DevRel Weekly - Issue 76 - National Avocado Day, Engaging an Online Community, Event Strategies, and More

Welcome! 👋

Y'all have had your writing fingers primed this week! There's so much great content in this issue that I won't take too much of your time in the intro. From engaging (and growing) online communities and how to set an event strategy to a lot of questions from your fellow DevRel professionals, be sure to click through to see all of the latest and greatest info about how to make you (and your community) successful!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Back to the Game Called Community Management

I love this game version of Community Management written up by @MotzeMatze:

First play session in a long time.

Allies = enthusiastic users & welcoming moderators

Their skillset:
- asking how I've been
- general happiness
- constructive criticism
- willing to work together

Enemies = trolls & spammer

Their skillset:
- asking if I need a penis or hair extension
- dissatisfaction with real life
- copyright infringements
- hate speech & promoting violence

My skillset:
- empathy
- not forgetting that behind every user might be a human
- consistency
- THE BAN HAMMER

But it's weird... there seems to be no LVL cap and the grinding never ends.

Who Do You Admire?

There were a few recognition tweet threads floating around this week, but this one caught my eye in particular. If you're looking for awesome DevRel professionals to follow, be sure to click through on this thread.

Want to recognize someone's contribution? You can give a shout-out there as well!

Stop Trying to Engage the Unmotivated

Simple solution to most community engagement challenges:

Stop trying to engage the unmotivated.

Spend that time focusing on members who are already motivated and give them more opportunities to contribute.

-David Spinks

DevRel Advice Column

Advice was flying around DevRel Twitter this week! Here's a few questions folks were asking:

DevRel folks, what do you do to manage business cards you get from events?

-Amara Graham

So what is the downside to becoming a Developer Relations Engineer? Asking for a friend.

-Sean Connolly

Friends in #DevRel, especially those who travel much. Do you know of any legit carbon offset programs to compensate for the environmental impact from all the air travel to conferences?

-Joel Lord

How do you reflect at the end of every week?

-CMX

Ask to Student Developers:
Is Developer Relations aka #DevRel your dream career option in future?

-Arkodyuti Saha

Community Building is not about creating people, it's about finding people (the like-minded ones). This is one challenge faced by majority I guess, so what was your best hack to bring the initial 50/100 like-minded people & how did you keep them active?

-Azhar Shams

How Well Do You Scale?

A key metric of community health is growth 📈 ; how well you are able to scale up your community when your members 👥 increases.

-Shubham Upadhyay

Responsibility of a DevRel Professional

It is the responsibility of a #DevRel to build credibility and trust of a product in the developer circles. It is the responsibility of a #DevRel to make that product even more accessible for the newbies as powerful for the experienced ones.

-Yashovardhan Agrawal

DevRel Thoughts from the Lens of the Apollo Program

Some #DevRel thoughts for your Monday morning:

I listened to a podcast on the Apollo program 👩‍🚀. One thought struck me especially:

"As engineers and scientists, we're great at finding solutions to problems. We're not so great at finding the problems themselves."

This is very much true for all engineering disciplines, including software and developer tools. 👩‍💻

Solve for X. Find out what X is after launching your product and seeing (why) it doesn't work. Why it crashes. 🤷‍♀️

Here's where your friendly neighbourhood #DevRel comes in. 🥑🦸‍♀️

We're the interface with developer communities - they are the people who will try your product and tell you why it doesn't work. 💣

We the DevRel folk can help you connect with the community who will tell you what the problems are, so the engineers can solve them! 💯

To sum up: #DevRel helps engineers find the X they are solving for, by connecting them to the community. ✌️

-Zan Markan

Tangibles 🤓

What a Very Bad Day at Work taught me about Building Stack Overflow’s Community

I've long admired the work that Sara Chipps has done with Jewelbots, so when I saw this article that she published about Stack Overflow's community, I knew I had to click through.

In it, she details a (very bad) day at work that wound up teaching her a lot about the Stack Overflow community, giving her a unique perspective into the SO culture and how to change the experience for newbies.

Do you Prefer a Live Demo to be Perfect or Broken?

We all know live demos can be fraught, but did you know that some people actually prefer it when the demo is broken so that they can watch the presenter fix unforeseen bugs? This article from Lauren Maffeo highlights a recent demo that Sara Robinson gave and the response that she got on Twitter when she took a poll to find out people's preferences for a perfect demo vs. a broken demo.

Protecting your Evangelist/Advocates: Part 2 – Hotel Safety

As travel season ramps up, Susan Ibach brings us a list of tips on how to avoid harassment while staying at a hotel.

How to Communicate Change (a thread)

There have been so many great threads relating to DevRel lately! This week, Steven Sinofsky brings us one about how to communicate changes to your customer base, whether it's a new feature, a breaking change to the API, or a major open source release.

Community Growth vs. Expansion

How to grow an online community was a popular topic this week. From how to deliberately expand to engaging the community you have to when to finally call it quits on a community, there are a lot of good articles to peruse!

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts: Event Sponsorship Edition

This week, we've got a doubleheader from Community Pulse for you. If you're in the midst of deciding your event strategy for next year, whether speaking, sponsoring, or attending, these are the episodes you'll want to listen to!

Looking for more content about how to choose the "right" events?

Amanda Gonser wrote about PagerDuty's process of choosing events.
Liz Lathan gives us a rundown of pros and cons for conferences, monthly luncheons, webinars, and more.
Paris Pundir shares 5 reasons why you should attend community meetups.
Hugh Lashbrooke reminds us that bigger events are not always better events. Sometimes, we attempt to do too much, too young.

One from the Archives 📰

A Reminder to Say No

Hem shared a great reminder from James Governor's talk at DevRelCon London 2018 (video link) this week which I thought was timely as we ease into the weekend.

Say no to people - a lot. No is your friend --
your good, decent, faithful friend.
It is always there for you.
By nature, DevRel folks tend to be eager to please,
and love to be helpful.
Being rigorous about what opportunities you take on,
and those you pass up, is super important,
for effectiveness and all-around self-care.
Say yes to family,
say yes to friends,
say yes to quiet evenings.

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Fall conference season is right around the corner, what events are you going to? If you haven't decided yet, check out our collection of upcoming events to see if one sparks your interest!

Know of a great event that should be on this list? Let us know!

Jobs 👩‍💻

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

Our collection of open Developer Relations and Community Manager jobs just keeps growing! Take a peek to see if your next opportunity is waiting for you.

Developer Avocados 🥑

Happy Belated National Avocado Day!

In case you missed it, Wednesday, July 31 was National Avocado Day here in the United States, as many of you were so kind to point out!

Confused about why and how avocados matter to Developer Relations? Check out my blogpost about the origin story of the Developer Avocado.