day, I gave a keynote with Lotte Pitcher to a roomful of happy people. Many of them were new to the Umbraco community, and Lotte turned 50 that very day. I'll remember standing up there with her, looking out at the faces and thinking that this is what we mean by community. Nobody had to be an expert or know the history, and still the room was warm.
As an old-timer myself, sharing a stage with Lotte, who has seen her fair share of festivals, felt special. We both agreed that despite the nerves associated with public speaking, we were glad to celebrate the big birthday on stage with our people.
On the sessions
If one theme ran through the programme, it was AI, and in particular what teams are actually building with it. Frédéric Harper and Jason Prothero gave a keynote for content editors, showing TinyMCE AI inside the editor alongside practical advice from Jason's own client work. Kyle Brigham spoke on designing Umbraco for AI search, and Alex Vilmur ran a hands-on workshop on building AI-powered workflows into the backoffice. Joe Kepley gave a super interactive and utterly entertaining locknote, with a talk on Umbraco Automate.
There was a lively panel too, hosted by Heather Floyd, where Umbraco's CTO Filip Bech-Larsen, Scott Wintheiser and Nicole Rogers asked what a CMS even is when AI agents read content as well as people. We were also glad to welcome speakers who travelled from further afield, including our friend Paul Marden from the UK.
We love first-time speakers, and this year we had one to celebrate: Ben Szymanski gave his first-ever talk. Ben is a 2026 Umbraco MVP who has worked with Umbraco for ten years and is building a package called FastGooey. His talk, "Photography of the Web: Framing, Capturing, and Composing Server State", used the idea of a camera to show how htmx and Umbraco can work together to build hypermedia-driven interfaces. Thank you, Ben, for taking the leap. We hope it's the first of many.
The power of community
Between the festival and the HQ-organised partner summit, there were 106 of us in the rooms. For many people it was their first in-person Umbraco event.
Karla Santi, Nicole Rogers and Nora Lahl have all written about it, and their posts share a theme. Nora summed it up as "what a close-knit, smart, fun community Umbraco is"
The details people mention are rarely the sessions. They're the party at Blend's closing do, the game room at Diagram, the hot dogs and the magician. Those are what a community actually remembers, and they only happen because people turned up and looked after each other.
The people behind it
None of this came from a big events department. The US festival is built by volunteers: community members who gave their time, their evenings and their sponsor contacts.
Thank you to all of them. You made an event that people want to talk about weeks later.
What we hope for next
The organisers worked hard to make this happen, and our hope for the coming years is to see more people pick up the responsibility for it. Volunteer-led events are wonderful, and they thrive when new people step in with fresh ideas and share the load.
If you came to Chicago and thought "I could help with that", you're exactly who we mean. You don't need to have organised anything before, because the brand, the energy and the community are already there, and Narly is waiting. Find out more at umbracofestival.us.
It still amazes me that people who don't work together, and who don't work for HQ, can create something like this, and it is a privilege to represent that community that I never take lightly: I'm so happy to be one of those whose jobs it is to take care of it. It's the in-person events that remind me just how great that responsibility is, and what we've built together over the years.
Thank you to everyone who came, wrote, shared and cheered.
