Welcome! đź‘‹
For most of us involved in Developer Relations and community building, our passion for communities extends beyond our professional lives. This week, I'm off building a different kind of community with the help of a little amphibian called an axolotl.
While I'm out there, I'm also grateful for my professional community, who's keeping this newsletter going while I'm offline! Taylor Barnett is taking the reins this week, talking about everything from empathy-driven documentation to developer experience to what drives us to be involved in technical communities.
She's the lead Community Engineer at Stoplight, an API development platform for designing, mocking, testing, and documenting web APIs. Taylor gets an immense sense of fulfillment in helping people build and learn things while still getting to geek out in a specific area of technology. She wants to help someone do something they couldn’t do last week, and it’s why she does DevRel. In her free time, Taylor rock climbs with a badass group of women in the Austin area, hangs out with her corgi, Yoda, and tries to find the funkiest sour beers on the planet.
Thanks also to Docker, DevRel Weekly's newest sponsor. They're hiring a Senior Developer Advocate specializing in Java. Check out the full job description below!
Until next week,
-Mary, @mary_grace
Events 📆
Developer Relations Events
Summer is winding down which means conference season is winding up! Check out all the awesome upcoming events in this collection.
gettoby.com
Jobs 👩‍💻
Senior Developer Advocate, Java Ecosystem
Docker is hiring a Senior Developer Advocate to help developers and operations professionals move their applications to the Docker platform. You’ll be a leader in the field of building, deploying, and managing applications. You’ll use your expertise to help developers outside of Docker understand how to build and administer applications using the platform and will work out in the community, through conference appearances, participating in social media, blogging, writing technology guides and producing videos. If this sounds like a role for you, we’d love to hear from you!
docker.com
Algolia Developer Advocate
The Algolia Developer Relations team is looking to grow and would love to have you be a part of the team! Developers make up a large part of our community, and Algolia Developer Advocates play a crucial role in keeping developers both informed and inspired about what’s possible. Choose your adventure with writing code and blogging, speaking and traveling or helping with partnerships!
lever.co
Jobs 👩‍💻
Developer Relations Jobs
Amazing new jobs keep popping up like this one from DevRel Weekly's newest sponsor, Docker! Be sure to check out their Senior Developer Advocate role as well as many others in this collection.
gettoby.com
Guest Post đź‘«
On Left Pad and Empathy
One of the topics that I have been having multiple discussions over the last few years is empathy. Myles Borin gave a talk officially titled On Left Pad and Empathy but I like the alternate title much better, “On Writing and Consuming APIs with Empathy: Humaning is hard.” I feel like empathy is at the core of DevRel and this talk is a great place to start.
youtube.com
Empathy-Driven Developer Documentation
Another empathy-related talk, Empathy-Driven Developer Documentation, from Kat King at Twilio, is focused on documentation and how to empathically leverage user feedback to build a great developer experience. One of the highlights of the talk is how to deal with soul-crushing level feedback about our platforms.
writethedocs.org
Share Knowledge Not Features
If you have never seen Adam DuVander’s Share Knowledge Not Features website and blog post, I highly recommend checking it out. I currently work pretty closely with marketing, and it is something that I think a lot about any time we “present” ourselves. Like in the Super Mario Brothers analogy in the piece, tell me about your fireballs, not the flower.
shareknowledgenotfeatures.com
Hero Making
One of the OG’s John Sheehan (Runscope, formerly IFTTT and Twilio) has a talk on Hero Making from a few years ago. “Helping developers be successful at whatever it is that they wanted to be successful at” is one of my guiding principles. Also, the product has to come first because it is tough to build a community around a product that stinks.
heavybit.com
It can’t just be a pile of parts
In It can’t just be a pile of parts, Anil Dash talks about how many developer experiences are just a pile of parts. I know earlier on in my career I would give up on tools just because setup and configuration were too confusing to a junior developer. I’m probably not the only one, but it is why I fell in love with the Twilio API because they gave me more than just a pile of parts.
medium.com
