Adobe Developers Live 2026 Recap: CEP to UXP Migration, Express Connectors, and Our Next Steps

Around 670 people from 57 countries registered for Adobe Developers Live, and more than 360 joined live on September 29 and 30 to learn, build, and network. Find out what we covered, where you can catch up, and what we’ll share in more detail over the coming weeks and months.

What you can do now

Watch the recordings. The recordings from both days (excluding the roundtables and breakout sessions) will be available on the event page once you log back in. This only works for those who registered for the event. If you didn’t register, no worries: We’ll add edited videos to our Adobe Developers YouTube channel, to this blog, and also post them to our LinkedIn group for Creative Cloud developers through the end of 2026.

Join Office Hours. We’re back with Office Hours for Adobe Express today, October 14, and for Creative Cloud tomorrow, October 15. We’ll talk about Developers Live and answer the questions that came up during the event. Find the links and times on our community hub.

Follow the blog. We’ll soon publish in-depth posts featuring content from Developers Live, including individual session recordings. More on that below. If you use RSS, you can subscribe to the blog’s feed.

Listen to the event song and get the t-shirt. Details are in the section "A studio in Dresden and a custom soundtrack" below.


Watch the aftermovie to experience the backstage vibe of Adobe Developers Live 2026 in Dresden with our team, as well as our friends from CROMATICS and Baldower:

https://youtube.com/shorts/2dPPS9XgV3c

What we covered

The program ran for two days, with one main stage, four breakout sessions, and a roundtable discussion at the end of each day. It focused on five themes.

What the community brought

A large part of the program came from the community, and three things stood out.

  1. New developer tools from the community: Community developers presented tools that help with the move from CEP to UXP, including updates to Bolt UXP, a UXP debugger for VS Code, TypeScript definitions for InDesign, and UI components. We will introduce each tool and the developers behind it here on the blog.
  2. Two discussions worth revisiting: The panel "How to start your CEP to UXP migration" and the debate "To AI or Not to AI: Using AI to code", where "AI-Pilled" and "Human-Pilled" Developer Champions argued their sides. Both produced plenty of insight and an active chat.
  3. Open conversations in the breakouts and the roundtables: Developers and Adobe staff talked openly in the four breakouts (UXP; Premiere, After Effects, and Media Encoder; Photoshop; and Media Encoder Meets UXP) and in the roundtables. Topics ranged from monetization and payments to the Unified Hub and Media Encoder UXP samples. We do record these discussions, but we don’t share the recordings publicly, so people can speak freely. We may share short snippets in the future and hope you can join us live next time.

One first-time attendee summed up what that openness meant:

“As someone new to the Adobe developer community, my first Developers Live online was welcoming, enlightening, and full of learning... The personal feedback I received and the people who reached out afterward made me feel at home and reassured me that I'm in the right place on my developer journey." – Amybeh Menendez, Developer Champion

What you told us

Your answers to the live polls during the sessions showed us what developers need most, and that’s valuable input for the Adobe teams who plan what comes next. The samples are small, and the results aren’t roadmap commitments, but we take them seriously.

Here are the main takeaways:

"I love this event, because it brings developers and Adobe together in a unique atmosphere of energy, where people open up, make jokes and share their everyday challenges. For me, it’s a reminder of who’s on the other side of the tools, docs, and products we build, and why the work we do matters.” – Ruben Rincon, Developer Experience Lead at Adobe

A studio in Dresden and a custom soundtrack

This year, my co-host Erin Finnegan and I hosted from a studio setup in Dresden, together with the team from CROMATICS and the musician Baldower, while Taylor Krusen co-hosted from Seattle. That setup shaped the atmosphere of the event.

Baldower did more than write the event song. In every break he delivered audio sketchnotes: short quotes from speakers in earlier sessions, cut into his music. The audio sketchnotes had an effect we hadn’t planned for: speakers heard their own words come back as a beat, and the chat joined in.

“Thank you Baldower for making my presentation sound way cooler than I delivered it 😎😂” – Poonam Tathavadkar, Senior Product Manager, UXP

Take the song and the t-shirt home

We also wanted to give something back to the community:

“I want to work with it in the background! It’s like audio Red Bull.” – Mark Itskowitch, Developers Live attendee

Join the community

Developers Live is where Adobe and the developer community meet, and the conversation continues all year:

You can find all this information and more on our Adobe Developer Community Hub.

Code. Connect. Build what's next.