DevRel Weekly - Issue 143 - You're Doing Good Work

Welcome! 👋

Whether you're looking for help with putting together a business plan for a new program, struggling to write content, or looking for confirmation that your focus is on the right things, I've got something for you this week.

Hold your heads high, DevRel fam -- you're doing good work!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. Thanks to all of you who replied to the post about event sponsorships last week. As I suspected, there are SO many pieces to consider when thinking through the best way to reach your community members. The most important thing is clear: meet your community members where they are, whether online, in person, or some combination of both. You know your community best!

Tidbits 🕔

Big Company, Little Company

Curious about the differences between managing a community at a small company vs. a big enterprise? Noele Flowers started a great discussion on Twitter. Check it out here.

What are some things that are massively different about managing a community at a small biz/startup vs. at a big enterprise?

Strategies that work well at one, but not the other?

If you're interested in hearing additional perspectives, check out this Community Pulse episode from 2019 about this same topic.

Create Content People Will Love

There are two ways to create content that people will love:

Show the simplicity in a complex topic

Show the complexity in a simple topic

-David Spinks

Building Communities is a Service

Growing a community is not about gaining members. It has never been about numbers. Rather, it is about gaining trust and building relationships. The business of communities is unlike any other. It is not a business at all. It is a service.

-LikeMinds

Focus Areas

DevRel focus areas

Attract developers

Inspire developers to sign-up

Listen to developers and share their feedback & sentiment internally

Educate developers on implementation with their tech stack

Support developers through community, internally & externally

-Tessa Kriesel

Tangibles 🤓

OSS Advisors - A DevRel Program Draft

If you're considering the addition of an open source advisory board (or any type of Customer Advisory Board), you'll want to take a look at this new template from Jan Schenk.

Complete with a value proposition, executive summary, definitions, objectives, key results, milestones, mitigation tactics, and more, you're unlikely to find another resource quite so in-depth!

Getting Buy-in with Confidence

Getting buy-in from stakeholders -- whether it's more budget for headcount or tooling, new programs you want to launch, or additional experiments to run -- can be one of the most daunting parts of working in Developer Relations or community-facing teams. Here are two articles that offer some fantastic tips:

How to Get Executive Buy-in For Your Community by Mary Cass and Lisa Tallman - Lisa explains 6 things that may be holding you back when it comes to presenting your case.

If you’re trying to influence executives, you need to show up with confidence and credibility that makes executive leaders buy in. The first step? Assess your own mindset.

The Buy-in Battle by Tirza Austin - Tirza identifies common challenges as well as action you can take to receive the support you deserve.

Be aware and share resources from Community Roundtable and CMX with your leadership teams. It’s not just you advocating for the community, it’s demonstrating that an entire industry that has proven the value of community to organizations.

10 characteristics of ambiguous content

Wondering why some of those pieces of content have been on the back burner for a while with no resolution in sight? Maybe it falls into the category of "ambiguous content," which is notoriously more difficult to tackle. Tom Johnson digs into some common characteristics of ambiguous content and sneaks in a few tips about how to tackle these pieces in this recent blogpost.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

Content and community at Red Hat: How Matt Broberg helps software architects tell their stories - What We Talk About When We Talk About Tech
Communitree: A network of community building audio conversations
Before Online Community Go-Live and After Go-Live - Peers over Beers
Building an Online Community with Ana Cidre - The Angular Show
Developer Advocate Stories with Jiri Zajic, GoodData
Developer Advocacy, Navigating Tech, & Frontend Dev with Debbie O'Brien - SELECT
Standardizing Work with Sam Ramji - Developer Love
Open source developer advocacy at Facebook: Dmitry Vinnik on supporting and growing Facebook's 700 open source projects - What We Talk About When We Talk About Tech
Why It's Harmful to Label Community and Community Pros as Underdogs with Georgina Donahue
Why Community Leaders Need to Understand Networks with Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas - Cohere
Culture, Oppression & Community with Mia Birdsong - Masters of Community
10 Ways to Build a Sense of Community and Belonging by Jono Bacon (video)

Events 📆

DevRel Events

Our Event Collection is always being updated with the newest events coming up.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Dremio: Reshape the World of Analytics

Dremio is the Data Lake Engine company. Our mission is to reshape the world of analytics to deliver on the promise of data with a fundamentally Open Architecture, purpose-built for the exploding trend towards cloud data lake storage such as AWS S3 and Microsoft ADLS. If you, like us, say “bring it on” to exciting challenges that really do change the world, we have endless opportunities where you can make your mark.

Technical Community Manager / Developer Relations

CoScreen makes engineering collaboration fun and productive. Help our community of developers and agile teams build software together faster than ever. Introduce a whole new way of getting things done together by telling their stories.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Have you seen our job collection recently? There are so many new opportunities there!