DevRel Weekly - Issue 164 - Twitter Discussions, Conference Talks, and Scaling Engagement

Welcome! 👋

Happy DevRel Weekly day, everyone! This week was a little light on the blog content, which is interesting to me given the recent conversations I've had about how videos are taking over as the best way to distribute content. Any thoughts about that? I'm curious to hear what you think!.

As the year starts to wind down, I'm anticipating we'll see more short-form pieces, more discussions on Twitter, and fewer blogposts, but perhaps you all will surprise me and put out more awesome content than ever in these next 6 weeks!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

DevRel Advice Column

Devrel -- when you post your content (blogs, streams, videos), would you rather see....

Growth in your followers

High engagement in your content (comments)

-KrunchData

If you were to correct one myth about Community Management from people's minds, what would it be and why?

-Community Folks

Is Your Community Prioritized?

People keep asking me how to set up a community around their product.

If you want to succeed, treat the community AS YOUR PRODUCT.

-Imran Hussain

Don't Discount the Lurkers

👀 Community lurkers are not such a bad thing like everyone thinks!

Community lurkers can still help grow your community by singing its praises on other channels. A loyal lurker can still spread awareness for your community to their friends, and you never know, the people they bring in might become contributors.

-Hivebrite

One Solution to Scaling Engagement

Communities thrive when every member feels seen and valued.

The Challenge:

It's easy to make 10 people feel seen and valued.

It's hard to make 1,000 people feel seen and valued.

Solution:

Distribute control to leaders who can make other members feel seen and valued.

-David Spinks

Tangibles 🤓

Creating content for a technical community

As I've alluded to in these past two issues of the newsletter, I've been thinking a lot about content creation lately. From blogposts to live coding videos, podcasts, Twitter threads, conference talks, webinars, and more, we have a lot of different ways we can reach our developer audience. But tracking the success and impact of those pieces of content can still be difficult! This week I talked to the folks at Krunch about the role content plays in building communities as well how to make sure people are actually consuming your content and more.

p.s. There's a video recording along with the written interview, so you can consume it however suits you best!

Storytime 📚

10 Technical Writing Style Guides You Can Use

A style guide defines communication standards for any tech document that your business produces, and all of your writers can follow it. Since style guides cover so much ground, they can be a chore to create from scratch. Fortunately, many companies make their own technical writing style guides available publicly, so you can analyze their strengths as you create your own style.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

3 Common Challenges Community Builders Face and How to Overcome Them by Jono Bacon (video with text summary)
Cohort-Based Online Communities: Exploitation or Real Connection? with Alex Witkowski - Community Signal
Embracing, Encouraging and Engaging Your Diverse Community Audience by Craig Cmehil - CMX Summit (video)
Creating a Developer Advocacy Program: A Conversation with Cassidy Williams - <De/coded> (podcast with text summary)
The 5-letter curse word in Corporate Communities by James Sinclair (video)
The Democratization of Development with Jesse Showalter - <De/coded> (video)
Which Key KPIs of a Community to Share with Your Stakeholders - Peers over Beers

Events 📆

Q&A with Mary Thengvall | Nov 18 @10am PST

The Uncommon Book Club will be featuring Mary Thengvall to discuss her book, The Business Value of Developer Relations. We'll focus conversation topics around a few themes from the book, including the value of a developer community and how to build, manage, and grow one.

We’ll also be asking her some questions submitted by the audience (that’s you!), which you can include when you register. Plus, if you’re one of the first 100 people to register, we’ll send you a free Kindle version of the book!

Events 📆

DevRel Events

Conference season is still going strong! DevRelCon is happening this week and there are a lot of other great events just around the corner. Come and see what we have lined up!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate

As a Developer Advocate, you will be a founding member of a team dedicated to forming and creating the awareness of Infobip as a brand and Infobip's communication services and public APIs.

Senior Developer Advocate

Speed, scale, performance, low-latency, distributed databases, Java, open-source, Apache Software Foundation. If this is something you're interested in, then come and join GridGrain's rapidly growing open-source community that creates Apache Ignite, distributed database for high-performance computing with in-memory speed. The Apache Software Foundation has ranked Ignite as a Top 5 project in various categories since 2017.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

We took the time to really prune our list of jobs this week -- we know too many links can cause decision paralysis! As a result, we'll only be keeping open jobs on our list for 6 months. And don't forget about the tags! Using the search bar, you can filter the list down and help you find exactly what you're looking for.