DevRel Weekly - Issue 106 - Industry reports, Twitter discussions, new content, and more!

Welcome! 👋

Hi DevRel fam! It's been a chaotic month for me, and from the conversations I've been having with other community members, I'm not the only one navigating this chaos. Apologies for the lack of updates lately -- I appreciate your patience! Between the close of one quarter, the start of another, and the addition of a new baby to the DevRel Weekly staff (congrats, Kristen!), it's been a struggle to keep up.

Buckle up though -- we're back this week with a fantastic set of resources for you, from new reports to great Twitter discussions and new content from yours truly, there's a lot to take in!

Special thanks to our two sponsors: Logrocket and Seagate. Be sure to check out their open job listings below.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Use Our Voices

The point of a community is not to be individual, autonomous units striving in silence - we need to share ideas and techniques, teach to those looking to learn, and use our voices to raise those without a voice. This is how better communities are built.

-DevRelate

What's the Key Purpose of DevRel?

This Twitter survey from Manrique López led to an interesting discussion about the key purpose of DevRel and where we fit into the broader scope of sales and building the product. My two cents? We're neither sales nor engineering, but we're also both. I see the three main pillars of DevRel as a) Awareness (which can lead to sales) 2) Enablement (which can lead to building tooling around the technology (but not building the actual tech)) and iii) Engagement (engage the community w/each other + your coworkers). I sense a blogpost coming soon... 😬😅

Don't Limit Your Impact

A common mistake that community professionals make is only measuring and reporting community-specific metrics, limiting the conversation of their impact and missing the opportunity to align the value of community with high-level business goals.

-Brian Oblinger

As Abdul Shakur said in a separate discussion,

A community manager is a catalyst for engagement, conversion and then retention. Combine all three and you're fueling growth for any business or organisation.

Easy-to-Adopt Tools Will Win

Software isn't sold—it's adopted, and the easy-to-adopt tools will win.

Developer experience, #devrel, and community eliminate friction and help companies play by, and win with, the new rules of adoption.

-Patrick Woods

The Time to Confront Toxic Members is Now

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the best time to confront or simply ban a toxic, long-time, influential member of your online community is TODAY.

-Patrick O'Keefe

Not sure how to do that? Click through to read the full thread from Patrick, who gives advice on how to go about handling these difficult situations.

Tangibles 🤓

The Camunda Developer Relations Career Path

Establishing a career path for Developer Relations is one more step forward in creating a mature industry. It makes a bold statement that we know our value, we’re here to stay, and here’s our plan on how to move forward in our careers! I recently rolled out a Career Path with my team at Camunda, and in the spirit of driving the DevRel industry forward, I thought I’d share the process of creating it as well as the final result.

Looking to hire additional teammates? Liz Guzy highlights some tips about creating a job description, interviewing, and onboarding in this great resource.

Can't The Community Run Itself?

If you ever find yourself wondering whether an online community can survive on its own, you'll want to read this short article from Rich Millington. All too often we forget just how important our role is in an online community, from moderation to successful onboarding, relationship building, and more.

COVID-19 Resources from DevRel Weekly

As we see a resurgence in COVID-19 cases, relevant resources for DevRel and Community teams are popping up as well. I've continued to update the Toby Collection with additional resources, but here are a few of the top links from the last few weeks:

DevRel Industry Resources

This has been the month for new resources! There have been several survey results released, along with a handful of new books that I'm excited to read and a collection of links about metrics for DevRel professionals. I'd encourage you to set aside some time this coming week to dig into these resources and invest in your own professional development.

How to Build and Scale a Successful Developer Community - ebook from Vanilla Forums
State of Developer Relations 2020 Report - survey results from WIP and Hoopy
The State of Community Management 2020 - survey results from The Community Roundtable (read the high-level overview from Higher Logic)
Building Brand Communities - newly released book from Carrie Melissa Jones
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software - brand-new book from Nadia Eghbal
DevRel KPIs - a collection of metrics and methods for proving ROI from Orbit

Navigating the Balance Beam of Inclusion

Articles about inclusion have been on the rise given all of the recent conversations about racial justice. DevRel professionals are struggling with how to handle issues of hate speech as well as implicit racism in their unique communities. There are a handful of resources I've found lately that may come in handy if you're navigating similar circumstances.

Responding to Hate Speech: A Guide to Community Management by Brandon Johnson
Institutionalizing Inclusion by Mac Stephens

Inclusion also goes beyond issues of racial justice. There are many conversations to be had around audience segmentation and more. As Rachel Happe says, it's important to recognize the tension between inclusion and exclusion:

If you are all things to all people, there is no sense of community. If you are too exclusive, you become passe and out of touch.

It is kind of like the work/life balance discussion. It's both.

Tangents 🐰

DevRel Tools

If you're in the market for new tools, you're in luck! The landscape for DevRel and Community tooling has changed drastically over the past 12 months and there are many more to come. Here are two tools that I've been digging into lately:

Krunch: An analytics platform that gives you insight into your community's questions, interests, and opinions.
Orbit: A community experience platform (think upscale, intuitive CRM) with a web interface that connects to GitHub and Twitter and an API that can connect to... well, anywhere your imagination (and skills 😉 ) chooses!

While I haven't tried this tool from Patrick Collins yet, it's piqued my interest! It does a quick scrape of Devpost to pull whatever submissions have code related to your projects. Whether you're running or participating in online hackathons, or simply observing, it's a great way to gauge the popularity of your products and may result in new code samples that you hadn't previously considered!

This collection from Commsor is a great representation of the breadth of tooling that is now available (45% of them are less than 3 years old!). Have fun exploring the new tools at your disposal.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

There are too many podcasts from the last few weeks to call out all of them, but here are a handful that caught my eye in particular:

A Talk About Racism, Privilege, and DevRel - Community Pulse Live
Cassidy Williams at the core of developer experience - DevJourney Podcast
Nigel Brown | Developer Advocate | Origin Story - IBM Developer Story
Defining “Open Source Community Health” with Dawn Foster, Matt Germonprez, Sean Goggins, Georg Link, and Don Marti - CHAOSScast

I've created a collection of all of the recent podcast episodes if you're looking for more audio goodness.

Events 📆

DevRel Events

I don't know about you, but I'm having a hard time keeping track of all the awesome events that are happening these days -- it feels like there's a new one every week! I'm definitely experiencing some FOMO as I realize just how much I'm missing out on. I hope that you all post summaries of the events you're attending or live-tweet some of the talks! If you do, be sure to shoot me an email with a link so I can include it in the newsletter.

p.s. Interested in hosting a local meetup for your nearby Community and DevRel Professionals? CMX has a program for that! Check out their CMX Host application.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate

Our Developer Advocate will continue to foster LogRocket's relationships within the web development community, keeping tabs on what product teams need to improve customer experiences. The Developer Advocate will help users understand LogRocket’s benefits and value proposition by contributing regularly to the editorial calendar. Topics will have a broad scope, from educational content creation (resources, tutorial), to thought leadership and some product marketing.

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

Jobs. You need 'em? We've got 'em. A list of them at least. If you or someone you know is looking for a new dev rel position, check out the DevRel Weekly Jobs and see if anything fits your needs. We wish you all the best in the job hunt!