Welcome! 👋
Happy DevRel Weekly Day, folks! I hope your week is off to a great start. This week's issue brings reminders that communities don't build themselves and spending time one-on-one with your community members isn't only a nice thing to do when you have time, but essential to building a strong and effective community.
May your week be filled with inspiring conversations, a good amount of productivity, and family members or friends who remind you to step away from your laptop.
Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon
p.s. If you haven't taken the time to give me feedback about DevRel Weekly, I'd greatly appreciate it if you would!
DevRel Weekly
Tidbits 🕔
You Have to Do the Work
twitter.comDear tech companies,
You'll only get value out of community if you actually do the work to build a community.
Using the word to describe your customers feels good, but won't drive any results.
DevRel: Draining, but Effective
twitter.comNobody talks about the amount of psychology that goes on in Developer Relations. It’s so draining but very effective.
Always Be Learning
twitter.comYou don’t need to have a huge follower base on social media to be in #DevRel.
Just a curiosity to learn and a desire to help fellow developers.
Create Community Love by Connecting One-on-One
twitter.comCommunities come down to individuals. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen #devrel teams make is by not building one-one relationships with members. This may not be as scalable but it creates community love that pays dividends and allows you to build a brand to eventually scale.
Tangibles 🤓
Making the Case for Community Research
An essential part of community building is talking with members, but it takes time. Carrie Melissa Jones answers questions about why researching first -- talking to your members extensively -- must come before execution in this recent article.
vanillaforums.com
How to Boost Engagement with Community Rituals
If you've been managing an online community for a little while, you likely know about the idea of using "content cadences" to engage your audience -- every Monday we post our goal for the week, or every Wednesday we post a picture of our desk, etc. But this article from Kirsti Buick brings up a few interesting points about one specific type of content cadence: rituals. Dig in to understand why these might help you boost engagement in your community.
commsor.com
The Most Important API Metric is Time to First Call
If your company has a public API, Joyce Lin says the most important metric to track is "Time to First Call," and I've gotta say -- I agree! When your goal is adoption and the easiest path to adoption is to take down as many barriers as possible, the best way to track that successful, easy adoption is how quickly someone can make their first call against your API. Interested in other metrics you can track in addition to TTFC? Joyce lists a few more in this article.
medium.com
Community structure, strategies, KPIs, and networks
Kengo Iwata recently translated a number of his blogs from Japanese to English, which I'm incredibly grateful for, because I might not have discovered this gem otherwise! It's a long read compared to most blogposts (~16min) but it's well worth it. Kengo walks through the basic ideas of an ideal community (what is the goal of a community? what are common characteristics?) before jumping into growth strategies and the idea of complex networks. He ends with a section on tactics and metrics and a list of stellar resources.
medium.com
Storytime 📚
Why Orbit is Better Than Funnel for Developer Relations
DevRel teams need tools and models created specifically for our discipline and not just those adopted from other fields. Here's why we think the free, open-source Orbit Model is better than the funnel for Developer Relations.
bit.ly
Storytime 📚
DevRel Podcasts and Videos
- How Asana does Community with Joshua Zerkel - Masters of Community
- The inside view on running a Developer Program with Richard Muir - SlashData Sessions
- Fostering Inclusivity for Neurodivergent Community Members and Colleagues with Wesley Faulkner - Community Signal
- Interview with Chris Sean - Web Developer, Entrepreneur, and Developer Relations Engineer - Tech-ology
Events 📆
DevRel Events
There have been some great events these past couple months and more are coming; but in the meanwhile, did you know that there are events that occur every week? Come and see what's in our Event Collection to find out!
raindrop.io
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.
ockam.io
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!
workable.com
Jobs 👩💻
Developer Relations Jobs
There has been an explosion of jobs recently, come dive in and find your new role!
raindrop.io