DevRel Weekly - Issue 147 - Empowering Developers, Unexpected Resources, and Quarterly Planning

Welcome! 👋

Happy DevRel Weekly day, everyone! This week has been a bit jumbled, with July starting next Thursday (😱) and all of the end-of-quarter/quarterly planning chaos that comes with the close of a quarter. How are you holding up?

As things slowly start to reopen here in the States, I find myself caught between excited that we're moving back to "normal" and still feeling the overbearing anxiety of the last 15 months. From the conversations I've been having lately, it seems like it's going to be a slow road of adjustment for a lot of people, especially when many countries are starting to close down again.

No matter what your circumstances are, be sure you give yourself the space to breathe. ❤️ Just because you're moving more slowly than someone else is doesn't mean it's wrong. You know what's best for you.

As we move into the second half of the year, I'd love to hear from you! What resources are you looking for? What information about Developer Relations does it seem like you're struggling to find? What gaps are you hoping to fill? Shoot me an email and I'll see what I can find (or create!).

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Words (and Context) Matter

People who have never experienced community see the term being used in a lot of transactional ways by brands trying to sell them stuff. So no wonder they remain unconvinced about the true benefits of community.

-Glynk

Building Communities Instead of Audiences

"Experts" tend to build audiences. They already have knowledge and they want to spread it.

"Learners" tend to build communities. They're seeking knowledge and looking for others to learn with.

-David Spinks

DevRel Advice Column

Question to my #devrel fam - we usually wear multiple hats: coding, creating content, delivering content, collecting and elevating devs feedback, moderating a community, etc. Which hats do you wear?

-Vera Tiago

Tangibles 🤓

Breaking into Developer Relations

If you're DevRel-curious and looking for tips on how to get your first Developer Relations role, Angeline Tan has gathered information on your behalf and distilled it into 4 easy-to-follow tips. Looking back, I can see this closely follows the path I took as well!

Showcase your skills
Build new skills in public
Engage
Research

The Role of Developer Relations is to Empower Developers

Empowerment is a huge part of Developer Relations, but this doesn't only involve enabling developers to use your product -- it's about empowering and enabling developers more generally. Jonan Scheffler talks about what this means on a practical level in a recent Twitter thread, explaining that creating content around topics that developers care about is actually far more important than talking about your own products.

50 Lessons In Developer Marketing

Looking for a good resource on Developer Marketing? How about 50? 🤩 Nick Moore has pulled together a fantastic list of lessons he's learned about developer marketing while researching the topic himself. Each tweet contains one lesson and one article, so be sure to carve out some time to go through these in the weeks to come!

Community, meet Privacy

These days, security policies, certifications, and privacy laws are talked about often, but unless your online community is hosted on Facebook, it's likely that you haven't looked at or thought about the privacy policy in your online community in some time. Alexandra Brower challenges that mentality in a recent article.

Protecting your community member's privacy is an incredibly important part of building an authentic and genuine community, one where your community members know that you have their best interests in mind. As Alexandra says,

Not having privacy in a community can breed animosity, exhaust engagement and energy, and affect the sense of belonging.

Community managers, we need to have a collective conversation about privacy. When was the last time you actually read a privacy policy? Most folks click through privacy and security policies, or get annoyed by them.

Storytime 📚

A tactical guide to kickstarting your community

A tactical guide to kickstarting a new community or channel, with actionable examples on getting started based on how we built the Orbit community from zero to one.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

Building Communities with Purpose and Integrity with Carrie Melissa Jones - Cohere
How to Drive Member Engagement by Judy Garvey (video)
Helping Online Community Members Experiencing a Mental Health Crisis with Becka Ross - Community Signal
Five things you need to consider before hiring a community manager with Gisela Mirandilla
Javier Ramirez - AWS - Developer Advocate Stories (video)
Q&A with Rich Millington of Feverbee - Crowdstack (video)

Events 📆

DevRel Events

If you missed DevRelCon Tokyo earlier this month, but want to see some of the videos you can click here. And as always, be sure to regularly check out our Event Collection so you don't miss out on anything.

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.

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.

Developer Relations Lead

Dagster is an open-source toolkit for building data platforms. Engineers, analysts, and scientists use Dagster to develop, deploy, and monitor their data pipelines and explore the assets they produce. Elementl, the company behind Dagster, is hiring its first Developer Relations Lead to help grow the community.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Over 600 jobs, can you believe it? Everything from technical writing to community building to managing a DevRel team is available in our massive collection!