Welcome! 👋
Happy DevRel Weekly day, folks! This week was an interesting mixture of (lots of) energizing meetings juxtaposed with a struggle to focus when I had the downtime to actually implement the interesting ideas that came out of the meetings. Anyone else experiencing this motivation to get work done and yet running into mental roadblocks when it comes time to be creative and innovative? If so, you're not alone! Hopefully you finally found your groove as I did late in the week. If you have any tips or tricks to share, be sure to let me know. I'd love to share them with the rest of the group.
This week brought us a slew of thoughts about online events, tips about proving the business value of the work we do, and more. It also (perhaps surprisingly?), brought a lot of new jobs, so if you're looking, be sure to check them out below.
There are also a few interesting events coming up in the near future, including FlyessConf on May 27 and Virtual Community Summit on June 3-4. I hope to see you at both!
Until then...
Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon
Tidbits 🕔
Pay Attention to the Masters
twitter.comWant to learn how to speak well in front of crowds? Watch comedians. Listen to the range of their voice. Watch how they use silence to build tension or punctuate a joke. Pay attention to how they move on the stage and how they use the mic as a prop.
They’re masters.
Learn to Write Excellent Love Letters
twitter.com"Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self." - Damian Conway
How to Reduce Churn 101
twitter.comIf you want to reduce churn, build a vertical social network
If you're at a great party with all your best friends, you don't want to leave
Stronger the community, lower the churn
We're All in This Together
twitter.comIt takes a village to raise a child; it takes a community to build a business.
DevRel Advice Column
twitter.comWhat are some great dev-rel KPIs or “how do we capture that we are doing a great job in a structured and systematic manner”?
Tangibles 🤓
Conferences During COVID: What's Different, What's New, and What Can We Learn?
This week saw a flurry of posts around online events, from retrospectives of events to livestreaming tips and how we shouldn't be comparing in-person events to virtual. Here are a few that caught my eye in particular:
- To Virtual Conference or To Not... That is the question by Jess West
- Love Letter To Conferences (And What Makes Some Truly Amazing) by Gene Kim
- Stream Your Events Live Using the Free Version of Zoom and Twitch by Tessa Mero
- Transitioning from Live Events to Digital with Dawn Parzych
- Running AV at the Women of React Conference by Kevin Lewis
🖥 So different MC-ing an online conference, without seeing the audience.
🔮A few tips that helped me:
- act like everyone is enjoying it
- humor is your best friend
- keep it short and sweet
- people pop in and out a lot more, so do those housekeeping announcements more often
"Building a community goes well beyond hosting events. You can think of your event (whether physical or virtual) as the iceberg above the water that is the physical representation of a community event but building a community is so much more about what you do before and after." -Mark Suster
dev.to"It takes a village..." is an African proverb which means an entire #community of people. Virtual online events etc., has its advantages. But the interactions of what we can accomplish in person at events can't ever be equaled by having it virtualized.
Content Strategy for DevRel Teams: A Primer
Struggling to define a content strategy for your team when you're used to creating conference talks at this time of year? Stephan Morillo breaks down the basics in this great article.
p.s. If you haven't already picked it up, I highly recommend her book The Developer's Guide to Content Creation - it's a fantastic resource!
stephaniemorillo.co
Working For A Community vs. Working With A Community
Are you working for your community or with your community? This can be the difference between a successful company and one that struggles to truly connect with and benefit from a developer community. This short post from Rich Millington explains the difference between the two.
feverbee.com
DevRel metrics – Counting things is terrible. Do it!
If you've been a subscriber for more than a few weeks, you've probably heard me say it's not enough to track things, we have to know why we're tracking what we're tracking -- what's the story behind it? What does it show us? What does it reveal about our team as well as our community? Jason St-Cyr digs into this topic in a recent blogpost where he explains that counting work output is a terrible idea... and why perhaps we should do it anyway.
jasonstcyr.com
Tangents 🐰
Tracking a Developer’s Journey From Documentation Visit and Sign Up to First API Call
"Time to Value" has always been one of my favorite metrics for developer experience, and this article from Derric Gilling explains what the path to this first API call (or pull request, integration, or whatever the thing is that your technical audience is attempting to do) looks like. Don't bypass this article -- it's valuable knowledge for any DevRel professional to have!
moesif.com
Storytime 📚
DevRel Podcasts
- How To Plan, Organise and Execute A World Class Virtual Event in a COVID World with David Spinks - SaaStr
- How do I know what I am good to speak about with Veronica Hanus - DevRel.Events (video)
- The Culture of Content Strategy with Kristina Halvorson - The Future of Content
Events 📆
Developer Relations Events
Kate here; I feel like many people are experiencing virtual gathering burnout right now (myself included). So, I've been thinking a lot about how to get creative with virtual events, and I know a lot of event coordinators are too. Check out the events in the DevRel Weekly Events Collection and show your support for event coordinators everywhere while developing yourself professionally! We're all in this together!
raindrop.io
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!
myworkdayjobs.com
Jobs 👩💻
Developer Relations Jobs
Never forget how incredibly capable you are!
If you or someone you know is looking for a job, please feel free to take a look at the DevRel Weekly Job Collection for some inspiration, and don't ever forget how far you've come. Whether you're helping someone find a job, or on the search yourself, we know that you can do this!
raindrop.io