DevRel Weekly - Issue 113 - Building your own brand while creating a stronger community.

Welcome! 👋

Hi everyone ❤️ It's been a challenging week in more ways than one and I know many of you feel the same. Carter Gibson's tweet felt very relevant -- we could all use a little more love and grace (for ourselves as well as those around us) right now.

I hope you've found a way to give yourself extra grace this week - whether through giving yourself permission to do something just for you, taking some time off of work, staying away from news briefings, or cuddling up with your animals and/or significant others.

Per usual, there's a lot of great content to scroll through, from building a stronger community to growing your own personal brand. Also, if you have a few extra minutes to help out the industry, be sure to fill out the DevRel salary survey (more info here). If you're based in Australia, it's also the last chance to take the 2020 Australian Community Managers Survey so be sure to get your experience recorded!

Here's hoping for a good week for everyone 🤗

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

A Chance to Practice Patience and Empathy

Project maintainers please be patient with new open source contributors. It has been a hard couple of days, but please don't discourage good people who might need a little bit of help - I found promoting regulars to maintainers helped

-Eddie Jaoude

The End Goal is to Enable Developers

To me developer advocacy is about closing gaps between developers and desired outcomes. The in between can take many forms, from blog posts, to docs updates, or even product changes. Yet the end result should be helping developers do actual things.

I used to associate developer advocacy with being the voice of the community, but I've come to realize it's less about being a voice and more about clearing pathways, or removing friction.

You should definitely be the voice of the community, offering feedback to product managers, open source maintainers, etc.

However, that's only one part of the job.

-Kurt Kemple

Building a Community is an Investment

If you're trying to build a user community around your startup and all you can focus on is the ROI and metrics, you're doing it wrong.

A community is an investment in your brand and in supporting the people in your ecosystem.

The point is to add value, not extract it.

-Jack Altman

Tangibles 🤓

Developer Experience Principle 1: Easy to Understand

Adam Kalsey is back with a new blogpost about developer experience. This week he's digging into the first two of his 6 principles: Easy to Understand and Easy to Use. In these articles, he explains that helping a developer understand your business model is just as important as the need for them to understand your API. From making sure that your product is as self-service as possible to helping developers discover the issues you solve, there are so many valuable tips and tricks in this series. If you're looking for an instruction manual on how to improve your product's Developer Experience, you'll definitely want to keep an eye on these blogposts.

Should you use automation in your community?

While I'm generally not a fan of automating community engagement, there are times when it's effective. In the DevRel Collective that I help facilitate, we send automated welcome messages to everyone when they join, letting them know what channels to join, reminding them of the Code of Conduct, and generally welcoming them to the group.

Venessa Paech walks through a few more reasons why automation can be helpful in this recent blogpost. She gives you a few questions to answer to determine whether a community task should be automated, then walks you through how to find the right balance. Perhaps now (when it feels like we all have a million things on our plates) is the right time to invest in the right places to automate these engagements.

Three Ways Developer Advocates Can Improve Their Online Presence to Increase Engagement

If you're looking to take the next step in your online presence, Stephanie Morillo has you covered. From how you personally can ramp up engagement to how DevRel teams can improve their calls to action, she's got a variety of tips to help you out in this blogpost.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

"It took me years to get there, but right now I have my dream job!" Can you say the same?? with Joe Karlsson - Reach or Miss: Entrepreneurial Business Success
Qualtitative Storytelling with Knut Melvær - Developer Love
Engaging Customers, Engaging the Org, Creating Content are all Good; Without it your Digital Community will DIE - Peers Over Beers

One from the Archives 📰

Your Developer Experience is Made of Content

I'm not sure how I missed this blogpost that Adam DuVander published back in May, but I'm glad I caught it this time around! Adam gives a great overview of how great developer content (even when it's not strictly related to your product) increases discoverability... and then what you need to provide a developer audience with once they do land on your page.

Events 📆

DevRel Events

Online conference season is definitely here - whew! With so many meetups, conferences, and trainings happening in a variety of timezones, there's sure to be something that piques your interest.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Sr. Developer Evangelist

As a Sr. Developer Evangelist at Split, you’ll represent the voice of Split to the developer communities you engage with, work internally to improve our developer experience and new user onboarding, create compelling content, deliver talks, participate in the open-source community, and be a key strategic advisor to our overall platform business. Our ideal candidate will have a great stage presence, a body of written work, an existing following on one or more social media platforms, an interest in both software development and DevOps, and deep engineering experience as a full stack developer. You’ll also be excited to partner with and enable engagement from our internal engineers. We currently have two open Sr. Developer Evangelist positions, Java and .NET

Head of Developer Relations

Chainlink is an open-sourced developer-focused blockchain technology. As such, DevRel is a highly visible and critical function. In the Head of Developer Relations role, you will lead the Devrel team to connect with, inspire, and educate developers about the power of blockchain smart contracts.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

Exploring the possibility of a new job as we head into October? Look no further. See a job that's out of date or know of one that should be added? Hit reply and let me know!