DevRel Weekly - Issue 172 - Building from the inside out and drawing lines to business outcomes

Welcome! 👋

Happy weekend, everyone! Apologies for the delayed issue -- as I told my DevRel Weekly team, I somehow completely spaced on finishing the newsletter this week. It's been two weeks full of these types of situations and I think my brain was simply overloaded by the chaos. 🥴

I hope you're doing well and staying healthy! I'm looking forward to sorting through the great content you've been releasing.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

DevRel Advice Column

I'm curious, #CommunityTwitter: what are your thoughts on removing inactive accounts from communities?

I see how this helps data not get diluted over time, but I'd generally favor just filtering data w/o deleting accounts. Thoughts on other pros/cons?

-Noele Flowers

Answer questions? Or help with governance?

Max Pete tweeted this last week, and it clearly resonated with a lot of us 😅

The Community Manager urge to respond to questions right away without first letting the community answer first

I appreciated Rachel Happe's response in particular:

My take: a #cmgr primary role is to manage the governance of a community, not the members and not even the information (subject matter experts independent of the community team are better for this)

Stay focused in order to increase engagement

If you're building a community & you want...
• Better retention
• More engagement
• Faster growth

...the key to this is a focused experience for your members

Lose focus & everything else falls apart.

Here's a framework to keep your community focused & growing in 2022 🧵

-Murtaza Bambot

Be a (Empathetic) Critic

Sometimes as a developer advocate, people who talk to me are afraid to criticize the thing I advocate because it might offend me.

What you need to understand is that I’m the biggest critic of the thing I evangelize because I want it to be the best it can be.

-Tejas Kumar

You Must Draw the Line to Business Outcomes

Just going to put this out there. There is no customer journey if you don’t have an end state you’re measuring to. This is just as true with #community #devrel. If you’re not able to draw a line from community involvement to a business outcome, you’ll never predictably achieve it

-Joshua Grose

Tangibles 🤓

Developer Relations Career Ladders

It's rare to find a Developer Relations team with an established career ladder, but with the help of Taylor Barnett, at least there's now a place to reference the ones that exist! As Taylor says,

You shouldn't have to work at exceptionally large companies like AWS, Google, or Microsoft in order to have a ladder.

Even though there are only 4 ladders currently included in this resource, it's a massive step forward and serves as a way to encourage other companies to create (and publicly share) ladders of their own. Know of another ladder that isn't included here? Simply submit a pull request.

Community principle: Weaving from the inside out

As someone who loves hiking and camping, I appreciated this analogy from Fabian Pfortmüller. His premise centers on how trees (particularly redwoods) grow from the inside out, "patiently... increasing in incremental steps." But we often fail to do this in communities, instead focusing on how quickly we can expand, ignoring the need for a healthy core that will hold everything together as the community continues to grow. Read this article for his tips on how to "weave from the inside out" and the long-term impact it can have.

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

Writing Documentation and Caring about Developer Mental Health with Lorna Mitchell - Polyglot
How the Pandemic Forced Online Collaboration to Mature with Nancy White - Cohere
Developer Education & Enablement with Nate Aune and Shannon Bradshaw - Under the Hood of Developer Marketing
The Conflict and Burnout Survival Guide: Handling When Things Go Wrong by Jono Bacon - Linux Conf AU 2022 (video)
From the Stage and Back: My Career Path into Developer Relations with James Seconde - HTM 6.0 Talk
Starting Communities and Engagement Strategies with Jenny Weigle - Peers over Beers
How to Tokenize your Community with Jeremiah Owyang - Masters of Community
Developer Relations AMA: Interviewing, Strategy, Prioritization, and Managing Up - Devocate
Online Community Building Lessons From Collaborative Board Games with Matt Leacock - Community Signal
How to transition an audience into a community with Rosie Sherrie & Erin Mikail Staples

Events 📆

DevRel Events

It's only the first month of the year, but it's been a busy month for events! Some have already passed but more are coming up soon; have you seen what's on the calendar for this next week?

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

Companies large and small are continually adding DevRel positions. From Entry Levels roles to Senior or even Manager positions, we have lots to look at in our collection!