DevRel Weekly - Issue 167 - Fixing Trust, Scaling, and Understanding Community Value

Welcome! 👋

Thanks for your patience with the newsletter this week, everyone! I had a lovely few days with family last week, and promptly caught a bad cold from my nieces & nephew that I hadn't seen for two years. 🙃🤪

We're a little light on content with the Thanksgiving holiday in the States, but there are a few gems to click on! In addition, I got this lovely response from Jen Wike Huger last week about how she's staying focused during this busy time:

I'm trying to stay focused by focusing on our community. Reading the names. Knowing the names. Speaking kindly, responding to everything. Asking questions, taking responses, and creating content from them to help others learn. It is a time of year full of checklists, which can be satisfying when completed but draining and depressing when stacked on top of each other with limited time. By putting more of my attention, care, and attention to detail in the people, I am uplifted and more focused on the things that bring me joy.

I hope your week brings you joy!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Community is a long-term play

If your goal is short-term buzz, then you're not building a community, you're building a hype machine.

Community is, 100% of the time, a long-term play.

-David Spinks

Trust problems don't change overnight

In 15 years of community management the top lesson - I can’t stress this enough - you cannot throw a community manager at a trust problem and expect it to change overnight. You cannot expect an individual to heal long-standing mistrust. That’s everyone’s job, starting at the top

-Annemarie Dooling

Stalk discussion threads

Do you stalk member discussion threads in your community?

It can tell you a lot about your community health and help you better plan your community intiatives and programmes

-Sangeeta Gupta

Scaling is Cyclical

Observation: scaling is cyclical. You scale, then you try some new stuff, then you scale again. It's important a) to know when it's time to scale and b) not to beat yourself up when you realize you've built some unscalable things.

-Evan Hamilton

Tangibles 🤓

How to Measure and Report on Community Value

I won't lie -- I had to read and re-read this article a few times to wrap my head around it, and I'm still not certain I fully understand it (maybe that's the cold talking?), but there are a lot of items that made me stop and think about how we're handling metrics and success at Camunda, so I thought I'd share it with you all as well! In it, Mike Washburn breaks down community value -- what value creation is, what types of value creation exist, and why it's important to ask the right questions in order to find the metrics you're looking for.

How has the pandemic changed DevRel?

Ashley Willis asked this question last week on Twitter and it sparked a variety of conversations, all of which were fascinating.

If you work in DevRel how has the pandemic changed the job and what impact do you think it will have on the future of developer relations?

If you have a moment, take a look at some of the responses this week and add your own perspective.

How students can get involved in Community & DevRel

If you're trying to take your first few steps into DevRel and are confused (or overwhelmed) about where to start, this thread from Aditya Oberai is a solid one!

Tangents 🐰

Why Tweeting for Growth Isn't Enough

If your mind has been on growing your personal brand lately, Stephanie Morillo has a blogpost you'll want to read. As with most things, while the number of followers/reads/pageviews can be impressive on some largely accounts, that's not what your ultimate goal should be. As Stephanie says,

If you have 1,000 followers but 80% of them engage with you at any given time, that’s more powerful than having 10,000 followers with 10% engagement. Increasing engagement will likely help you meet your goals — but you need to be specific about what you want to achieve.

Storytime 📚

Human-like Conversational AI for Developers

Dasha is a conversational-AI-as-a-service platform that lets you embed realistic voice and text conversational capabilities into your apps or products. With a single integration, create smart conversational apps for web, desktop, mobile, IoT and call centers.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

Career Series: What is a developer advocate? Interview with Senior Dev Advocate Michael Liendo - Faraday Academy (video)
Lessons from a decade of DevRel with Philippe Ozil - Developing Communities
Are You Gardening, or Are You Managing Waste? with Lydia Fiedler - Community Signal
The Role of Community in Web 3.0 with Tiffany Zhong & Cooper Turley - Masters of Community

Events 📆

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 📆

DevRel Events

Here is the US we took some time this last week to think about all the things we have to be thankful for. It's a little quiet right now with events but there are a few things still coming up in the next couple weeks. Come and see what is up next in our Event Collection.

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 Experience Team - Infobip

Come join the team at Infobip, where you'll be building brand awareness throughout the developer community around advocating not only Infobip’s communication services and public APIs, but also by altruistically assisting developers around the globe with whatever issue they may have.

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

Are you looking for a new role? You're in luck because we have plenty to choose from in our extensive Job Collection!