Issue 230  August 11th 2023

For the past few weeks, I've been deep in the weeds of strategic planning and data wrangling for my day job, and logistics and organizational planning for my Burning Man camp. It's led to some interesting conversations about the similarities between communities of any type, and strengthened my belief that Developer Relations is, at its core, community building for a technical audience.

While I know many people have very divisive opinions about Burning Man (most people tend to either love it or hate it 😅), the fact that a city of 70,000+ people can come together for a single week in the middle of a desert and create a welcoming, inclusive, supportive environment always seems like a small miracle to me. Now that I'm co-leading a camp, I know that it takes a lot of work alongside that miracle 😅 but there's something special about being able to return to the same place year after year and know that no matter what has happened in your past year, the community will always be there.

Here's to finding (and creating) communities like this wherever we go!

Best,
Mary (Twitter, Bluesky)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. If you're looking for community engagement benchmarks, you might be in luck! David Spinks pointed me in the direction of a new Community Benchmark Report that was released 2 weeks ago. I'll be digging into it soon and look forward to hearing what you think as well!

DevRel Weekly