DevRel Weekly - Issue 169 - Planning your next steps

Welcome! 👋

Coming back home from a wonderful vacation is always a bit of a shock to the system, but I have to say, leaving 80°F weather and ocean views and coming home to 48°F and torrential downpours was a rude awakening 😅 While I'm incredibly grateful for the much-needed rain, I hope you all are having lovelier weather than we are in Northern California.

Planning seems to be on everyone's minds this week, from the best way to set up boundaries and processes to how to set yourself (and your team) up for success in the new year. If you're asking these same questions, you're in the right place! I look forward to hearing what you learn from these resources.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Deliver on the expected value

Once a new #community member signs up you need to deliver on the value they are expecting!

You can have a flashy website, great marketing, and affordable memberships—but your members will be quick to leave if you can’t provide real benefits.

-hivebrite

You have to start with a good product

No amount of community building will fix a bad product (software, art, or anything else).

Community only works when people already value the thing they have in common.

A lack of engagement in your community can be a signal that your product isn’t working.

-David Spinks

DevRel Advice Column

Tech/Dev Rel folks - How do you handle setting up boundaries between your personal social accounts and your job?

Has your job ever made you post content? Was there a quota? Any issues? What would you recommend?

-Joe Karlsson

There are pros and cons to automatically closing old discussions in an online forum -- which would you do?

-Rich Millington

The pros and cons of recording an event

NOT recording an event is becoming a superpower.

So many virtual events record content for people to watch later.

When people know it won't be recorded they value the content more and will be more comfortable participating openly and honestly in discussions.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't record any events.

There's certainly advantages (marketing + accessibility) to recording.

Just saying that you don't HAVE to record all events, and should look for opportunities where not recording is additive to the experience.

-David Spinks

This topic is definitely a controversial one based on the conversations in this thread -- what are your thoughts?

Tangibles 🤓

2022 Planning Resources

Whether you're planning for next year or simply next quarter, there are a few resources that popped up this week that should be helpful for you:

Day of Big Dreaming from Jen Dary at Plucky
The Communities of Practice Playbook from The European Commission's Joint Research Centre
Community Strategy & Planning Templates from Structure3C
8 Enhancements for Your Online Community to Improve its Performance & ROI from Grazitti Interactive

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

How to Build an Awesome Developer Relations Team with Wesley Faulkner & PJ Hagerty - Masters of Community
How to Get Resources for Your Online Community with Michael Sandoval & Chris Detzel - Peers over Beers
But why does the business care? by Michael Heap (video)
Content for developers with Raphael Mun - Under the Hood of Developer Marketing
DevRel, a key role at hackathons by Siddharth Dayarwal (video)
Taking Time to Reflect – Doing Better Than You Did Yesterday, Today with Zachary Powell - Launchies
Supercharge your career with a tour of duty in DevRel by Jordan Adler (video)
GitLab’s DevRel career ladder by John Coghlan (video)
Embodying Work-Life Balance as a Community Professional and Manager with Allison Able - Community Signal
Community Engagement Strategy with Michael Sandoval & Chris Detzel - Peers over Beers
A DevRel team that doesn’t sell anything by Alex Scammon and Caterina Rindi (video)
A day in life of a developer advocate / working from home edition by Olena Kutsenko (video)
Put an End to Boring Community Events with Jacques Martiquet - Masters of Community
Technical content that resonates with developers by Karl Hughes (video)

Events 📆

The Perfect 10: Talk with Special Guests from Temporal.io | December 16 @11am PST

Join Common Room (@CommonRoomHQ) on Twitter Spaces for a live, 10-minute interview with Temporal leaders Shawn Wang, Head of Developer Experience, and Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product, on December 16th, 11am PST. They'll discuss the importance of community engagement to the process of rapid product iteration, customer success, and enduring business models.

Events 📆

DevRel Events

Looking for a fun way to connect with DevRel professionals around the world as you close out the year? Many DevRel meetups are coming together for end-of-year holiday parties, all of which you can find 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.

Senior Developer Advocate

Are you interested in practical, open source ML tools? At deepset we're building Haystack - a Python framework for composable natural language processing (NLP). Our users have leveraged Haystack to build scalable, API-driven NLP backends for a wide range of common NLP services, such as semantic search, document ranking, question answering, summarization, and more. As a Senior Developer Advocate, you have to ensure product builders become successful with Haystack. Our biggest focus is to make the barrier of entry to NLP as low as possible through outstanding developer experience. We are a remote-first company backed by leading VC firms.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Got your eye on a new role? Whether you're looking for inspiration or new opportunities, check out our collection of jobs -- there's sure to be something that catches your eye whether you're in management, advocacy, or community building!