DevRel Weekly - Issue 102 - Prioritize the People - Your Coworkers as well as Your Community

Welcome! 👋

Eloquent words are hard to come by tonight, so I'm going to keep this short and sweet: While the amount of content might be slimmer than usual, it's still just as good! 🔥 Thanks for continuing to create awesome resources that continue to drive our industry forward -- this newsletter wouldn't exist without you!

Special thanks to our new sponsor Seagate, who has a Senior Staff Dev Advocate position open. Interested in helping a corporation develop an open source strategy? Here's your chance! Apply today.

I hope you're all doing well and staying safe and healthy. Lots of love from San Francisco.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

It's About the People, Not the Platform

If you’re thinking about how to start a virtual community right now, remember the community is the people, not the platform.

If you don’t have an engaged audience yet, go to where your target members are already spending time (Slack, Facebook, Discord, etc). You can always move later.

-David Spinks

Documentation & Communication Skills are Queen

@EriPDev recently tweeted this:

Documentation and communication skills are incredibly important in tech roles. To me, it takes a certain level of skill to take something technical and break it down for non technical people.

I wasn't the only one it struck a chord with! @theavalkyrie quoted it and confirmed my thoughts:

This is one of many reasons why technical writing and developer relations exist. Every engineer needs to be able to communicate, but devrel/tw specialize in that skill.

Creating Value is an Ongoing Need

You want to reap rewards from the community, you need to keep creating value. It can't be just a one-time thing.

-Paras Pundir

DevRel Advice Column

Remote workers and community management folks - any advice on good ways to train and mentor people? Love to hear what has worked well for you and why

-Serena Snoad

Tangibles 🤓

COVID-19 Resources

It's been a while since I've posted an update about the DevRel-related COVID resources I've been collecting, including remote working tips, event organization, and DevRel-specific posts about the future of DevRel and Community Management.

Here are a few highlights from the last few weeks:

How to Prep for Speaking at a Virtual Conference by Ivan Burazin
Dev rel in the time of Coronavirus - DevRel.net interview with Anthony Kiplimo
Developer relations in a coronavirus world: The same, but different by Heidi Waterhouse

Click through to view the full collection.

The Developer Relations Explainer

As a Harry Potter fan, I was a little nervous when I realized Kim Maida was comparing some of the various Developer Relations roles to Hogwarts houses, but her article won me over in the end! I'll admit, the analogy was a bit of a stretch in some places, but I'm no stranger to out-there analogies. 😜🥑

The three questions that she digs into at the end of the blogpost are a solid foundation on which to build a strategy:

How can we help?
What challenges can we resolve?
What can we build?

and this quote sealed the deal:

A great DevRel team member is a champion for the developer, the organization, the community, and the user experience.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

Online Community Management: How DevRel is Going Virtual with Marjorie Anderson and Wesley Faulkner - Community Pulse
Building Community During a Pandemic at Pandora and SiriusXM with Erick Linares - Community Signal
The (Not So) Secret Powers of Community with Jennifer Erzen - Conversations with Community Managers
Developer Relations Interviews with Daniel Phiri - Candidate Planet (video)
Developer Relations with Josh Dzielak and Jarod Reyes - WAPI Radio
Developer relations in the post-COVID Era with Patrick McFadin - Under the Hood of Developer Marketing

One from the Archives 📰

10 Golden Social Media Rules for Developer Relations Manager

Over the last few weeks, I've seen more people turn to social media as their primary way of connecting with their community. Subsequently, more people are wondering how to build their personal brands. I stumbled on this conference talk this week and while the slides were published in 2016, these rules haven't changed. Thanks to Markus Eisele for creating such an evergreen resource!

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

There's never a bad time to invest in your professional development. Take a look at the events in the DevRel Weekly Events Collection for some ideas. There might be an event there that could help you grow in your career. 😊

Jobs 👩‍💻

Senior Staff Developer Advocate

Serve as the public face of Seagate's open source initiatives. Help us develop, implement and maintain our corporate open-source strategy. Share our vision and open source initiatives via blog posts, hackathons, meet-ups, and code integrations with popular third-party software sites such as pytorch, Map-Reduce, Kubernetes, and Spark etc. Apply today!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Are you or someone you know looking for the perfect Developer Relations Job? Take a look at the DevRel Weekly Job Collection and see if something piques your interest. And don't forget to check out the featured job from our latest sponsor, Seagate. We here at DevRel Weekly wish everyone who's searching the all the very best in their job hunt!