Without overemphasis, we can say that 2025 was one of the most active years ever for the R&D community at Mews. We optimized our internal processes so we can support as many colleagues as possible while still providing teams with individual care. Not only did we achieve last year’s goals, but we also took a significant step forward.
Our R&D Community members were active in more than 15 cities across Europe. While the highest number of events took place in Prague, our community hub, our presence extended far beyond it. Explore the map below to see where we’ve been.
Community Space in Prague
One of the biggest changes for us was the opening of the new Community Hub on the 3rd floor of the Mews Prague office. The Mews Workplace Team did an excellent job building and continuously improving the space, which can comfortably host events of up to 60 people. We also recently brought our legendary claw machine to life, making it more interactive and fun. The feedback we received from you, our community members, has been incredible.
Community Business Partnering
We made our collaboration with teams more effective by introducing the role of “Community Business Partners,” assigning each partner specific teams and tribes. We strengthened our communication with engineering managers and directors to gain insights from their perspective, discuss team needs, explore ways to increase visibility, and identify how we can better support individuals within their teams.
As part of becoming more data-driven, we established scorecards that we reviewed regularly each month. These scorecards tracked metrics such as the number of returning and first-time speakers and blog contributors, the number of our speakers presenting at events in key locations, participation in online events, LinkedIn post impressions, and more.
The Mews R&D Community in Numbers
Newsletters
Honza Hruby’s (Staff Frontend Engineer) bi-weekly Frontend Mewsletter keeps going strong, and we’ve just celebrated a milestone with issue #42!
But we didn’t stop there. We also launched a brand-new monthly newsletter, The API Dispatch Mewsletter, curated by Jan Vlnas (Senior Software Engineer). It’s all about APIs and packed with insights for anyone working with them.
Hackatons with customers
This year, we launched hackathons with our hotel customers. Cross-functional teams of engineers and product managers visited customer properties, where customers could share hands-on feedback about Mews and collaborate with us to build the features they were missing. Check out this article highlighting our first-of-its-kind collaboration.
Call for Papers
Throughout the year, R&D members submitted 49 Calls for Papers to conferences across Europe (and there may be even more). The most active CfP submitter was Stephan Delbos (Senior Director of Product Knowledge Activation).
Events
We took part in more than 100 events this year – whether by organizing them, hosting speakers, or partnering with others. Most of these were meetups and conferences, but we also joined workshops, podcasts, school lectures, and plenty more.
Although our team works tirelessly all year, event activity is quite seasonal, spring and autumn are always the busiest months. Check out the chart below to see the number of events per month.
Speakers
Mews R&D team members delivered talks on an impressive variety of topics: engineering, product, leadership, community, data, design, security, AI, and so much more. And this year, once again, we’re adding a leaderboard to spotlight our most active speakers and give them a huge kudos for their amazing contributions!
- Josef Starýchfojtů (CPTO) 8 talks
- Miroslav Horáček (Staff Security Engineer) 7 talks
- Michaela Trčková (Software Engineer) 5 talks
- Lenka Křenková (Senior Security Data Analyst) 4 talks
- Jan Vlnas (Senior Software Engineer) 4 talks
- Jan Meissner (Product and Tech Community Lead) 4 talks
- Stephan Delbos (Senior Director of Product Knowledge Activation) 4 talks
We maintain the quality of our talks by offering public speaking workshops, and every presentation goes through a mandatory dry run before it’s delivered.
Conferences
As every year, we supported several conferences and prepared booths for them. This time, we also introduced a vibecoded form styled as a reception desk with keys, where attendees could win and take home our cozy merch. Our booth appeared at:
- 🇨🇿 Career fair MatFyz (Prague)
- 🇪🇸 J on the Beach (Malaga)
- 🇩🇪 Hatch (Berlin)
- 🇨🇿 DevOpsDays (Prague)
- 🇨🇿Frontkon (Brno)
- 🇨🇿 DevFest (Prague)
- 🇨🇿TechMeetup (Ostrava)
Around 40 people from Mews R&D joined us as speakers or booth representatives at these conferences.
Partnerships with communities
As we did last year, we continued supporting multiple communities, and this year, we backed even more of them!
🇨🇿 Czechitas, ReactGirls, Frontendisti, Mechanical Keyboard Meetup, OSSI, Friend of Figma, Junior.guru, TechMeetup Ostrava, Projector Global Community, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (Charles University, Prague)
🇬🇧 The Female Product Lead, The Product Group London
🇪🇸 XantarDev
If you want to know more about why community partnerships are essential to us, check out this article by Jan Meissner.
Do you want to be part of the R&D community?
Check out our open positions!
Blog posts
This year, we published 32 blog posts on Mews Developers | Make it remarkable , with contributions from 27 R&D authors. Most of the posts focused on technical and engineering topics, with some great insights on management as well.
Most articles were published in February, with January and October not far behind.
One of our most active authors this year was José Silva (Chief Architect), with articles on topics Leveraging ADRs to strengthen architecture and teams, Why tracking technical debt matters for growth and The unexpected joy of digital parenthood: a fictional developer’s tale of code ownership.
Check them out, along with our other blog posts!
Mews R&D (Mini) Podcasts
This year, we doubled down on publishing podcasts featuring people from R&D. Not only did we release three long-format R&D podcasts you already know and love, but we also upgraded our podcast studio in the Prague office and launched a brand-new series: R&D Mini Podcasts.
These shorter, fun episodes have been a hit. We published 13 of them this year, covering topics like career and work at Mews, AI and the future, engineering, security and technical insights, leadership and management, and much more. This format is popular with a wide range of people across different seniority levels. We’ve also received great feedback from Mews R&D team members, who enjoy getting to know their colleagues better through these episodes.
Check out our most popular episode with Roger Ribas (Engineering Manager).
Social Media
Our social media manager, Gabriela, keeps our LinkedIn and Instagram full of high-quality, up-to-date, and often funny content from everything we do. One of my personal favorites is a post she made while I was improving our podcast studio. I happened to pick up a light, and she turned it into a post that made me look like a Jedi.
But it’s not just our team running the Mews R&D social media, we also offer mentoring to R&D members who want to build their personal brand on LinkedIn. We help them with posting, motivation, confidence, and creating meaningful content. See below how the same content achieves different reach when posted on a company profile (left) versus a personal profile (right).
What to expect in 2026?
A big shift and an even bigger change for our community came after analyzing our survey data. We found that 53% of R&D members want to be active in the community but haven’t had the chance yet. To help, we introduce the Ambassadors program, which identifies these individuals and helps them find opportunities to contribute.
Here’s the vision for how the end of 2026 will look: thanks to the internal AI tools we use at Mews, we’ve automated many repetitive tasks, like collecting event data, managing Calls for Papers, and gathering presentation feedback. Our communication is amplified by Ambassadors within teams. We’ve also personalized activities based on experience level, for those at earlier stages in technical skills or public speaking, we provide training, local meetups, events, blog posts, and social media opportunities. Senior members, meanwhile, take on roles as podcast guests and presenters at major global conferences, ensuring that our content remains top-notch. And yes, as you can see, our team will be focusing mostly on our internal community, personal growth, and culture.
