Issue 52

Welcome! 👋

Happy 1st Birthday to DevRel Weekly! It's hard to believe that this all started a little over one year ago with a few RSS feeds and a lot of late nights pulling together just the right links. Over the past year, I've hired a part-time Content & Sponsor Strategy Manager, learned more about Zapier tasks and filters than I would have ever imagined, and sorted through an average of 600 links every week to bring you this newsletter.

I've also gained an appreciation for data and connecting behavioral patterns with the overall maturity of our industry. This issue looks fairly standard from here on out, but for those of you are curious about what's happened in the DevRel industry in the past year and where I think it might be headed for the next 52 issues of DevRel Weekly, you'll want to check out this new blogpost from yours truly.

If you make it all the way through the post, you'll notice that I've included some information about future plans for this newsletter toward the end. (Don't worry -- it's not going anywhere!) TL;DR: I love this newsletter and I love this community. I’m so grateful that I took the leap and decided to start this newsletter a year ago. However, I’ve also realized in the past year that creating a weekly newsletter is difficult and I'm looking for ways to make it more sustainable. You'll want to read the blogpost for the full story, but the short version is that I've launched a DevRel Weekly Patreon in an attempt to make this project more sustainable from a financial standpoint.

On the surface, nothing will change. The newsletter will continue to go out on a weekly basis for free to anyone who subscribes. But for those of you who are willing to take things one step further, I ask that you become a patron. With your help, I can properly prioritize the work and also afford some much-needed assistance. Your monthly donation will offset the hours and money spent creating a high-quality newsletter every week and will allow me to continue producing content that advances the Developer Relations industry as a whole. With your support, I can continue to create this newsletter as a free resource for others just like you and me, who care about our technical communities and want to do our best to advocate for their needs.

As always, your support and encouragement mean the world to me. Thanks so much to those of you who have reached out over the past 52 issues to let me know how much the newsletter and the DevRel community means to you! Together, let's continue to change the DevRel industry for the better.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)

Tidbits 🕔

People Skills > Technical Expertise

Chad Fowler just laid out his 7 values for DevRel at Microsoft, and only one of them actually involves technical expertise. All the rest are people skills. If you are surprised, you probably haven't been paying attention.

-Jeremiah Dooley

Twitter Recap from the FOSDEM Community Room

The FOSDEM Community room was in full swing last weekend and if I'm honest, the tweets were giving me a bit of FOMO. Check out the tweet stream. I'll be sure to post a link to the videos once they're posted! This may be my favorite quote from the event:

"The major problems are not much technological as sociological. Soft skills are harder than 'hard skills'. We call them process skills."

-Sage Sharp

Intuitive vs. Informed Decisions

A good developer experience is making it so a developer will succeed with intuitive decisions rather than informed decisions

-David McKay

Meet Developers Where They Are

Important point for #DevRel: When you say “Meet the developers where they are” it means what conferences do they go to, even if those are not in a “market” you sell in.

If the developers you want to reach go to a conference in Malaysia, but you don’t sell in Malaysia, you should still be there because that’s where your developers are.

If your ‘selling’ market is North America, but that’s not where your developers go to conferences, no amount of sponsorship or attendance at N.A. events will reach your developers.

In other words, don’t discount an event because it’s not in your “market” … unless you want to miss your developers.

-David G. Simmons

Engagement Wins Over Vanity Metrics

Community contributions > Follower count

-Francesc Campoy

Track all of the Elements Carefully

If you are building an open source project, code is key, but it is one artifact of a strong community. Make sure your code review is open, accessible, and clear, but also focus on open roadmaps, issue tracking, collaboration, and leadership. Track these other elements carefully.

-Jono Bacon

Building Connections Within Your Community is Key

An important skill for any #CMGR: networking & identifying opportunities within their own circles.

"I know someone who is doing what you're doing" is better than "Sure, I can help" if you aren't a subject matter expert. Build trust and it will pay you back in spades.

-Shannon Emery

Tangibles 🤓

Motivating Community Members to Provide Feedback... and then Collecting It

We all know it's important to collect feedback, but there's no denying that it's not always the easiest task. Two articles appeared on my radar this week: the first dove into how to motivate your community to submit feedback and the second addressed how to collect said feedback.

What's been effective for you in the past? I'm always eager to hear success stories! Just hit reply.

Interested in collecting feedback internally as well? Patti Sanchez offers tips on how to use digital communication to drive digital change. She offers a tip that can be applied to external communities as well:

What if, rather than going quiet after kickoff, leaders model the behaviors they want to see by using digital tools to deliver a steady stream of messages to their employees and continually gather and respond to their feedback?

Hat tip to Keely Sorotki for the link!

5 Key Community Strategy Principles

Community guru Jono Bacon gave a lightning talk at the 2018 Core Summit. He's written up information about the talk and expanded on the 5 key community strategy principles that he touched on in this recent blogpost.

Developer relations in sub-Saharan Africa

Just like DevRel looks slightly different at different companies, it also changes with different cultures around the world. This is just one of many reasons why DevRel starts with listening. Africa's Talking DevRel Lead Anthony Kiplimo recently wrote a piece about what DevRel looks like in sub-Saharan Africa.

Measuring Your Member’s Sense of Community

I'm not the only one who dug into data analysis this week! Elijah Van Der Geissen published a guest post on CMX Hub this past week. He'd been struggling to increase retention for his volunteers and had been running a survey for years that wasn't returning quality answers. He took the time to figure out what really mattered to his community, revise his questions, and then analyze the data. Read more about his discoveries.

If you're also struggling with engagement and retention, take a look at Majorie Anderson's recent post. She walks through identifying the behaviors you'd like to see and then understanding how to influence those behaviors within your community.

The Value of The Top 0.00001% of Members

Steven Pruitt has become popular lately as the man responsible for a third of the content on Wikipedia. Community members like Steven may not come along that often, but chances are you have someone similar to Steven in your community right now.

Perhaps they're the community member who takes care of issues for other community members or answers questions after hours when no one else is available. As Rich Millington points out in a recent blogpost, the value that these members bring to your business is incalculable. Make sure you're treating them as such!

Don’t do the minimum required to keep Steven happy…blow his expectations completely out of the water.

Successfully Launching a Community

If you're looking for resources on how to launch a new community, this piece from Mickael Ruau is a great place to start! He walks you through communication issues with your teammates as well as how to find the right channels to promote the new community, in addition to which tools you should consider using.

The original piece is in French, but Google Translate in Chrome does a good job of getting the principles across.

Tangents 🐰

How to Convince Your CFO to Invest in Customer Experience

The hardest thing about Developer Experience (DevEx or DX) is that you need to find a way to make a business case for pursuing the investment. As this recent article from CMS Wire says,

Many companies find it difficult to measure returns on their CX [customer experience] investments because it’s not immediately clear how to tie qualitative improvements in the customer experience to financial outcomes.

They follow up this problem statement with four key steps to follow to convince stakeholders that CX and DevEx are worth investing both time and money in.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

Buckle up -- there are a LOT of fantastic podcast episodes for you to indulge in over the weekend while you're running errands or cleaning the house.

-After Pulse: Big Company, Little Company - Community Pulse. Jason & PJ sync up after our latest episode to chat about their personal experiences with DevRel at big companies versus smaller companies.

-Céline Schillinger on Engagement and Community - The Days of Change. Céline Schillinger talks about how leadership must change in order to create ownership and engagement at work.

-Communities are a-coming and you’d better be ready for them - diginomica. Rachel Happe’s upbeat assessment of community has been a long time coming.

-The Role of Credibility in Community Management - Community Signal. Ben Whitelaw, the engagement lead for the Engaged Journalism Accelerator, asks when Facebook is going to start taking bigger risks to solve their moderation problem.

-What Makes Real People Care About Your Social Media? - Social Pros Podcast. Andy Sernovitz, CEO of SocialMedia.org, joins the Social Pros Podcast to discuss the core elements of a successful social media community and getting real people to talk about your brand.

DevRel: A Personal Viewpoint

As I mentioned in my blogpost about DevRel Weekly data, there's been a recent influx of personal accounts of how folks got into DevRel or what it's meant to them to be a part of this community. While I'm still trying to figure out the best way to display all of those on an ongoing basis, I wanted to highlight these two pieces.

The first one resonated with me as someone who has been asked "So what's your normal day look like?" more times that I can count. I completely understand the dread that Zan Marken refers to at the beginning of his post. I like how he's reframed it to reflect "What is it that you do as a DevRel practitioner?" That seems like a far more manageable question!

The second post is from Oliver Chaudhuri, who walks through the transitions he had to make when switching from editorial work that served his internal community to working with the external community. I have a similar background, so I found myself nodding along with his suggestions. One editorial note about this piece: the article is written in German, so while Google Translate does a decent job, it can be a bit more difficult to read than some others.

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Planning on attending a professional development conference sometime this year? Take a peek at our list of upcoming events around the world to see if one is right for you. Don’t worry if you don’t see one that sparks your interest right now, we’re constantly adding to the list so check back frequently!

Unlocking the Business Value of Developer Relations

I've been getting a lot of people requesting the TL;DR of my book recently. The short version is if there was a TL;DR, there wouldn't be a whole book written about it 😜But if you haven't had a chance to read the book yet though, you're in luck! Vanilla Forums is hosting a webinar about the topic with me on Feb 19th. Sign up today!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Want to take the next step up on your career ladder? Check out this collection of jobs to see if your next big opportunity is available now!

Developer Avocados 🥑

Avocado Shipment Volume Data

In case you're interested in avocado data in addition to DevRel data, the Hass Avocado Board can tell you how many pounds of avocados have gotten shipped in the past few weeks, as well as what they predict shipments will be through June 2019. Let's get guac-y with that data.