DevRel Weekly - Issue 133 - Disaster Recovery Plans, Recruiting (and Being) the First DevRel Hire, and Three Primary Functions of DevRel

Welcome! 👋

👋 Hi, DevRel fam! Ready to dive into the great content that was released this week? From how to prepare for community disasters to recruiting your first DevRel professional and the three functions of Developer Relations, there's a lot of great stuff waiting for you!

Before you start scrolling, special thanks to our new sponsor, Okta. If you're passionate about developer enablement and looking for the next step in your career, this role might be for you!

Have a great week, everyone.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Lower the Barriers

"The more layers there are between people who use a product and people who create the product, the worse things get."

#AskYourDeveloper making a very good case for the power of #DevRel in lowering the barriers to feedback between devs and the tools they rely on.

-Ben Greenberg

5 Ways Your Customer Support Improves with an Online Community

✓ Knowledge sharing - allows fellow customers to offer solutions

✓ Decrease in the number of support tickets - Customers learn from each other’s past experience through discussions and resource-sharing

✓ User-generated resource data

✓ Brand's space for negative feedback - a more controlled environment with the potential to not only solve problems but strengthen relationships

✓ Product Improvement - Learn about your product & your users by watching their discussions. Get a feature that’s constantly being requested

-Glynk

How to Handle Discussions of Competitors

Brian Oblinger challenges us to think about how to handle discussions about competitors and product comparisons when trying to establish a community of practice. Read the thread.

Tangibles 🤓

What May Be Missing in Your Community Governance

If you run a community and have an admin team, a code of conduct, community onboarding, and a contributor program, you're off to a great start! But do you have a disaster recovery plan? Marjorie Anderson walks you through how to set yourself up for success even on the worst of days in this recent article.

A Tactical Guide to Kickstarting Your Community

Looking for tips on how to kickstart a brand new community? Patrick Woods has you covered with this blogpost about how he and the rest of the team at Orbit kicked things off and encouraged community engagement in their first year.

The DevRel Path to Success: Awareness, Enablement, Engagement

Whether you’re trying to figure out what type of Developer Relations professional to hire or trying to decide which of your team members is responsible for which tasks, having a clear framework with which to divide the responsibilities and focus our work is important. In this blogpost I talk about the three primary functions of DevRel: Awareness, Enablement, and Engagement and which DevRel teams these functions most typically fall into.

Recruiting your first Developer Advocate: The first email

Whether you're relatively new to DevRel or looking to make your first hire, this post from Taylor Barnett will come in handy. She gives tips on what to watch out for as well as how companies can (and should) do it better.

Looking for more tips on what to do right? Jamie Langskov writes about how to hire community professionals (hint: many of these tips apply to all DevRel functions!).

Community Metrics

Metrics are a popular topic anytime DevRel professionals get together, and online gatherings are no different. John Coghlan recently presented at FlylessWeekly about measuring the impact of community. He took the time to write up his thoughts afterward, citing a number of sources that he pulled from in order to create this talk. You better believe I'll be digging into this one in the weeks to come! Keep your eyes peeled for a video as well -- I'll be sure to include it in here should one surface.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

The Ultimate Quick-Start Guide to Meaningful Engagement with Carrie Melissa Jones (video)
DevRel and professional craziness with Joe Karlsson - Refactor
Community Engagement, Training & Community and How they Link - Peers over Beers
How Nextdoor Scaled Community to 268,000 Neighborhoods with Sarah Leary - Masters of Community

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Kate here: I just have to say, I think virtual events are getting better all the time. If you haven't seen the events that have been planned and you haven't put them on your calendar, check out the DevRel Weekly Events Collection to see what's happening!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Senior/Manager, Developer Content

We are looking for a strong, seasoned leader, developer and writer with an eye for developer experience to lead as well as be an individual contributor to the Developer Content team, as part of the effort to make Okta an iconic developer brand by educating, inspiring, and informing developers at scale.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Looking for a new job or just getting started out in Developer Relations? Take a peek at the DevRel Weekly Jobs Collection, and see if there's anything there for you!