DevRel Weekly - Issue 165 - Metrics, Moderation, and Inclusivity

Welcome! 👋

Happy DevRel Weekly Day, friends! This week's issue leads us down the path of metrics, moderation in online communities, and inclusivity. In addition, you'll find new jobs from our sponsors Infobip and GridGain.

As always, let me know if you have any questions or if I missed any relevant articles this week! I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. I had so much fun doing a live Twitter Q&A yesterday! If you missed it, you can catch up on the thread. Also, you have another opportunity to take part in the discussion -- this Thursday at 10am PST.

Tidbits 🕔

Don't Lose Track of the Problems Your Community is Facing

Unpopular opinion: If you are a developer advocate and not doing the activities people you are representing do (coding, architecting, working on organizational problems, leadership), you will eventually fail connecting to the practitioners you are representing.

-Jaana Dogan

Traits to Build a Community

Building a community takes vision, creativity, selflessness, passion, and consistency. What traits am I missing?

-Joshua Grose

Buddy Programs

A buddy program is a great way to forge networks inside your community! Pair new members with your super users who can guide them and answer questions!

-Hivebrite

Tangibles 🤓

Should You Delete Discussions?

Deleting content from an online forum might be one of the most controversial moves you can make as a moderator. But how do you manage posts that are old, unhelpful, or duplicates? Rich Millington suggests identifying the problem you're trying to resolve rather than going straight to deletion. He offers a few tips in this recent article.

Making our Communities Inclusive and Breathable

We've talked often about setting up proper onboarding for our online communities, but these tips don't often include information about how to ensure that your communities are explicitly inclusive. This article by Sangeeta Gupta lays out five fantastic tips for how to make your community intentionally inclusive.

The Developer Advocate's Guide to Metrics and Reporting

We've spent a lot of time talking about DevRel metrics over the past few years, but if you're still scratching your head and looking for a straightforward explanation of terminology and best practices like many of us are, this post from Kurt Kemple may do the trick. In it, he not only walks through some of the possible metrics you could track, but also why some metrics are trusted and others aren't. I highly recommend setting aside some time to read through the article this week (maybe click through on some of the linked resources as well!) and then reflect on how your current metrics are working for you.

Tangents 🐰

Types of Technical "Thought Leadership"

Many of us still shudder at the term "thought leadership" because of the "better than you" mentality it can imply, but the reality is, if we're talking about good practices, new frameworks, or recommended patterns, we're doing thought leadership-like activities!

This week, Karl L Hughes published a thread of three types of technical thought leadership which helped me reframe the idea of thought leadership for myself. Bonus: He included examples of ways to do it effectively, including things like sharing a unique point of view about a topic to gain people's interest.

Storytime 📚

Dev Spotlight

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Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

How DevRel Impacts the Growth Metrics of the Company with Jordan Adler - Scaling Developer Success
101 Ways to Build Community by Ramel Wallace - CMX Summit (video)
Work Week in the Life of a Developer Advocate/ Performance Testing Advocate by Nicole van der Hoeven (video)
How to Keep Localized Communities Buzzing with Dani Weinstein - Masters of Community

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!

The Evolution of Developers & DevRel | Episode 4 | December 8 @8am PT

In the final episode for 2021, we look into the past and future of DevRel. We will discuss how the industry evolved over time, current trends and what is ahead of DevRel and developer communities in 2022 and beyond.

Grab your free Community Pass or request an invite for a richer experience with a full-access Thought Leader Pass at futuredeveloper.io.

Events 📆

DevRelCon Recap

Whether you missed out on DevRelCon or are still thinking through all of the gems you learned throughout the week, go check out the hashtag to see the takeaways that others have posted. Personally, I'm taking notes on which videos I want to keep an eye out for in the near future!

DevRel Events

Hopefully you've had a chance to attend at least one of the many great events this season. I hope you had some amazing takeaways that you can apply to your life. Although the official conference season may be starting to wind down, there are always new events on the horizon; be sure to keep a look out to see what's next!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate Manager

As a Developer Advocate Manager, you will be dedicated to forming, creating and leading a team that will assist in your task on 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 are adding to our job collection almost every day! Even though we recently did a sweep up so that you can have an easier search, the number of new positions is astounding.