Issue 36

Welcome! 👋

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll see that I'm trying to revamp my morning routine... and by revamp I mean create one 😅 Having routines are important but seem difficult at the same time -- what happens if you get bored with your routine? Is it still effective? How do we mix it up so that it's still exciting but not so much that we aren't sure what the "right" thing to do is?

The same thing applies to our communities -- we need to establish a routine, so that they know what to expect from us. Whether that's live coding on Thursdays, hosting meetups on the 3rd Tuesday of the month or open office hours every Wednesday, having a consistent cadence is essential to keep people engaging.

However, don't let the rigidity of a schedule keep you from being spontaneous. Found a cool new tip that you want to share? Go live with it! Hit a stride with a blogpost? Don't sit on that sucker -- publish it now! Find yourself in a good conversation with community members? See if they want to meet up more regularly for coffee (virtual or otherwise)! An open source contributor makes a new contribution? Throw some swag in the mail for them!

As we embark on Q4 and wrap up 2018, let's keep that balance in mind. A healthy mix of routine and spontaneity keeps us all from getting bored with what we're doing and makes sure that our community knows they can count on us for consistency as well as genuine fun.

Have fun finding the spontaneity in your week this week, and feel free to share any tips about building new routines. I'd love to hear what works for you!

Best,
-Mary (@mary_grace)

Tidbits 🕔

We are many things, but we are NOT...

Repeat after me. #DevRel is NOT sales engineering.

-Emily Freeman

So that's what we aren't... what ARE we?

Developer Advocacy/Relations === developer education

-Max Katz

Are all "coders" developers?

So why is #devrel a thing, but #opsrel isn’t?

-Robert Tarrall

I left my opinion… what’s yours?

Product vs. People

💡A thought - Difference between marketing and developer relations: Marketing targets a group of people trying to build product awareness. #DevRel is about building long-lasting relationships with individuals/communities, establishing trust, encouraging the use of your product.

-Anna Ossowski

DevRel Advice Column

Chances are if you’ve been following the newsletter for a while you’ve seen a handful of articles from Community by Association. Founder Majorie Anderson is looking for feedback on how to expand and improve the blog. If you read it, check out her tweet for more info on how you can help.

Social media community managers, are Buffer and http://Commun.it still the best tools on the market for scheduling and interaction or are there others that are taking preference? Advice appreciated!

-Darragh Doyle

One question for my DevRel friends: do you control corporate social accounts, or is that the responsibility of someone else?

-Tyranny Siren

Tangibles 🤓

Speaking Tips

Still looking for last minute speaking tips? I’ve got a short round-up of them for you this week!

A 20 step plan to being viscerally horrified of public speaking and giving a talk anyway from Dave Josephsen
A Twitter thread from Mark West
The Essential Speaker Checklist (an oldie but a goodie!) from Esther Snippe

If you’re looking for a little more personalized training, VM Brasseur is my go-to! She provides training on writing and submitting CFPs as well as delivering fantastic talks. Let me know if you’d like an intro!

How to Create a Passionate Community

Many of us who work in Developer Relations are stereotypical people pleasers — we want to make sure everyone’s having a good time and getting value out of our work and being helped in exactly the right ways. But sometimes making sure everyone is happy stifles the dissent in a group, and dissent is necessary for a healthy community!

As Jeffrey Bonkieicz writes in this article about creating passionate communities:

A community with no dissent is a top-down, Soviet-style structure where might makes right. There’s no room for this in the modern, more democratic community structure. Companies need to allow for dissent because they need to know where they’re failing. They need to know where the product is weak. They need to know how they can improve it. They need to know where their market stands. Communities are excellent listening grounds for companies to learn about how their product is actually being used.

Community Metrics: Share of Voice

If your company is starting to pursue “Share of Voice” (SOV) as a metric to track to determine the success of the work that you’re doing, congrats! And also, buckle up. There might be some rough roads ahead!

Luckily, Matthew Broberg has you covered with this comprehensive explanation of what SOV is, why it’s helpful, and how to implement it in your company.

Tangents 🐰

How to conduct a channel audit in 6 steps

Writing content can be a long, laborious process… all for a few dozen, hundred, or if you’re lucky, thousand page views. But publishing shouldn’t be the last step in the process — metrics and tracking should be. This article from Catchy walks through how to figure out whether what you’re doing is actually useful and effective for your community. In their words:

You need to take stock of your efforts by analysing, evaluating, and reflecting on how your content is of value to and discovered by the developers you aim to connect with… Yes, it does take time but the insights you’ll gain will be worth the effort.

The ‘always-on’ mentality is terrible — here’s how to switch off without getting left behind

Worried about turning off Twitter, email, or Slack for fear of missing something? There's actually a new name for that -- nomophobia. We all need to be better at prioritizing our time, personally and professionally, and this article acknowledges how difficult that is. From offering suggestions of how to leave it behind without feeling guilty to apps that will track app usage, there's a little something for everyone, whether or not your focus is social media.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcast Episodes 🎧

In this week's round-up of podcasts are two very different episodes:

This Week in Enterprise Tech: Oracle Cloud Developer Relations
Community Signal: The Community Manager You Think You Can’t Afford

I haven’t had time to listen to either yet, but you can be sure that I’ll be digging into them this week!

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

CMX Summit and The CR Connect both happened this week, along with API City, which means there was a bit of information overload on Twitter! Here’s my top favorite tweet from each event. Be sure to check out the event hashtags for more info!

#CMXSummit:

"An audience watches you, a community sustains you" Truth!

-Arleen C

#TheCRConnect:

"The community manager is the website designer of 1996. Your business may not know you need one but soon you will realize you can't live with out one.”

-Keely Sorokti, quoting Heather McGowan

#APICity2018:

Love hearing @PetuniaGray give examples of good API docs and how to drive adoption of your product based on the observations you’re making along the way! Who says #DevRel doesn’t have metrics?! #APICity2018

-Mary Thengvall

Interested in catching up with other DevRel folks IRL? Take a look at the current list of upcoming events. Know of one that I’m missing? Drop me a line with the relevant information.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Lead - Kauri

Kauri is hiring a Developer Relations Lead to help grow the Open Source Ethereum ecosystem. Kauri is the Ethereum community's knowledge network and works with pioneering blockchain projects to crowdsource technical content on how to build blockchain based applications. You’ll learn how to build applications on Ethereum using the emerging web3 technical stack, and help the community do the same through conference appearances, participating in social media, and writing technology guides on kauri!

Deep Learning Developer Evangelist

Samsung NEXT’s MissingLink product team is in search of a Developer Evangelist with a deep passion for Data Science and Deep Learning. MissingLink.ai has built a platform that accelerates the development and research around AI. Our platform automates most of the day to day tasks that Engineers and Data Scientists have to take to develop incredible AI machines.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Be sure to check out the job listing from this week’s new sponsor: ConsenSys. Thanks as always for your support and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re interested in sponsoring DevRel Weekly in the future.

Interested in one of the other 100+ jobs that are currently open? Take a stroll through the Toby Collection to see what piques your interest. Know of other job openings that are available but aren’t listed? Hit reply and be sure to let me know!

Developer Avocados 🥑

An Avocado a Day Keeps the LDL Away

Speaking of routines... it turns out that the health benefits of avocados are cumulative. It's the compounds in avocados, not just the healthy fats, that make it so effective in lowering our bad cholesterol (LDL). Excuse me while I go garnish my lunch with avocado...