Issue 37

Welcome! 👋

With World Mental Health Day this week, it's no surprise that there was a flood of tweets and blogposts around taking care of ourselves as we take care of our communities.

My motto for the week was

Give myself grace, but don't accept excuses.

I make that distinction because every once in a while it's easy to confuse the two. One keeps me in the direction of making progress... the other allows me to explain away my lack of motivation.

But as you're taking care of others, don't forget to give yourself grace and take care of yourself, first and foremost. After all, if you aren't taking care of you, how can you expect to have the energy to take care of others as well?

Be considerate. Be passionate. Make an impact. But don't forget to take care of your own needs.

Hang in there, friends. We're doing good, important work! Just remember to save some energy for the most important part: you! Let's keep an awareness of mental health issues and our own limitations front-of-mind every day as we work in and with our communities.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)

Tidbits 🕔

With Great Power…

We do not make better communities in tech by knocking folks down. We do it by raising more people up! Be considerate of humans in your space. Words are important - use them wisely.

-PJ Hagerty, DevRelate

Account for _all_ of your Needs

If you are a #cmgr and not accounting for BOTH deliverables (roadmaps, plans, etc) and maintenance work (engagement, relationship building, curation, programming) you are likely understaffed and overwhelmed. To be successful you need resources to do both.

-Rachel Happe

Be Human (and be Kind)

Be human on social media - how would you converse with that person in person? What's their tone and word choice?

-Catherine Walker

DevRel #RealLife

Tech Lunch @Algolia about what a #DevRel real life looks like:
- be passionate with what you do
- share the love
- test new things
- connect: with people and technologies
- travel around, write some blog posts, give some conferences…
.... and take care to not burn out!

-Gabriela Gabriel

DevRel Advice Column

Anyone have any strong recommendations for presentation remotes? I seem to be doing lots of talks and slidedeck persuasion these days.

If you know something to work well with reveal.js, even better.

-Branden Faulls

Curious... What are the most mature online community platforms based outside the USA?

-Ben Martin

Online vs. Offline, In-Person, IRL...

Online communities are named just... “online”.

While we have offline, in-person, meetup, IRL, etc to describe communities that are location-based and with a predominant physical interaction model.

Dear #cmgr colleagues, would we mind to decide one term and stick to it? 🙂

-Alfredo Morresi

Community Management Matters

If people are using tech and we want to make it better, then we need to take seriously the management and support of those people by skilled people. i.e. community management matters.

If people are using tech and harming themselves and each other, then we need to consider how both tech and people managing it can mitigate and eliminate those risks. i.e. moderation matters

Another thought on why community matters - people shouldn't be 'walking pound signs' to your company. Yes you may be selling things but those things are improving lives, making things better, or creating experiences. You bring people together to do that.

One more thing. When people are involved, empathy matters. How they may be feeling and how you understand that and let it inform what you do and how you respond.

-Serena Snoad

What do you need in order to have an impact?

Something I'm still thinking about from #CMXSummit:
Community health is a measure, not a goal. (h/t @morsla)
The goal isn't engagement, it's impact. (h/t @RichMillington)

My question is, do you need a healthy, engaged community in order to have impact?

-David Spinks

Writing “from scratch” rather than in Company Voice(TM)

When I was in school, a lot of my writing was "from scratch," using my own voice or perspective and trying not to mirror others' language too much. A lot of my recent work-writing has been writing documents while reading previous/similar work to maintain consistent voice/tone.

In a lot of cases, structure is deliberately mirrored from similar resources in order to keep mental models simpler for the end users who are trying to navigate a lot of documents. Just some reflections on #writingthedocs.

-Yulan Lin

Tangibles 🤓

Food for Thought…

I’ve seen a number of conversations lately about how those of us who travel so often work to offset any carbon footprint increased by the number of flights we take per year. Chris Adams asks that question:

For example, I one reason I haven't worked in #devrel, even if I think I'd really enjoy it, is all the flying. I can't square it with how I view climate change, but I understand why #devrel folks end up getting on so many planes. Most of the time tho, the extent of synchronous #devrel activity is stuff like passive ppt webinars, which might work, but also involve ppl tuning out a lot too, the way do with lectures at uni. Who is doing interesting, interactive, low-carbon #devrel style stuff for example? I mean Glitch is ideal for this.

He prompted a fascinating discussion with Glitch CEO Anil Dash about remote conferences and the possibility of doing more DevRel work virtually — take the time to read through the thread and resulting comments when you have a moment!

Using Stack Overflow questions to feed your content calendar

DevRel teams who have a strategy based purely on data are few and far between, which frankly, is a problem. Like every other department, we are responsible to set goals based on data that will prove our value to the company. Nexmo’s DevRel Manager Martyn Davies talks about one way their team uses data to drive decisions: by using StackOverflow questions to create a content calendar.

My Experiments with Communities

Ever wish you could get a brain-dump from someone who’s spent years experimenting with building and marketing to communities on various platforms? You’re in luck! This long and comprehensive walk-through of everything that author Venkatrangan Gokul has tried has a handful of golden nuggets in it, from how he streamlined tasks to how he sorted through hundreds of possible community sites to find which worked best for him.

Who Is This Not For?

We spend so much time trying to figure out who our audience is that we often lose sight of the more insightful question: who is our product (or community) NOT for? By turning this question on its head, Richard Millington posits we can more easily identify who our true audience is and therefore, who we should most be focusing on.

Storytime 📚

RelationshipsIRL (Community Pulse Episode 28)

This episode of Community Pulse was a very personal one for me. Sometimes being in DevRel means being lonely a good portion of the time when you're finally "home." When you spend a good percentage of your time on the road, how do you intentionally build a community in the city where you reside?

Interviews with Community Managers

From blockchain community managers to moderators, there’s something to learn from all of the roles represented within Developer Relations.

*11 Questions for Blockchain Community Manager, Jelena Djuric

*A Day in the Life of a Moderator (MOD)

One from the Archives 📰

Take care of yourself, your team, and your customer—in that order

If you've ever heard me give a presentation about burnout, you know that I emphasize one thing above all: your priorities should be as follows:
1) You
2) Your Community
3) Your Company

This article gives tangible advice on how to do just that. Take a few minutes to skim it, whether or not you feel burned out right now. Mental health and burnout prevention means actively working to keep yourself in a healthy state, not just making changes once you're in the thick of it.

Events 📆

Conference Talks & Recaps, Fall 2018

As we’ve mentioned many times now, conference season is in full swing, which also means that videos and slides are starting to be released from recent conferences! I’ve put together a collection so you can keep track of the growing list, but for this week, you can see Bill Doerrfield’s slides from API City 2018, Rachel Happe’s recap of TheCR Connect, and Richard Millington's writeup of his talk at CMX Summit.

Developer Relations Events

Looking for a different kind of professional development conference? I'm incredibly excited about Empower, coming up in just a few weeks -- Nov 1 in San Francisco. As I've said before, it’s incredibly important that DevRel has a voice at the table when it comes to product and road-map decisions, but we so rarely engage with Product teams outside of our own companies. I’m hoping that this conference is an opportunity to understand where they’re coming from and open doors to working collaboratively on a regular basis.

Interested in attending? Use discount code MARY_GRACE to snag your ticket. Early Bird pricing ends on Monday, so don't miss out! Hope to see you there.

Not able to make it to SF? Check out this list of other events happening around the world.

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!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

There's no sign of the job market slowing down, with 131 open roles that I've come across this week! Looking for advice on how to apply for a DevRel role? Keep an eye out for more resources coming soon from Alejandra Quetzalli Olvera-Novack. If you're a pro, please help out by offering suggestions!

Developer Avocados 🥑

Community for the Community Builders

Don't forget that if you need advice, empathetic ears, or just a place to know that you're not alone, there's a community of DevRel professionals just for you. If you're doing DevRel professionally, sign up here. We're here to help!