DevRel Weekly - Issue 118 - Creating Regular Feedback Loops, Pre-Recording Conference Talks, and More

Welcome! 👋

hi DevRel fam!

I hope you've all had a good week. It's been a mixture of exciting and chaotic for me, with enough balls in the air that it's hard to keep track of everything that's going on (hence the reason why this issue is late 🙃). Thanks for your patience as always.

There's a lot of great content below, including tips and tricks about creating regular feedback loops, pre-recording conference talks, and more.

For all my new subscribers (hi! 👋 ) and for those who didn't take the DevRel Salary Survey when it first launched, please take 5 minutes this week to contribute your information. We'll be collecting data through the end of 2020 and releasing our initial findings in early 2021. We're excited to help push the industry forward in this way!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Share Your Wins

Invite members to share their ‘wins’.

Make it a regular weekly or monthly discussion thread.

These wins can be as minor as finally unplugging the kitchen sink or winning a major competitive contract.

The purpose is to get members into the habit of sharing what they’re proud about and seeing that reciprocated by other members.

Very small things can have a big impact on creating a sense of belonging and changing the tone of discussion.

-Rich Millington

Chase Impact, Not Numbers

I love the growth of developer relations as an industry.

However I am concerned about the trend of chasing every possible developer vs developers that will have the most impact.

Part of the problem I believe is that many newer devrel programs are measured on KPIs of how many developers there are.

So chasing growth of that number is their sign of success.

A large developer pool has no guarantee that those developers are engaged, and passionate about your work.

-Gene Chorba

Start with the Basics

This might sound really basic but do you seriously have a Vision & Mission for your community? And are your members aware about it?

-Paras Pundir

DevRel Advice Column

It's been a while since we've had a good DevRel Advice Column! Help your peers out by answering some of these questions that were posed over the last few weeks:

Are there any good examples of #devrel in government you've seen? A new rule from @CMSGov requires State Medicaid programs to build APIs and I think everyone in gov needs a better understanding of developer experiences.

-Kelly Taylor

Questions for the folks in my network involved with DevRel or related positions:

What was your path to DevRel? How did you transition into that role?

-Kyle Shook

This is a fascinating, thought-provoking question from Matt Hamilton.

...as a developer advocate, my job is to help developers to learn about, access, and utilise technology. To build community. To listen to developers and their experiences and feed that back to the product teams.

But what contributes to happiness? What things can developer advocates, or developer relations people do specifically to help improve developer's happiness?

What are your thoughts?

Tangibles 🤓

Important Lessons Learned From My First Experience of Pre-recorded Talk

It seems like pre-recorded talks are going to stick around for a while longer. For those who are looking for tips and tricks on how to navigate this brave new speaking world, Wahib Ul Haq has documented his experience, including tips and tricks for what he will do differently next time.

7 Rules For Engaging and Growing a Developer Community

While I disagree with the opening statement of this blogpost, there are some solid tips on how to find, create, and join developer communities here that deserve some air time. From finding and participating in already-active communities to creating intentional feedback loops and the importance of engaging for the long run instead of just a momentary walk-through to share marketing information, these will serve as good reminders for those of us who are community veterans and good foundational tips for those of you who are just getting started.

Capping The Number of Members

What if instead of trying to build the biggest community possible, you instead limited how many people could be members at one time? Rich Millington poses this question as a way to create a far more engaging community. Sometimes it really is about quality over quantity. The key is to figure out when this "exclusive but engaged" mindset is the right approach.

Pillars of a solid Developer Feedback Program

Actively collecting feedback is an essential part of a successful DevRel team. But how do you establish this routine in a way that is natural and authentic? Tessa Kriesel gets the conversation started with some important tips and tricks in a recent blogpost

Tangents 🐰

How Developer Marketing Parallels Consumer Marketing

Struggling to explain the importance of Developer Marketing to your company? This article from Tomasz Tunguz is a good place to start. In it, he points to similarities between consumer marketing and developer marketing, including community gathering places and scalability.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

Budgets Rule Everything with Bear Douglas - Community Pulse
Authenticity and Connection with Travis King - Engagement that Scales
Measuring the Business Impact of Community with Rich Millington - The Connectors
DevRel Content Creation with Stephanie Wong - Semaphore Uncut
People Problems with Austin Parker - o11ycast
The Tension Between People and Technology with Perry Hewitt - Engagement that Scales

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Okay, I admit, some events aren't a quirky as the Internet Cat Video Festival but check out the DevRel Weekly Events Collection. You may find something that piques your interest anyhow.

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.

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!

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!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

According to The Muse, "[LinkedIn is] (by far) the best resource we have available today for career and job search networking, for finding people working at companies of interest, and for positioning yourself to be found by a recruiter who has a relevant job opening." What do you think?

Check out the DevRel Weekly Jobs Collection for jobs that might be relevant to you!