DevRel Weekly - Issue 166 - Maintain Your Focus

Welcome! 👋

Welcome to another issue of DevRel Weekly! The topic this week is one that I've been repeating to myself over the last few weeks -- maintain your focus. It seems like this has been increasingly difficult for a number of us over the last few weeks and months. As 2021 starts to come to a close (somehow?!), maintaining focus is going to be more important than ever. I'd love to hear what you're doing to stay focused in these last few months of the year!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Discord Onboarding Techniques

I learned about an interesting Discord feature thanks to this tweet from David Spinks.

A cool onboarding technique that Discord communities are using is a "choose your own adventure" experience:

New members reply to a welcome post with an emoji

The emoji(s) you select unlocks channels related to that path

By setting up particular channels for each segment of your community, you allow people to self-select which channels they want to see while not being overwhelmed by all of the options.

Maintain Focus

Without fail, one of the top things hurting new communities I review is a lack of focus.

Your members need to know why they're there.

Your staff needs to know what outcomes to work towards.

Your budget needs to be funneled towards highest impact rather than widest spread.

Yes, there are some amazing - MATURE - communities that do many things. You should start with ONE goal for your company and ONE goal for your members. Laser focus, do it really well, and THEN expand.

-Evan Hamilton

Tangibles 🤓

Persuading Members To Bring Sufferable Problems To The Community

Encouraging people to ask their questions the "right" way is almost as important as finding people willing to answer questions on your forum. After all, no one wants to be the individual responsible to ask every forum poster for more information about their problem. But how do you set them up for success? Rich Millington has a few ideas in this recent blogpost.

Five Books Every Developer Marketer Should Have On Their Wishlist

Looking for a solid onboarding toolkit for a new DevRel professional? This list of books is a great place to start!

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

DevRel Resources with Albrey Brown and Jessica Rose - Community Pulse
Making Diverse Communities Truly Inclusive with Nicole Crentsil - Masters of Community
From Oracle to Developer Advocacy: A Database Career with Franck Pachot - Mission Control Center
Pioneering the Developer Advocate Role with Cassidy Williams - Sourcegraph Podcast
From individual developer advocate to the C suite with Simon Maple - DevRelCon 2021 Conference

Events 📆

DevRel Events

It's been a busy season! So many great events took place over the past several weeks. Even though conference season may be winding down, new things still come up and our Event Collection is always here to show you what's next.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Lead Developer Advocate

We’re looking for an experienced, creative, results-oriented Lead Developer Advocate to join Chronosphere as an early member of the Marketing team. This Lead Developer Advocate will focus on open source projects, and will continue to foster Chronosphere’s relationships within the developer and SRE community, keeping tabs on what product teams need to improve customer experiences. They will also spend time engaging with developers to help solve their issues and then write blogs, documentation, or do a livestream to discuss how to overcome these challenges.

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

If you attended DevRelCon and heard some great talks about furthering your career (or maybe just getting started!), we have a massive collection of new job opportunities for you to explore!