DevRel Weekly - Issue 115 - Audience Segmentation, Industry Standards, and Filling Gaps

Welcome! 👋

Happy Monday, everyone! I hope you had a relaxing week and that your week is off to a good start. It still feels like summer here (actual summer, not a San Francisco summer 😂), so we spent a good amount of time outdoors this weekend, which was a refreshing break from technology!

Special thanks to our new sponsor, Ambassador Labs. Check out the open job they have listed below, as well as the jobs from our two other sponsors, Split and Chainlink. There are so many great jobs available right now! Best of luck if you're on the hunt.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Mind the Gap(s)

When hiring for a community manager, fill in your team's gaps.

If you have a lot of engagement, but lack structure, then hire a great operator.

If you have a lot of structure but lack engagement, hire someone that will bring a lot of creativity, passion and energy to the cmty.

-David Spinks

DevEx, DX, or DevX?

This simple question from Ian Jennings turned into quite the discussion on Twitter this week! What do you all think? I'm curious to see if there's an "industry standard" for abbreviating Developer Experience or if there's still a wide spread of usages. As you know, I tend to use DevEx but I'm not opposed to change! Whatever makes the most sense for the industry is the best option in my mind.

Top Challenges for an Online Community

This Twitter poll might be over, but I'm still curious to hear what your top challenges are:

Keeping members engaged

Growing the community

Measuring the success

Lack of resources

-Tribe Community Platform

Tangibles 🤓

Virtual events: 10 best practices and tips for speakers

As many of us have learned over the past few months, giving presentations from home is quite different than delivering them in person. So how do we shift our focus to these online events, giving them the same amount of care and excitement that normally goes into our in-person talks? Carla Rudder has a few solid tips in this blogpost. With quotes and anecdotes from several industry leaders, there's likely something even the best speakers haven't thought of!

Ok but can you really scale community?

Duolingo has one of the largest communities in the world, and while they aren't tech-focused, if you've been around for a while, you know my viewpoint that we can learn from every community, whatever the topic area. Duolingo's Globl Head of Community, Laura Nestler recently shared some of her thoughts about scaling communities, including how to start small and gaining resources in a healthy manner,

Open Source vs Enterprise Developers

If you're new to the concept of open source products, you may not realize just how different the mentality, habits, and tendencies can be between open source developers and enterprise developers. While these generalizations don't always hold true, this post from Tessa Kriesel points out a number of interesting differences to keep in mind.

Programming language bias is another important area to examine. Sidney Maestre walks through some of the issues caused by the "us versus them" mentality that can happen in tech when new software, languages, or products are introduced. When you're considering which programming languages to implement in your next API, be sure to look beyond the Silicon Valley trends and understand what your audience truly wants.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

What is Developer Relations? with @LaylaCodesIt and John "Fitzy" DeLancey (video)
Developer Empathy with Adam DuVander and Christina Voskoglou - Nordic APIs (video)
Events in the Pandemic with Rahmona Henry and Floor Drees - Community Pulse LIVE
Executive Perspectives on How the Way the World Works is Changing - The Community Roundtable

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Still have a bit left in this year's budget for some professional development? Check out the events in the DevRel Weekly Events Collection and see if any of them pique your interest.

p.s. If you're a conference organizer looking for tips and tricks on how to make your next event even better, you might find some good resources in this Facebook group we stumbled upon this week.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate

Ambassador Labs is solving interesting problems for cloud native developers in the Kubernetes space. We are looking to hire our second Developer Advocate (open to mid-level to senior to lead to leadership level) that cares as much about empowering developers as we do, loves the power of open source and communities, embraces the cloud native phenomenon that is taking over the world. We have grown quickly (3x in headcount) and closed series A and series B funding, all in the last year.

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 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Kate here: When I'm looking for a job, I find that it's interesting to see what companies are posting, even if I'm not interested in working for that company in particular. Take a look at the DevRel Weekly Jobs Collection. Who knows, you may find something interesting!