DevRel Weekly - Issue 119 - Community Surveys (internal as well as external), collecting feedback, and more!

Welcome! 👋

hey folks 👋

As the year winds up, I'm finding myself stuck in that confusing confluence of "the days are long, but also... how is it November?!" As I'm looking ahead toward the end of the year and the beginning of 2021, my mind is solidly in planning mode, which makes a handful of this week's resources particularly helpful! There are a few that I've already forwarded on to various teammates with notes to bookmark items for consideration in the coming year 😊

As you look ahead to 2021 and think through budgets, strategies, planning docs, and more, don't forget to stop and take a deep breath every now and again. Making sure that you're seeing both the current plans as well as the broader picture is an important part of planning for a successful community.

Speaking of successful communities... CMX's 2021 Community Industry Report Survey is open! Be sure to take a few minutes this week to take part in it. The information that they're gathering around your strategies, metrics, and growth over the past year will go a long way toward creating more resources and content for Developer Relations and Community Professionals for years to come.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Start with the Basics

5 tips to grow an active and engaged online community:
* Give the best learning opportunities for the community
* Provide resources your community might need
* Invite the community to contribute
* Be proactive in existing communities
* Manage community efforts

-Glynk

Layers of Community

I agree with Mac Reddin when he says that defining "community" can be challenging. I'm also a big fan of the way he's broken it down from a business perspective in this tweet! This is similar to the broad scope definition I've used for years, but has concrete examples behind it, which makes the rationale even stronger when speaking to stakeholders.

Building Communities Right = Job Security

If you know how to build a community, you'll never be out of a job

-Greg Isenberg

David Spinks followed up with this statement:

There are few things you can do that will help your career than build a community.

It puts you in a position of leadership, radically expands your network and reputation, and displays your ability to organize and communicate with people.

Community builders are very hirable.

Community is Not a Catch-all

reads a rather long job #CMGR description

Me: Whew, that's basically running the company with that many "responsibilities." I wonder if I could get them to change the title to CEO instead. 🤣

Community is not a catch all, y'all.

-Shannon Emery

How to Increase (Internal) Engagement

If you want your employees to engage in your community, you must invest. Take the time to understand their motivations, build enablement programs, and empower them to become a vital piece of the success story.

-Brian Oblinger

Tangibles 🤓

Hosting a Participant-First Conference in the Age of Corona - How To Do It

Looking for an in-depth document that walks you through how one event successfully navigated online tooling to create a participant-first conference online? Matty Stratton has your back! In this recent blogpost he detailed how he and the rest of the DevOpsDays Chicago team organized their annual event so successfully that one of the attendees said "This isn't 'instead of real life' this is 'how to do it right.'"

Processes for collecting feedback post-release

Looking for a way to collect feedback on your docs? Tom Johnson has a new post about how to optimize for (as well as process) feedback from your users.

Why care about the developer experience?

I know I've been sharing a lot of Developer Experience resources lately (anyone spotting a trend? 😉). I almost passed on sharing this one but the longer I read the article, the more I knew I couldn't. Sean Falconer walks through the business implications for setting up a great onboarding experience for your developer audience as well as the key focus areas you need to cover in order to create this experience.

Events 📆

DevRel Events

In the U.S. some of us are starting to find the things we're thankful for in preparation for Thanksgiving next week. Personally, I'm feeling thankful for all the great events I've been able to go to this year despite the world shifting in March. Take a look at our collection of upcoming online conferences, meetups, and webinars to see if there's one you'd like to attend.

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!

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

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.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

We have so many jobs in our curated collection. We have Entry-level jobs, Mid-level jobs, Manager-level jobs, and even jobs that are DevRel adjacent. We've even taken the time to split out the Technical Community Manager roles if that's what you're looking for. If you're looking for a new job, we wish you the best of luck that you find something you love. 🤗