DevRel Weekly - Issue 151 - Invest in Relationships

Welcome! 👋

Welcome back to our usual DevRel Weekly format, everyone! In case you missed it, earlier this week I released a special issue commemorating the 150th issue of DevRel Weekly. In it, I launched DevRel Resources, which includes a variety of links to resources on everything from breaking into DevRel and building a team, to collecting feedback and writing excellent documentation.

I also launched a short feedback survey to better understand how DevRel Weekly has helped you and what I can do even better in the future. Please take a moment to click through over the next few days!

Before I let you dig into the great content that has been released over the last few weeks, I want to remind you to take care of yourselves in addition to your community members. For those of you who are feeling like you have too much on your plate and you can’t take any time off, now is the time to take time off. And for those of you who are feeling some imposter syndrome, the work you do matters and is likely making a larger impact than you realize.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Don't Confuse Information with Practical Advice

If you are doing documentation, don't confuse information with practical advice. Your focus should be on how a developer can/should/would actually DO a thing, not just the details about the thing.

-David Simmons

Are you Investing in Relationships? Or Performing a Transaction?

Community is hard for businesses if they're not used to giving value without immediately asking for something in return.

They always want an email, money, data...something back.

If you ask for something in return, you're not investing in a relationship, you're transacting.

-David Spinks

Content is Critical

Content is critical for a vibrant community

You want your members to comment on your content, share it, engage in discussions around it, and keep coming back to the community for it!

-hivebrite

Prioritize Building 1-on-1 Relationships

The biggest mistake I see people - including #cmgr - make when starting a new community is not building one-on-one relationships with early members.

They see it as not scalable (it is not) but it IS the only way to scale effectively

-Rachel Happe

What's Your Mindset?

All aspiring community builders and developer advocates should have a community-first mindset.

-Harun Mbaabu Mwedna

Tangibles 🤓

Getting Members To Join Isn’t Enough

As Richard Millington reminds us in this recent post, it’s not enough to only post, asking for people to engage. You also need to engage with specific individuals. Draw them out. Ask them to participate. Tag them in posts. Even reach out to them 1:1 via email or private message! Is it a lot of work? Sure! But going the extra mile is what will make your community successful in the long run.

How to Find a Technical Writer for Hire

Struggling to find technical writers that could help with your content strategy? Karl Hughes shares his team's process of finding technical writers for hire at his company, Draft.dev, including what doesn't work.

Storytime 📚

How we use Orbit to build Orbit

Orbit enables DevRel teams to build relationships, not spreadsheets with tools to grow your community and data to prove ROI. This guide takes a look at how we use Orbit to build our own community.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

More of an AND than an OR with Jenny Weigle, Taylor Harrington, Jocelyn Hsu, and Shaveta Sharma
“Developer Marketing Does Not Exist” with Adam DuVander - API Resilience
DevRel, community management, and marketing with Kim Maida - PodRocket
Developer Relations @ OneSignal with Jordan Adler - OneSignal Podcast
The backstage of developer advocates' work - Community Show (video)
Technical Principles of Developer Experience with Shodipo Ayomide - SINFO (video)
How to use new and emerging social media like TikTok as a developer advocate with Zachary Powell - Developing Communities: The DevRel Podcast
Building Sustainable Communities with Jono Bacon - Sustain
Hiring Pipelines with Lusen Mendel - DevRel Talks (video)
Community marketing is all about trust with Rosie Sherry
How to run an online meetup event in 4 steps (that isn't a boring webinar) - Jono Bacon (video)
Building Safe & Inclusive Communities, Human Moderation, & Community Monetization with Jessica Moreno - Masters of Community
Knowing Community - CodenTech (video)
Developer Advocacy & Personal Branding with James Quick - Web Dev Weekly

Events 📆

DevRel Events

If you're based in the Northern Hemisphere, we hope you're out enjoying the sun this summer, but if you're looking for an event to take part in online, or exploring possible in-person events for later this year, don't forget to pop into our Event Collection now and then to see what might be going on.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Head Of Developer Relations

We are seeking a talented DevRel Lead to build our Developer Relations practice from the ground up! This is an exciting role where you will work directly with builders in enterprises, collaborators at Add-on partners, the broad open source community, and the core Ockam engineering team.

Developer Advocate

Aiven provides managed open-source data technologies on all major clouds. We are looking for Developer Advocates, Developer Educators and Technical Writers to join our DevRel team. We have offices in Helsinki, and Berlin, however we are hiring for this position remotely in several countries all over Europe additionally to Germany and Finland. You will be empowering and enabling developers everywhere to take advantage of the best open source database technologies, preparing and delivering content for industry events, meetups, our own webinars and creating engaging demos and documentation. Contact us for more details!

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

Have you seen our job listing recently? If you're looking for something new, you'll find it here!