DevRel Weekly - Issue 75 - Insatiable Curiosity, Showing Your Impact, and Cooking Tips

Welcome! 👋

I hope your week has been a good one! It's been a hectic one for me, but full of lots of good opportunities and fun moments connecting with the DevRel community. Bonus: It's Thursday morning in San Francisco and DevRel Weekly is hitting your inboxes right on schedule... achievement unlocked! 🎉

I've been thinking a lot about what makes a good leader recently -- is it the way they lead? they way they treat those that they're leading? the knowledge that they share? What is it that makes them better than the others? I came across this article this week thanks to Rotana Ty's tweet and my counterpart Kate's killer instinct. The premise is that successful leaders are insatiably curious. I find this quality often in Developer Relations professionals. They too want to "better understand the root cause of the problem and not focus on offering temporary fixes." I'd encourage you to take the time to read this article this week and learn how to engage your "curiosity muscle."

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Have Fun with Your Community

Engaging with your community can come in many forms — even polls about ice cream! Don't forget that sometimes, engagement means stepping away from the technical and having a bit of fun, as Hem illustrated this week.

DevRel Advice Column

What would your ideal developer/hacking/maker community look like?

-Amy Dickens

What's the best thing you've read or listened to on the topic of building communities / networks?

Putting a talk together and looking for inspiration.

-Erik Torenberg

Arkodyuti Saha started by asking this question specifically of Indian developer communities, but is interested in communities around the world as well! The poll is now closed, but leave him a comment to let him know about your practices.

Do you run #Meetups on Weekdays?

Be Engaging to Encourage Engagement

Engagement is not the result of benefits... it’s the result of engaging [your community] in a meaningful way. You have to BE engaging to encourage engagement.

-Rachel Happe

Focus on the Positive

...If you work in dev rel, don't devalue technologies that you don't like. It's punching down. Talk about the things that make you excited, and share knowledge about why they are great.

-Brandon West

Writing Content 101

Happy Monday! Today in #devrel life, here's my writing process:
1) Write very opinionated first draft of my documentation that sounds like pre-coffee Yulan
2) Walk away and come back tomorrow
3) Rewrite it to sound... more like publishable documentation
4) Ask for peer review

-Yulan Lin

Tangibles 🤓

Effectively Showing Community Impact

Understanding the function of your community is the first step in effectively proving the impact (and value) of your community. Without this foundational knowledge, you won't be able to accurately represent the value to your stakeholders. This article from Community by Association gives a few examples of possible business objectives that the community can impact in order to get you thinking about the various options.

Harnessing the Power of Developer Advocacy across the Kin Ecosystem

Chase Barker recently documented a few observations from his personal experiences starting a developer advocacy program at Kin. From building good relationships from the start to expanding their reach by finding developers who were particularly engaged, this is a great read for those who are new to the industry.

Following Cooking Recipes Makes You a Clearer Writer

Most of you know that I love analogies that help us understand deeper concepts, and Amara Graham knocked it out of the park with this one. She walks through the importance of following recipes while cooking in order to make it a better overall experience and then quickly pivots to explain how good recipes follow the same format as good documentation.

I found another cooking analogy in an older article this week. Jason Lengstorf equated his cooking skills (with the right tooling, of course) to developer experience:

Like in cooking, if our development tools are well-suited to the task at hand, we can do excellent work without worrying about the underlying details.

These two articles will be great reading material as you enjoy your next home-cooked meal.

10 Steps for Building a Community

If you’re relatively new to Developer Relations and Community Building, it can be a bit overwhelming to know where to start. Two recent blogposts cover a good amount of ground on how to build on a community and how to engage with your community in forums.

Community Manager Strategies for Vacations, Holidays & Taking Time Off

As July wraps up, hopefully you've taken the time to relax a bit during these slower months. If you haven't, Adrian Speyer's recent blogpost will hopefully give you some tips on how to do so soon. If you need a little more convincing, this article from Dan Leonard reiterates why it's so important.

Develop Five Ideas and Test Them

I fully support Rich Millington’s suggestion to come up with multiple possible approaches to solving a problem. Being able to pull various “levers,” knowing that at any moment you could decide that one isn’t working as well as you’d hoped and pivot to the next is a freeing experience that allows you to serve your community’s needs rather than feeling locked into a single metric.

Sample Speaker's Rider

Do you ever wish you had a list of questions to ask conference organizers before you agree to speak? Or perhaps a way to check all of your requirements off the list before filling out a CFP? Josh Simmons has taken the time to write up a sample speaker rider which takes into account setup, accessibility, representation, safety, and more.

Storytime 📚

Developer Relations Down the Stack

A few weeks back, IBM Developer featured their first interview with one of their Developer Advocates. This week, author Dave Nugent sat down with Marek Sadowski to chat about the difference between advocating for DevOps communities and API or application developers. Be sure to check out the interview and follow the full series.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

How Atlassian Tracks Community Metrics with Celina Zamora - C2C Podcast.
How do you develop yourself and your code while fighting off trolls with Ali Spittel - CodeNewbies

Events 📆

DevRelCon San Francisco Talks Released

More DevRelCon San Francisco talks have been released over the past few weeks. Here’s a sampling:

Planning Your Team’s DevRel Strategy from Naomi Pentrel
Personas: you’re doing it wrong from Claire Hunsaker
Building an enterprise developer marketing program from scratch from Luke Kilpatrick.
What’s brewing and cooking in your open source community? Part 1 and Part 2 from Alison Yu and Shilla Saebi.
Embracing the hobbyist persona from Tarun Gangwani.

Developer Relations Events

What meetups or events are you going to in the coming months, weeks, days? Not sure? Check out our list of inspiring events and come along. We’d love to bump into you at one or more! 🎉 Kate here: I personally wish I was going to all of them. The talks, the people, the food… it’s all so interesting!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Senior Developer Advocate

Heroku is looking for a Developer Advocate with past experience in a developer-facing role, creating demos, writing blog posts, and building communities. This role can be remote or you can work from a Salesforce office, but we would like you to be in a North American timezone. Also, this role will require 10-30% travel.

Sr. Developer Advocate

The mission of the Bose Developer Relations group is to enable a growing community of innovative and creative developers to deliver amazing experiences to our customers. We do this by engaging our community around the world, at key events, in key regions, and online through our portal, workshops, tutorials, sample code, demos and via forums, social media, and other channels. Representing the needs of our developer community and partners back to platform teams at Bose, we will make building 3rd party applications easier and scalable. Working with outstanding members of our developer community and with supporting groups at Bose, we will find the best ways to embrace these innovations, showcasing them to our customers and inspiring continued integration and increased value of our platforms.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Wether you’re passively looking to just see what’s out there, looking for a new job, or “fun-employed” & on the job hunt, we have some jobs for you to take a look at! Check out our collection of open Developer Relations and Community manager jobs. And if none of those jobs fit your dreams, follow Ryan Estrada’s advice and speak out your dream job.