Welcome! 👋

This has been a whirlwind week! Thanks for your patience with this newsletter issue. Between my laptop debacle and my keynote at Gluecon, I was taking my own advice and pushing anything and everything off of my plate that wasn't absolutely essential to get me through the day.

As we close out the month of May, which is Mental Health Awareness Month here in the United States, I've been focusing on this mentality more and more in order to not only prevent but protect against burnout. What's essential? What's necessary? What's fulfilling and satisfying? What can (and should!) be delegated? What can be documented so that it's easier in the future?

I've been going through the book How to Not Always be Working to answer some of these questions. As people who love to build communities, our work often bleeds into our personal life in a way that makes it difficult to tell the difference. And with the mental health crisis in tech continuing to rear its ugly head, we need to be making sure that we're acknowledging these issues and addressing them head-on as they come up.

I'm grateful for companies like Vimeo, who are aware of these issues and are willing to address them with their employees. I'll actually be in NYC the week of June 3, leading a panel at Vimeo about burnout: how to prevent it as well as how to spot it in yourself as well as in your employees.

Want to chat while I'm in NYC? I've set up a handful of casual coaching meetings: 2-hour sessions with individuals and companies to brainstorm upcoming projects, walk through current initiatives, and get feedback on their DevRel and community programs. Snag a spot or send me an email for more information.

Before we jump into the awesome content from this week, I wanted to give out a special shoutout to our new sponsor, DevRelCon San Francisco. It's a fantastic opportunity to interact with and learn from other DevRel, Community, and Developer Experience professionals.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

P.S. Co-Matter just launched their annual survey about The State of Communities. If you have a few extra minutes this weekend, please take part!

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DevRel Career Advice

Looking for some career advice from folks who have been in the trenches for years?

Richard Millington starts us off with a good one:

If you don’t love research, identifying costs, project planning, developing benchmarks, getting internal support, and building decision trees, don’t become a community strategist.

He explores this concept in more depth in this blogpost, explaining that while these are the less attractive bits of community building, they're intrinsic to your success.

Lisa Devaney dives into 13 myths about Community Management next, highlighting objections that we might hear from our stakeholders as well as beliefs we may be holding ourselves.

Jeanne Meister took an interesting approach to the idea of automating work in a recent Forbes article. Rather than focusing on AI, she explored self-automation, looking at jobs where the work could be simplified, delegated, and most importantly, repeatedly done without human intervention. As we continue to explore which metrics are the right ones to track and how to reach out to each and every one of our community members, these automation tools are going to become a more important part of our job. We should begin to ask this question right along with Jeanne:

How can job automation become less a top-down mandate and more a bottom-up movement?

Lastly, I recently spoke on a panel with Bear Douglas, Vanessa Diaz, and Gabriela de Queiroz. We gave advice on how to join the DevRel industry as well as landmines to watch out for and how to find the right company for you. Check out a sampling of the tweets from the attendees in this Moment.

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