DevRel Weekly - Issue 171 - Setting your Team up for Success, Being Authentic, and 2022 Trends

Welcome! 👋

Happy New Year, DevRel Weekly family! It's been a busy start to the new year and y'all delivered on content over the holiday break, which means I had a lot of links to go through this past weekend. 😅 I've chosen a handful of exceptional pieces of content to get our year started off right. Enjoy!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

What is DevRel built on?

Developer Relations is built on trust, credibility, and authenticity.

It is not built on fame.

-Stargirl

We're all in Public Relations

Jobs in Developer Relations (dev advocate, dev evangelist, etc) are in large part literally PR jobs for the company you are working for.

I've seen too many Dev Advocates recently that either don't understand that, try to deny it, or somehow think it's different at their company.

Read this full thread from James Hollingshead to learn more about how our personal brand impacts our company brand, and vice versa.

Authentic and Genuine

Developer Advocacy is all about authenticity!

Genuinely wanting to help fellow developers

Genuinely care to improve products & experience

Authentic content & outreach - not just to growing followers

-Priyanka Vergadia

Be realistic in order to prevent burnout

If you’re a one-person team for community, be realistic about what you can and will accomplish. You cannot and will not succeed in doing all the wonderful things around community management. Do 2-3 programs or maybe less that will be super valuable to the users and the org.

-Peers Over Beers

Give them a clear direction

If you're struggling with how to set your team up for success without being too overbearing, Evan Hamilton shared a great list of tips on Twitter earlier this week.

Tangibles 🤓

How to Spend your First 90-Days in a New Community Role

If you're about to accept a new job (or maybe you're gearing up to start!) you'll want to take a look at this new resource from CMX. It walks through what your first 90 days should look like at a new company, from setting up meetings to auditing the various community platforms, and everything in between.

p.s. If you're on the opposite side of this and you've just hired your first DevRel employee, Tessa Kriesel has some great tips on how to set them up for success.

Why the term lurker in community strategy should be banned

I'll admit... when I started reading this article I didn't quite understand what Michelle Goodall meant by the fact that "lurker" is pejorative and hurtful. But the more I read into the background of the word and what it used to mean (someone who took up space/bandwidth but didn't participate, and therefore was often booted from the community), the more I understood the problem. Words are important, and language changes over the years. It's important for us to change with them. Looking for a new word to use for this terminology? Read more here.

DevRel Trends and Themes to Look For

A good number of companies released "trends" articles in the past few weeks, from "what's next in tech" to "what to look for in your career." These ones caught my eye for the DevRel industry in particular:

Tangents 🐰

Cultivate Happier Customers in 2022

I've often seen an overlap between the skills required for good technical support teams and DevRel professionals, and these tips from Victoria Pak underscore this nicely! From empathy to clear communication, perhaps there's a thing or two we could learn from working alongside these teams.

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

DevRel AMA
Hackathon Culture and Career in DevRel with Aditya Oberai - Segment Talk
Measure developer productivity using the SPACE framework with Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey - Software Engineering Unlocked
Delivering Belonging in Web 3.0 Jess Sloss - Masters of Community
Scaling Developer Success
Tips for Content Creation by DevRel by Prisma (video)
Being a developer advocate, Web3, and DeFi - RSS
How to Get Community Resources, Part 2 - Peers over Beers
Developer Advocate Stories with Alba Rivas (video)
Journey into Developer Relations | Arisa (video)
How to get new members to join your community in 4 steps by Jono Bacon (video)
The importance of communities in tech with Pachi (video)

Events 📆

DevRel Events

It's a new year and new events are starting to get on calendars around the world. Come see what has been scheduled recently!

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.

Developer Advocate

We are an open-source company and the pulse of ZenML's community is our driving force. As a Developer Advocate, you will help us fulfill our mission by connecting with other developers, contributing to open-source, and sharing your knowledge and experience about ZenML and other leading technologies at conferences and meetups, in contributed articles, and on blogs, podcasts, and social media. Your work will foster a community inspired by ZenML and will drive our strategy around developer love and our participation in the open-source ecosystem.

Head of Developer Community

At Ethyca, we believe that privacy is a human right. We recently launched the world's first open-source privacy devtools to help engineers build systems with respect - a Privacy-as-Code approach that was called "astonishing" by the International Association of Privacy Professionals. We're seeking an experienced builder to help grow our fledgling privacy engineering community. You'll have scope to help define the community strategy and test the content, channels, and activations that resonate with our developer audience.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

The New Year is here, and with it brings a host of new opportunities. Maybe you're looking to try something new or advance in your career. Either way, we've got you covered with a plethora of career opportunities just waiting to be filled!