DevRel Weekly - Issue 110 - Virtual Conferences, Passing Feedback to Product, and Getting Started in DevRel

Welcome! 👋

hi DevRel fam! It's nice to be back. 🥰 Thanks for your compassion and support over the past few weeks. Our hearts and minds are on the mend after two weeks off of work and a chance to escape into nature for a short camping trip. I'm happy to be back at work today and returning to some of my normal routines, though my heart goes out to so many in the States who are dealing with horrible air quality among so many other things that 2020 has brought our way. If there's anything I can do to help, please don't hesitate to reach out.

I've heard from a lot of people recently who have said that they're feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work on their plate and unsure of how to prove their value to their colleagues. As Amara Graham said recently, "...people only see the tip of the iceberg that is my role in developer relations and even improving the developer experience. I’m negotiating, defending, arguing, positioning for devs every day." Keep your head up and give yourself some grace, DevRel friends!

And when the going does get rough, remember why we do this to begin with. As Hem says, "There's always a crowd of dedicated developers who are looking forward to building great stuff. In the process, we get to learn a lot from them that helps us build a strong platform/product together ❤️ "

Before we dive into the main content today, I came across a few humorous tweets over the last few weeks and thought you all might need a laugh as well. Without further ado...

A WFH productivity hack from Chris Gallello
The mistake made by interior designers in San Francisco from Jaana Dogan
What a "full stack" Developer Advocate looks like at AWS from Forrest Brazeal

Until next week,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. For all my Australian DevRel professionals, the 2020 Australian Community Managers survey is now open! Be sure to take a moment to share your opinions and experiences today.

Tidbits 🕔

Start with the Customer

If you don’t take the time to understand who your customers are and what they want, everything else you do will be a waste of time.

-Brian Oblinger

The Ability to Communicate Feedback is Key

If your Developer Advocate doesn’t have a direct line to Product Managers and the ability to suggest changes based on developer/customer feedback, you’re doing it f**king wrong.

-Naveen Pantera

Educate, Advertise, then Wait (and Continue to Advertise)

The community's understanding of norms and expectations stick around for a long time. If you want to change an entrenched understanding of your community, you need to make big changes, advertise it frequently...and then wait. Norms can't change overnight.

-Evan Hamilton

Tangibles 🤓

7 Ways to Build Engagement in a New Community

There have been a lot of posts over the last few months about creating online communities as people attempt to generate the same or similar engagement that we're accustomed to finding at in-person events. Now that we're 6 (7?) months into this pandemic, it's more clear than ever before that there isn't a way to replicate those in-person conversations, but there are a few consistent tips that have filtered down.

Noele Flowers has gathered a few of those tips along with a lot of her personal experience in a recent blogpost which distills practical wisdom in a way that many of the other blogposts haven't. You should definitely check it out!

False Promises

Mistakes happen and roadmaps change, but the best way to get ahead of these issues and retain your community's trust is to communicate early and often... and rarely (if ever) make promises. Rich Millington explains why in this blogpost.

Developer Relations + Product

While I don't know if I'm completely on board with the job title of "DevRel Product Engineer," this recent article from Yashovardhan Agrawal brings up a lot of fantastic ways to partner with the Product Management team at your company. From feedback loops to helping drive the product roadmap with the community's needs in mind, Yashovardhan is spot-on with his advice on how to engage with your product teams to better serve the developer community.

Getting Started in Developer Relations

There has been a steady flow of "How do I get involved in Developer Relations?" questions lately and while I hope to have a Best Of: Career issue out in the near future, we're still at least a few weeks away from that being a reality. 😅

In the meantime, I've seen a number of recent interviews and blogposts from folks talking about how they got started in DevRel and giving tips for others who are considering a career move, so I thought I'd highlight a few of my favorites.

Tangents 🐰

Virtual Conferences 2020 ~ a Speaker’s Review

Whether you're putting the finishing touches on your upcoming online conference or prepping to speak, you'll want to read this post from Caito Scherr. She covers accessibility and tooling, as well as how to handle A/V issues and speaking "into the void" rather than getting instant feedback from attendee's faces, as well as some of the best events she's attended and spoken at in the last few months.

Storytime 📚

IBM Dev Advocate Interviews

Over the last year I've had the privilege to work with the DevRel team at IBM through their DevRel Weekly sponsorship. This week brings their sponsorship to close with this fantastic interview with Johanna Koester and Dave Nugent. Among other things, IBM's Director of Worldwide Developer Advocacy, Johanna discusses how to lead a developer advocate team to its maximum potential with empathy and compassion.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

Y'all have been BUSY with the podcast episodes and video segments lately! 🙌 There's so much great content to consume that I had to create a Toby collection just to house them all. Know of other interesting podcasts or video series that I should be including on a regular basis? Shoot me a note!

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

What happened to the "conference season"? Oh, right, 2020 happened to the conference season. Even though everything might seem a bit off, there are still some great virtual events to attend, just take a look at our DevRel Weekly Events collection!

If you've missed out on some of the online events that have happened lately, I'm starting to collect videos and blogposts recapping the talks that happened at those events. Be sure to pass them my way if you know of any that have been posted!

Speaking of which, DevRelCon Earth has posted more of their talks lately. Check out this Toby collection to see the transcripts and videos from this online conference. There were also some great tweets coming out of Swarm Conference over the past few weeks. Be sure to check out the full conversation on Twitter.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Engineer

The Developer Relations Engineer is responsible for ensuring App partners, including SaaS companies and independent developers, build and publish innovative solutions using the ActiveCampaign platform. This individual will be the first DevRel Engineer in the organization. They will have an opportunity to build/mold what DevRel means at AC.

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.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Looking for a job? Stop by the DevRel Weekly job collection and see if anything piques your interest!