Issue 56

Welcome! 👋

I don't know about the rest of you, but this past week came out of nowhere and kicked me hard. I heard from several other folks that it wasn't an easy week for them either. If you can relate to this sentiment, know that you've got people on your side and in your corner! For me, it was the trifecta of not feeling 100% physically, failing to take a break from work over the weekend, and my first major conference of the year.

Between those three, I've ridden the roller coaster of feeling energized by being around passionate developers and a handful of like-minded DevRelians while at SCaLE 17x, but also struggled with keeping up with work (hence the late newsletter!) and keeping myself rested enough to enjoy the highs.

But we have a new week ahead of us and a lot of content to sift through today! So grab your favorite caffeinated beverage at your favorite café (bonus: if you care to share what your favorite café is, I'm always open to hearing about new places!) and dig in.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. Thanks to our most recent sponsor, PubNub. Be sure to check out their Developer Relations Engineer position!

Tidbits 🕔

DevRel Advice Column

What does it take to get a job as a developer advocate? Is it difficult to go back to a strict developer job afterwards?

-Peggy Olson

Do you think there's a hierarchy of community needs? What would it be?

-David Spinks

I'd like to do a bit of writing this week and need inspiration.

Do you have any questions about developer relations and experience? Or about team building? Or any other subject you think I may be able to share some thoughts on?

If so, I'd love to hear them.

-Phil Leggeter

Note: He's set up a Github repo to keep track of further suggestions.

Where Do We Belong?

David Spinks sparked a great conversation around where a DevRel or community team should sit within an organization:

One of the most confusing things about community strategy is that community fits into many parts of the business. You can have community-driven marketing, product, support, content, etc...

So what department does community live in? Should it be its own department? Hub and spoke?

Jeremy Meiss's response rang true for me:

Much the same question is often asked about #devrel and the answer is often the same: wherever it fits the goals of the business the best.

How we work is all up to us.

Developer Relations is not only about holding events and talking at events, but all activities relevant to engineers; one writes programs a lot, another writes docs, the others do others. How we work is all up to us.

-Yoshi Yamaguchi

Do Analytics Right

Not everything you can measure, should be measured. Don’t be a data puker, be a data analyst. Be laser focused on the things that matter & provide actionable insights. #doanalyticsright

-Adrian Speyer

DevRel is Like an Onion

DevRel is more like an Onion when it comes to scalability in a Developer Organization/Community - every layer is connected from Code to Content to Advocacy to Evangelism to Marketing to ....

-Arkodyuti Saha

It's Not Always Possible... and that's ok!

A quote from a recent Octribe meetup:

Community Managers serve as a bridge between community goals and company goals; it's not always possible to meet community’s wants and that’s okay! @GoldieChan #cmgr #OCTRIBE

-Phoebe Shin Venkat

Make Your Work Visible

Elizabeth Kinsey recently tweeted this quote from community veteran Evan Hamilton:

"Community managers, in particular, seem to be a very humble bunch who just want to help and don't need the spotlight. The problem with this is that much of our work is invisible without a spotlight. When we're doing our jobs well, it can be hard to see it." - @evanhamilton

I couldn't agree more. This is why I tell all of my clients that they should be bubbling up their wins throughout the week to their stakeholders. Our work has to be seen in order to be understood as valuable!

Always Choose Kind.

You can spend a lifetime to build a good reputation and then ruin your efforts with less than 280 characters.

Be mindful of what you share. Be less judgmental and mean spirited. Don’t belittle people. And if given a choice between clever or kind, always choose kind. Be kind.

-Vala Afshar

Be a Developer Advocate, Not a Solution Advocate

Nader Dabit sent out this timely tweet last week:

Another important thing I’ve learned over the past year as a developer advocate:

Be agnostic about the company you work for when helping developers

Regardless of who signs your check, you should help solve developers problems even if it means recommending a competing solution

At the end of the day your job is advocating on behalf of other developers, not your company.

There will always be opportunities to help using your company’s products.

Part of the role is being aware of the trade-offs of competing solutions & learning from those communities.

and I appreciated Tirumarai Selvan's response:

In other words: Be a developer advocate, not a solution advocate!

Tangibles 🤓

7 Tips for Breaking Into DevRel

Interested in DevRel but want more information or to take it for a test drive before making a career shift? This post from Nader Dabit is full of good advice!

8 ways you can help the Streamr community grow

This post is a fantastic example of how a company can crowd-source contributions from the community!

1) Be straightforward w/needs
2) Clearly communicate how ppl can help
3) Give examples to follow
4) Offer a place for questions & suggestions

Work/Life Balance for DevRel Professionals

Jim Bennet, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, recently posted a great thread about how to balance work time and personal time, which is complicated when we're traveling so often for conferences or working odd hours to help our community members. From taking flex days to giving ourselves grace when it's been a long week, there are a lot of great tips here for anyone working in a community-centric role.

Travel Tips & Tricks

Looking for travel tips as conference season is spinning up? Martin Casado has you covered with over 20 of his own tips. Dig into the conversation as well -- others have shared their own tips and tricks there.

5 ways community projects benefit developers

If there’s one thing that successful community projects have in common, it’s that they all provide something valuable to the developers who use them.

This statement from a recent DeveloperMode blogpost has my full support! Tim O'Reilly sold me on the idea of "Create more value than you capture" years ago during my tenure at O'Reilly Media, and I think it applies most heavily to the DevRel industry.

Patrick Woods gives us 5 ways that we can use community projects to benefit developers. From open source tooling to sharing practical information, there's something applicable to every team.

Does your developer community need a forum?

One question that comes up often from clients is "Should we host a forum on our site? Or can we just go to where our community already is?" Adrian Speyer tackles this question, addressing the pros and cons of managing your own forum, in a recent post.

15 tips that help you to internationalize your Community

If you're looking to expand your community outreach into other countries, it's important to recognize that the cultural differences matter even more than the language barrier. This post from Jan Biller explains some of the mistakes to avoid when trying to internationalize your community.

Be Flexible & Willing to Iterate

I wrapped up my "Lessons Learned While Organizing a First-Year Conference" this week. In this last segment, I touch on how to be flexible and plan for problems, as well as how to plan for the future and what the future of REdeploy looks like for me.

Lady Conference Speaker: Speaker Bios

So! You need to write a speaker bio. And you’ve been trying to do it for 3 hours now, and you’ve come up with “Me make smart ideas and eat cookies, which is for C”.

In this short quote, Heidi Waterhouse has accurately described my brain every time I try to write a new speaker bio. Lucky for all of us, she's taken the time to write down some tried and true suggestions that will help all of us craft our next speaker bio.

Planning For What Happens When It Doesn’t Catch On

Community is not a "one-shot deal." It takes time and effort and revisions to figure out what will work for your specific community. As Richard Millington says in a recent post,

The more swings you take, the more you learn about what members want and what works.

Taking these first few swings is easier once you've figured out the "why" for your community. What's in it for them? What's in it for you? What's in it for your business? By figuring out what your business value is, you'll be able to define which levers to pull and where to spin up resources. Richard addressed this concept on Feverbee this week as well when he talked about "The Underlying Desire."

Tangents 🐰

My Twitch Live Coding Setup

If you're looking to start live coding, you can't go wrong with Suz Hinton's recommendations. A few years back she published a piece about what she'd learned during her first year of live coding and now she's back with an up-to-date walkthrough of her live coding setup.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

-Product Hunt Radio: The present and future of social media with Matt Navarra

-Austinpreneur: Developing Reality? Develop Relations First w/ Chuck Freedman

-Write the Docs: Minimum requirements for good tech docs, with Matt Reiner

-Real World DevOps: The Value of DevRel and Writing Technical Books with Emily Freeman

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Were you able to make it to DevRelCon Tokyo? I'd love to hear about your experience! If you're experiencing some FOMO like I am, check out these other awesome upcoming events and figure out where you're going next.

Know of an event that should be on this list? Let me know!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Engineer

Developer Relations at PubNub is all about teaching every software developer in the world how and when to use PubNub. You'll write and promote open source software to educate the masses on building real-time experiences into apps! You'll advocate on behalf of PubNub at meetups, hackathons, developer conferences, webinars, and be the developer voice to the rest of the company.

Lead Developer Evangelist

Nylas is looking for a trailblazer to be our Lead Developer Evangelist. In this role, you will serve as the official spokesperson, mediator, and translator between the Nylas technical teams and the wider developer community.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Are you on the hunt for a new DevRel Job? Check out the posting from our newest sponsor, PubNub! And don’t forget to take a look at our ever growing list of jobs in our Toby collection!

Developer Avocados 🥑

Stay Tuned for More Avocados

The talk that I'm giving this weekend at SCaLE 17x is all about the business value of Developer Relations (surprise, surprise), but I'm putting a fun twist on it. It's been a while since I first posted the origin story of the Developer Avocado and I plan to update the post shortly after this talk! It will include new information, including new terminology and more a in-depth explanation of how this analogy can help you sell the value of DevRel internally. Stay tuned!