DevRel Weekly - Issue 152 - Challenge Your Assumption to Find the Best Solutions

Welcome! 👋

This week's issue reminds us that things may not always be what they seem, whether because of assumptions or misperceptions. It also nudges us to look outside of the DevRel industry to see what else we can learn in order to better serve our community members (and yes, I recognize the irony of saying this after I just released DevRel Resources 😜).

As always, I encourage you to find the resources that work for your community specifically, whether you find them in "traditional" DevRel spaces or somewhere else entirely. Some of the most helpful information I've found throughout my career has come from a different industry entirely -- yet another reason why diversity is helpful in helping to provide the best possible experience for our communities!

Keep being curious, DevRel fam, and as always, let me know if you find anything particularly interesting!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

We Don't "Manage" the Community

A community manager doesn't "manage" a community. That's not how it works

A good community manager:

1) Designs the community
2) Gives oxygen to the community
3) Keeps the community healthy

It's probably one of the most underrated hires your startup will make

-Greg Isenberg

Assumed Knowledge May Not Be Actual Knowledge

Understanding your community includes modifying your examples because assumed knowledge may not be actual knowledge and that code is absolutely going to end up in production.

-Amara Graham

You Don't Have to be a Speaker

hot take on #devrel: you don't need to be a speaker at events to have impact. some of us don't do well in that format and excel at direct connections or via code to share our content. it's fine.

-Jay Gordan

Tangibles 🤓

How to Drive Community Engagement at your Virtual Conference

Now that we're coming up on 18 months of virtual events, you may find that you're struggling more than ever to attract and engage community members to your online event. If so, this article from Kristie Kaaa is a timely one! Kristie walks through 6 lessons she's learned from helping companies host virtual events and watching the creative solutions these companies have brought to the virtual table.

Read Books About The Results You Deliver

Books about developer relations and community building can be incredibly helpful. However, given that Developer Relations sits somewhere between Product, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Success, and more, don't forget that it can be valuable to read books, blogs, and articles about these other topics as well!

Storytime 📚

Dev Spotlight

The best at creating technical content for developers and IT leaders. Trusted by Twilio, Salesforce, MongoDB, SolarWinds, and more. Schedule a call now.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

Building a DevRel Team with Lorna Jane Mitchell - API the Docs Podcast
Managing Community Operations, Supporting the Roadmap, & Enabling a Cohesive Community Experience with Tiffany Oda - Masters of Community
Broadening your tech career horizons with Priyanka Vergadia - WTM Spotlight (video)
Community Platform Vendor Selection and Where Does One Focus - Peers over Beers
The top 3 Mistakes even Smart Community Managers Make with David Spinks - Game Thinking TV (video)
How to be a Successful Developer Advocate with Vinnie Erdman
Storytelling from the Developer Perspective with Adam DuVander - Breaking Changes (video)

Events 📆

DevRel Events

Although most of the big industry events won't be here for a few more months, don't forget that there are always smaller gatherings happening weekly, and every now and then something new pops up. Come check out our Event Collection to see!

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!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Summer isn't the only thing that's hot right now in the US! How you seen our Job Collection recently? There's so much to choose from if you're looking!