DevRel Weekly - Issue 170 - Pivotal Strategies, Hidden Benefits, and the Last Tips of the Year

Welcome! 👋

Welcome to the last DevRel Weekly issue of 2021! I'm both grateful that the year is wrapping up and in a bit of disbelief that we're already here. 😅 If you're feeling the same way, you're not alone!

Hopefully this week's resources will be helpful for you as the year winds down. In particular, I found this recap of 2021 IPOs highlighting how community strategy proved integral to the success of these companies to be both inspirational and motivating!

I look forward to reconnecting with you all in the new year and reading more of the fantastic resources you create! See you on January 10th.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. If you have a few extra minutes this week, please take the time to fill out this survey from CMX which will be used to create the Community Industry Report 2022.

Tidbits 🕔

Posts are important, but replies are essential

Community is built in the replies, not the posts.

-David Spinks

A hidden benefit of community

A hidden benefit of community - just knowing someone else out there is experiencing what you are experiencing, and knowing that you are not alone.

-Zac Novak

As Shannon Emery says, this "starts out as a hidden benefit but it quickly becomes the reason people come back."

Tangibles 🤓

4 speaker tips to focus on your camera while recording a video

If you've struggled to make eye contact with your camera while giving an online talk over the past few years, you're not alone! Jason St-Cyr has put together a few tips regarding how to focus on your camera, making your audience feel like you're actually connecting with them.

Automation Rules vs. Member Journeys

Product adoption is a hot topic these days, from developer experience to product-led growth and creating developer-friendly tools. Some companies take the approach of onboarding emails, while others rely on their content to speak for itself and provide a good experience. Rich Millington makes a case for optimizing the customer journey first in this recent blogpost.

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

End of Year Wrap-up - 2021 with Jason Hand, Mary Thengvall, PJ Hagerty, SJ Morris, and Wesley Faulkner - Community Pulse
Coming to you live! Inclusive, effective, fun live streaming for DevRel by Ramón Huidobro (video)
IBM’s Playbook for Scaling Internal Communities with Joy Dettorre and Stephanie Galera - Masters of Community
Conversation about community with Josh Grose, Head of Growth, Common room (video)
Using TikTok to reach a new developer audience by Zachary Powell (video)
History of AWS Developer Relations with Jeff Barr - AWS Developers Podcast
From business growth to DevRel and the lessons along the way with Joyce Lin - Developing Communities
Outcome-based Observability with Gibbs Cullen - O11ycast

Events 📆

DevRel Events

The year will be ending soon, but new events are already being scheduled for the spring. Be sure to check back here to see what is coming on the horizon.

Jobs 👩‍💻

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.

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.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

DevRel is booming, more companies are realizing their need for Developer Advocates and Community Managers, and new roles keep coming up despite the year end! Have you seen what's new lately in our collection?