DevRel Weekly - Issue 145 - Conference Abstracts, Onboarding, and Finding Great Content

Welcome! 👋

Y'all -- there is SO much good content this week, I'm a little bit overwhelmed by it all! 🤩 Thanks for producing so many great resources. We cover everything from onboarding community members to the most important part of your onboarding at a new company, how to write awesome conference abstracts, where to find the best content for your community (hint: from your community members!) and more.

Before you jump in -- for all of my India-based DevRel folks out there, LikeMinds is running a new survey: The State of Indian Community Management -- be sure to take a few minutes to share your experience this week.

Here's hoping for a productive but balanced week for all of us!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Create and Collect Content for your Community

No one wants to arrive in an empty community

Create and collect content and add it to the platform before the launch.

Build a monthly community content calendar to keep content fresh and exciting for users as they trickle into the community

-Hivebrite

The Difficult Part of Running Experiments

Finding community fit is one of the hardest and sometimes most depressing parts of the job. It sucks when you have an idea you think will be compelling and then the audience reaction is "it was fine". It takes a real community builder to get back up and try something new.

-Evan Hamilton

Learn Everything You Can Before Suggesting Change

First #cmgr lesson of a new role:

Learn all you can about the program, community, etc., before you try to "fix" anything.

Historical context is SUPER important. Why? Simply because it existed before you arrived, hopefully with a fancy flourish.

Unless specified, orgs didn't hire you to be the hero who saves them from utter demise.

Shocking, I know. You're the expert but guess what, sometimes the person before you was also an expert.

And a well loved one at that.

-Shannon Emery (click through for the full thread -- it's a good one!)

The Best Content Lives Within Your Community

Hey Brand and Content folks. Why scratching your heads trying to produce eye catching stories when THE STORY always lives within your community? The best marketing strategy is leveraging your community stories

-Gabs

Tangibles 🤓

Awesome Developer Advocates Are Hiding in Plain Sight

If you're struggling to hire a Developer Advocate in this competitive environment, this article from Nnamdi Iregbulem might help! Nnamdi runs through a handful of tips that will expand the scope of your search, including looking for core characteristics, regardless of their current title.

Storytelling On Stage: The Basics

I seem to be getting more emails about open CFPs by the day, but sometimes finding the time to craft the perfect abstract can be difficult. If you're struggling to write an abstract that will stand out, this article by Kris Brandow has some great tips. While it's focused primarily on GopherCon, the principles are still the same:

Make sure to hook your audience.
If you have the opportunity to include an outline, do it! This helps you better understand what you'll actually have time to cover in your talk.
Tailor your talk for this specific audience (the language, the community, the problems they're facing)
Identify the impact -- what do you want to your audience to walk away with?

The Front Door vs. The Back Door

Rich Millington points out something fascinating in a recent blogpost:

We often imagine people arriving at the community homepage, finding the registration option, and becoming a member [and] we design most of our efforts to optimise for this journey.

But most people enter the community through the "back door" -- finding the answer to a particularly difficult question on your forum.

The question is -- how do we onboard these folks who enter through the "back door" in such a way that they want to stick around?

Get Strategic About Community Engagement

How often do we scratch our heads and try to figure out how to encourage people to engage further in our communities? (Hint: All the time 😉)

Noele Flowers introduced this "community stoplight method" on Twitter this week and it's a brilliant yet simple way to approach this problem.

Trust me... by the time you're reading this, I've already pasted the link in my own team's Slack channel to see if we can use it for our community at Camunda! Click through to read the full thread.

Storytime 📚

Developer Love

A podcast for people who build developer communities. Hear from people who win the hearts and minds of developers, including founders, execs, and top practitioners in developer relations, dev marketing, and community management.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

Everything in Moderation with Rosie Sherry - Community Pulse
The Campus DevRel Show with Mary Thengvall
Achieving Virtual Event Success in your Community with Lauren Hagerty - Masters of Community
Advocacy in Open-Source Organizations with Rain Leander - Developing Communities
Feedback is the key! with Alex Hoffer - API The Docs Podcast
Developer Advocate Stories with Mary Thengvall

Events 📆

DevRel Events

Interested in attending an event? Come see our Event Collection to see what what might be coming up.

Jobs 👩‍💻

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.

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.

Developer Advocate

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard platform that enables distributed teams to work together effectively. Join the team as a Developer Advocate to engage with developer communities around the world, evangelise the Miro open developer platform, and provide developers and partners the support and guidance they need to be successful.

Check out our open roles in Amsterdam and Austin.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Have you seen our massive jobs collection? We are always adding new jobs there; jobs at entry level all the way through top managing positions.