Issue 2

Welcome! 👋

Not All Change is Good, but Sometimes Change is the Only Way

Change seems to be the common theme this week. Whether it's change that needs to happen within company cultures or in the understanding of what "community" entails, one thing's for sure: Developer Relations is never boring!

For those of you who were here last week - welcome back! To those of you who are new, thanks for joining me! Below you'll find Tidbits (tweets, quotes, and succinct descriptions), Tangibles (articles that directly apply to DevRel and the world of technical community building), and Tangents (features that may not be specifically about DevRel, but that are highly applicable to our industry). You'll also find links to collections of relevant upcoming events as well as current job openings, along with a fun avocado fact.

Why do I do this every week? So that you don't have to. Instead, you get to skim, click, read, and then go back to your to-do list with a renewed sense of purpose and drive to continue building your community.

Enjoy the newsletter, and as always, feel free to send me any feedback, comments, questions, or concerns: [email protected].

Mary Thengvall, @mary_grace

Tidbits 🕔

Hint: If the whole team isn't invested, it's not going to work.

@cloud_opinion has a strong opinion... but they're not wrong. You can have the best DevRel team in the business, but if the other teams who interact with devs aren't pulling their weight, it's not going to help.

You can invest as much as you want on DevRel or DevEvangelism, but if your product team doesn't respond to bugs reported on public forums for days, devs think you still suck :)

Welcome to Flight OSS. Please take your seats.

Kelsey Hightower (Chief Developer Advocate at Google) gave a fantastic analogy for open source maintainers last week on Twitter:

Maintaining an open-source project is like being a Flight Attendant for an airline where all tickets are free and the majority of customer surveys offer suggestions on how to fly the airplane.

Warning: don't be drinking your morning coffee while you read this... ☕️😂

Even Specialists Need a Team

"[Community Managers] are specialists in the human engagement side of things... They need partners who listen to them and then marry the engagement value with analytics."

Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of the Community Roundtable

Some Things Have Yet to Change 😏

DevRel and community management has come so far in so many ways --

I am seeing a lot of first-time DevRel-ers. and new books, conferences and DevRel as a Service businesses are popping up

and yet --

We still have to explain what we do to the rest of the people in the industry because everybody thinks our job is partying around the world 😬

Tomomi Imura, DevRel at Slack API

Nintendo Switch Joy-Con Controller... aka Presentation Remote 🎤

I'm not that much of a video game nerd, but with this hack I might be convinced. Jen Tong, security advocate at Google, has a quick write-up about how to turn the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con Controller into your new go-to presentation remote.

Tangibles 🤓

What is community, anyway?

Videos from DevRelCon London 2017 are starting to be released, and let me tell you... they're worth waiting for! This talk from Leslie Hawthorn, Developer Relations Strategist for Red Hat, in particular, does a great job at distilling what community is, and why it's a valuable business endeavor:

We have lost sight of the idea that in a business context, cultivating community means empowering people and enabling their success... Of course, our community endeavors need to support our employers’ business functions, but if we consider community as solely a part of our sales process, we are losing out on the opportunity to cultivate a much more important and sustainable trajectory for all of technology, and for our own companies as well.

I suggest that the most important thing that we can do as developer relations professionals is consider that our power is in user education and helping people to be more successful, whether or not they end up becoming part of our customer base, because they will become passionate advocates for our technology.

There are too many videos and interviews for me to highlight each of them, but here's a quick rundown:
- Jenny Wanger, Product Mgr at SpotHero - The UX of DX: user testing in the invisible world of APIs
- Joe Nash, GitHub Student Program Manager - Engaging the Developers of the Future
- Ade Oshineye, Senior Staff Developer Advocate at Google - The Developer Advocate as ‘Customer Zero’

Welcome to Meetup Land, Place of (Perceived) Miracles

Who here has spent hours of their life searching Meetup, trying to configure the API, struggling to pull down the data that will show them definitively which meetups are the right ones to sponsor? ✋PJ Hagerty, founder of DevRelate, has created a tool which curates the top 20 meetups for a particular topic. It pulls from the Meetup API, so it may not be a complete list, but it's a lot of useful data with only a few clicks! 👏

Wondering what to do once you find the best meetups in your area? In this post from the archives, Matthew Revell, Founder of DevRelCon, does a great job of explaining what the role of DevRel is at a meetup, and how to bring value to the community.

Tech T-Shirts: Can't escape 'em, but we can make them better

Conference t-shirts are either the bane of your existence or the siren call of the expo hall, depending on which side of the table you're on. But for those of us who have been traveling to conferences for years, our t-shirt standards have changed. Michael Coté, Director of Technical Marketing at Pivotal, shares some opinions.

Someone Tell Me How to Build a Community Program!

This has apparently been a popular refrain lately, given the flood of answers coming our way this week. Here are the highlights:

Leo Chanea, Global Head of Community at Moovit:

The vision is the real glue that connects the community members, drives them forward, and keeps them together during tough times... Vision drives passion. Mission drives action. And action is what really gets things going. Read more.

Bryan Lynch:

Large communities start with a small core of dedicated users (SCODUs)... Once a community is off the ground, engaging the SCODUs gets harder, but it’s no less important. You now have to balance the needs of a community at large with a healthy respect for the SCODUs that give it continued life. Read more.

LibDem Expand:

Meet people where they’re at. Identify who you have on board already, and who [needs to be won] over... Once [you find them], they are whole heartedly on board! Read more.

7 Ways to Actively Manage Expectations in a Community

We often get so wrapped up in the process of launching a community that we forget to manage the community's expectations once they actually arrive (oops 😳). Fabian Pfortmüller, Co-founder of COMMUNITY, published a great article about how to set your community up for success by actively managing their expectations.

Tangents 🐰

The Marketing Mix for You

Traditional marketing tactics are usually the opposite of what works for DevRel, but in some cases, taking a lesson from our marketing counterparts can pay off. In this case, Kenneth C. Bator, Marketing Consultant & Trainer, has some solid advice:
* Determine your budget -- and keep it consistent.
* Understand your USP (unique selling proposition).
* Track and tweak -- stay flexible.

One from the Archives 📰

Content: Bane of your Existence? Or the way to your Community's Heart?

Editorial calendars: just the thing that every DevRel team wants to focus on, right? 😣 Maybe not so much. But whether you're directly in charge of your developer content or not, it's important to make sure that you -- the community expert -- have a voice in making sure the community's needs are being met. This great post from The Community Roundtable archives gives some good tips for how a technical community manager can give input and create the content that their community is actually looking for.

Speaking of how to manage developer-related content, CMSWire has two great posts about content strategy this week:
* The Case for Sharing Ownership of Your Organization's Content Strategy - Author Erika Murphy makes a good point: it's far less about who "owns" the strategy and far more about agreeing on how you will drive and manage the content strategy overall.
* Content Policies: Your First Step Toward Comprehensive Digital Policies - Once you've decided who's in charge of the content, it's time to tackle what the content will be. Keep everything straight with a clear content policy and there won't be any confusion about what you're posting, or why.

And don't forget: content isn't limited to technical blogs or Twitter. While Instagram might be a tough nut to crack, here are 17 tech companies that have figured it out and are doing (mostly) right by their developer audience.

Events 📆

Open CFPs

The Community Leadership Summit 2018 (CLS) brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. It's back in Portland this year 🙌and the CFP is open for keynotes. Each session is 15m long.

DevRelCon is the world’s leading developer relations, developer experience, and developer marketing conference. It's headed back to London in November 2018, and the CFP just launched! 🎤

Get your best ideas together and submit today.

Developer Relations Events

From webinars to conferences and local meetups, this is the place to find links to upcoming Developer Relations events. Know of one that I'm missing? Shoot me a note at [email protected].

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

In the market for a job? Take a look at this Toby collection. I'll continue to add to it each week (there are 18 new roles just this week!) and try to weed them out as the roles are filled. Know of ones that I'm missing or notice some that are no longer available? Drop me a note [email protected].

Developer Avocados 🥑

Avocado Popularity on the Rise

As we all know, Community- and Developer Relations-related jobs have been on the rise for the past few years (take a look at the job board to see proof of that!).

In case you haven't heard (tho I'm guessing you have), avocado popularity is on the rise as well. In fact, reports say that avocado consumption has increased by 241% since 2015. Want to know more about avocado production statistics? There's a graph for that.