DevRel Weekly - Issue 116 - Bite-Sized Tips and Tricks from the DevRel Community

Welcome! 👋

Hey DevRel Weekly fam! I hope everyone had a good weekend 😊 For our European contingent, happy timezone changes! I hope the adjustment is an easy one and you're enjoying the rare additional hour of overlap with your North American coworkers.

This week's issue is heavy on the tips and tricks -- there were a number of tweets and discussions that resonated with me this week and I hope they're equally as impactful for you!

I'll keep this short and sweet as I'm signing off for a week of strategy and vision planning. I'm excited to see where it will take me.

Looking forward to connecting with you all online!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

P.S. For all of my Australian followers, Dr. Jennifer Beckett is surveying online moderators about how this moderation has impacted their wellbeing. If you're able, please take part!

Tidbits 🕔

When to Walk Away

One of the trickiest "soft" skills in community is knowing which community complaints to respond to, which to let the community respond to, and which are likely to get zero traction and should be ignored.

-Evan Hamilton

New Times Call for New Experiments

Virtual events are changing our notions of what content people really want.

Practical, in-depth edu. content is in.

Waffly, abstract keynotes are out.

Virtual events shouldn't be bundles of webinars. They need to offer something new.

I love the experimentation going on!

-Jono Bacon

Content is Queen

No one ever showed up to a community and said, “I wish there was less valuable content here!”

Content is Queen 👑 Invest accordingly.

-Brian Oblinger

It Doesn't Happen Overnight

When establishing a community, understand that it is an ongoing process of continued involvement from developers, audience members, stakeholders, & community managers.

-Glynk

Always Ask Why

It's crucial, as a #cmgr, to understand why people do what they do. What motivates them. What drives them. What is their answer to why?

You can line up the best #community experience & fail because you didn't ask 'why?'

Always ask why. Anyone else agree/disagree?

-Shannon Emery

They Just Want Code That Works

You don’t take devs out for golf, and try to close the deal on the 18th hole. Instead, you give them knowledge, tools, trials, and you let them work with your products. Devs don’t want slick marketing collateral; they want code that works.

-Micah Neidhart, quoting Siddhartha Agarwal

Tangibles 🤓

Any Questions?

I don't normally share Twitter discussions in the Tangible section of the newsletter, but this one is meaty enough to break the rules for! Jen Wike Huger recently switched roles and is now officially the Community Manager for Open Source Way, which I can verify is a pretty awesome community! She hosted an impromptu AMA on Twitter to answer questions about community management for a technical audience, and there are so many good takeaways. I'd encourage you to read through the thread and the offshoots as well!

Developer Relations as Developer Success

There are some ideas in this blogpost that I'm 100% on board with, and others that I'm a little more iffy on, but one thing I know for sure is that this statement from Adam Kalsey rings true:

The primary role of your DevRel team is to enable customer outcomes.

Too many teams focus solely on awareness, and while this is important, it's difficult to track without getting caught up in leads and sales numbers. When our focus is enablement, we're able to provide valuable content, build meaningful relationships, prevent customer churn, and truly serve our community.

He closes the blogpost with this statement, which I appreciated:

The companies that are most successful with developers aren’t spending most of their time at events and doing content marketing. They’re spending most of their time making sure their developer customers are successful.

How CMX Planned Our First All-Virtual Summit

If you're looking for interesting and engaging ways to spice up your next online event, check out this post from CMX. In it, they talk about how they created an agenda that was unique but still paid homage to their in-person events, in addition to the extracurricular activities they hosted, the live captioning that accompanied each of their sessions, and their impressive strides toward a more diverse speaker lineup.

You can check out all of the videos from the conference on their site -- I guarantee you'll find something relevant to the projects you're working on!

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

After Pulse: Events in the Pandemic - Community Pulse
API Evangelism with Kin Lane - Developer Love
Empathy and Learning with Jane Bozarth - Engagement That Scales
How Slack Built Their Community Events From Scratch with Elizabeth Kinsey - Masters of Community

Curious about what makes a good podcast? Alexis Anthony dug into what sets particular podcasts apart and discovered that authenticity has a lot to do with it! Read more about her findings and let me know what you think!

Events 📆

Google Open Source Live

Join us for the Go day on Google Open Source Live!

Go experts will share updates on everything from Go basics to Package Discovery and Editor Tooling. Our partner, Khan Academy will also walk through an interesting use case about how the organization is using Go to save time and money. Throughout the event, our speakers will answer your questions via the Live Q&A Forum. We’ll wrap up the event with an After Party on Google Meet for an opportunity to connect with the speakers and other attendees.

Event: Go day on Google Open Source Live

Date & Time: Nov 5 (Thu) 9 am - 11 am Pacific Time

Register: Register here to reserve your spot!

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Kate here: All Zoom'd out? Yea, me too. Check out the DevRel Weekly Events Collection though, maybe you'll find an event that you can get excited about!

If you're looking for a different type of professional development, check out Stephanie Morrillo's new Content Coaching Course -- it looks fantastic!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate

Spectral is developing the next generation of a code security platform for developers.

As a Developer Advocate at Spectral, you will write blog posts, best practices, and tutorials, Be the company champion to the company’s community, and maintain a credible and robust presence in social media channels relevant to developers, Security, DevOps, and DevSecOps professionals.

The ideal candidate will have strong writing ability and experience in creating engaging technical blog posts, excellent verbal communication skills, and a passion for participating and building open source communities.

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! Logo attached.

Senior Developer Advocate

At Cube.js, we are building a technology stack for modern analytics. We are a small and dedicated remote-first team with an HQ in San Francisco, funded by top-tier SV investors, working on making advanced analytics infrastructure accessible to all developers around the world. As a Senior Developer Advocate, your main goal is to promote Cube.js, increase its awareness and adoption, and support the overall Cube.js community at large. If this sounds exciting, we'd love to hear from you!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Juggling Oranges Because [it's] Saturday (JOBS)

Okay, I won't quit my day job. 😉 But if you're looking for a new day job, check out the DevRel Weekly Jobs Collection. We hope you'll find something that will match your skillset.