DevRel Weekly - Issue 69 - Metrics, Event Recaps, and the Impact We Have.

Welcome! 👋

My sincere apologies for this delayed newsletter! One of the most crucial tools in my newsletter workflow changed their UI and in doing so, broke most of the functionality that I use, which has made my week a little less fun and a lot more stressful. I'm working on implementing an alternative for the weeks to come, but I appreciate your patience in the meantime!

Here's hoping your week has been stress-free and full of motivation. If you're in need of job motivation, perhaps this Developer Advocate role at Rasa will be a good fit for you! Be sure to check out their listing in the Jobs section below for more information.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

DevRel Advice Column

In your speaker notes, do you include bits on the important points that you already know by heart?

-Tierney Cyren

Currently previewing #forum and #communitymanagement platforms for use in a dev community. What's your fav and why?

-Lyn Muldrow

Measure the Cost of the Problem

We often try to measure the benefit of collaboration, but sometimes it's easier to measure the cost of the problem, then deploy the collab technique or technology and see if the problem goes away.

-Dennis Pearce

What Qualifies as Good Swag?

Good work, Team @discovercatcat. This is exactly what swag should be: (1) rewarding contribution, (2) personalized, (3) surprising, (4) useful, and (5) attractive, consistent desirable design.

-Jono Bacon

Why is "Community Manager" a Difficult Role? (A Thread)

This Twitter thread from a Community Manager at Udacity expresses a lot of my feelings from my decade as a Technical Community Manager.

Being a community manager is tough as hell because #1 EVERYONE thinks they can do your job, and they love to cm-splain to you about it #cmgr #cmx #pleasestop

Click through to read the rest.

Tangibles 🤓

What is DevRel? The Terms, the Titles, the Technicalities.

Wondering what all of the various DevRel titles and terms mean? I took the time to write my thoughts down for Vanilla Forums. Let me know what you think!

Why Orbit is better than Funnel for developer relations

We've long tried to make DevRel fit into traditional business standards followed by Marketing and Sales, among other departments. But what if we create our own standards... ones that actually represent the business value that we produce, rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?

Josh Dzielak and Patrick Woods took the time to write up their idea of an Orbit Model, replacing conversion with connection.

Empathy and the Technical Writer

Content management is likely one of the most difficult pieces of Developer Relations. When you're responsible for not only writing technical content, but also making sure that you're keeping other folks on track with an editorial calendar, empathy becomes even more necessary than usual.

Will Kelly puts it this way:

At its heart, technical writing is a people game. The more energy you put to working with people the better you will collaborate with your team. Empathy will also improve how you interview subject matter experts.

Developer Relations And Data Science

Making data-driven decisions is difficult when most DevRel teams are struggling with what data to track. This blogpost from KrunchData breaks down how to use practices from ESG investing to determine which metrics are most beneficial.

With statistical analysis like this, DevRel can start making a more defensible, scientific case to management that doing certain DevRel activities will lead to an improvement in company performance.

Want a second opinion? Carrie Melissa Jones was recently interviewed by Honeycommb about metrics, among other things:

When getting started, I always recommend tracking growth and meaningful engagement metrics (what meaningful engagement means varies from community to community). Growth and engagement will always be relevant, so you’ll need them as a benchmark.

Tangents 🐰

Don’t Pee in the Pool

Jake Dohm sent me this piece from Seth Godin this past week. While not strictly related to Developer Relations, as Jake says,

The community is a pool. No matter what size the pool is, and how little people think their negative actions effect it, it all comes around 😄

Seth wraps up the post with this thought:

The culture of the place we work, the vibe of the community where we live. It’s all more connected than we realize.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

Video Content 101 - Community Pulse
Community & Developer Advocacy at Google - We Belong Here: Lessons from Unconventional Paths to Tech
Microsoft's Chloe Condon On all Things Developer Advocacy - The New Stack Makers
Season 1 Wrap-up of Under the Hood of Developer Marketing: Part 1 and Part 2

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

This time of year I feel like conferences are all everyone is thinking about! What events are you attending this season? If you’re still looking for a conference or meetup to attend, check out this collection in Toby!

Why should I care about DevRel anyway?

Emily Freeman and Nicole Forsgren recently spoke at Velocity Conference and Sylvia Botros tweeted a fantastic summary thread.

DevRelCon San Francisco 2019 Retrospective

In case you missed it, DevRelCon San Francisco happened on June 6-7, and in case I had any chance of forgetting its occurrence, there were 867+ tweets coming through my system to prove it!

There's too much to cover in this small area, so you'll have to keep an eye out for upcoming videos on DevRel.net, but for now, here are a few highlights:

While there were many talks with awesome takeaways, Naomi Pentrel's presentation of this adaptable framework for creating a DevRel strategy struck me as the most immediately relevant. One of the major things the DevRel industry is lacking is business skills, and Naomi's guide goes a long way toward equipping you to build a strategy for your team.
If you're a visualization nerd like me, you'll love this graph from Connected Action that walks through all of the tweets about DevRelCon.
Developer Mode was awesome enough to gather a list of highlights from Day 1 in this Twitter moment.
Hoopy wrote a retrospective of the event.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate

Rasa is looking for a passionate developer advocate to join them at their office in San Francisco and help them grow their open source community. The developer relations team at Rasa owns the full funnel from developers first hearing about Rasa to contributing to our open source products and has one simple goal: constantly simplifying the experience with our products so that developers can get started faster, build better AI assistants or contribute to our open source.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

It’s no secret looking for a new job is a beast of a project. But I’ve done the first part for you and compiled an extensive list of open positions. You can find it in this Toby collection!