DevRel Weekly - Issue 82 - DevRel Conference Talks, Industry Trends, and More!

Welcome! 👋

Welcome to another week of awesome content! I feel like the amount of relevant content has been growing by leaps and bounds lately, which makes it difficult to curate the best of the best for you all. It also means far more of my week is spent reading through great resources these days. Given my research and journalism background, I'm not complaining! 😅

This week, I've got a roundup of the latest DevRel-related conference talks (be sure to set aside a few hours to take in all of the great information!) as well as observations from the last few years of Developer Relations trends, in addition to resources on how to launch an external "champions" program.

As always, if you know of additional blogs I should be following or people who are publishing great content, be sure to send them my way.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Don’t Underestimate the Power of External Validation

Here are two quotes from a short post by Richard Millington that stood out for me this week:

Having a place where members can share their successes is a powerful way to help build a powerful sense of community among members.

When members are featured on the news, or the community is featured in some external source, it’s powerful to share this within the community. It validated everything the community is doing.

Moral of the story: Don’t underestimate the power of external validation.

The Two Biggest Mistakes We Make

Two biggest mistakes people make when building community:

They don’t research and talk to the target member enough

They wait for engagement to happen organically

-David Spinks

Rachel Happe agrees:

One is a strategic problem and one is tactical. You can tell which by looking at whether no one is coming (ie you don’t have a compelling shared purpose) or people are coming but not engaging/staying (too hard to find a way to engage).

David expands on this topic in a related Twitter thread about how to encourage regular contributions from the community. Hint: it starts with us.

It Begins with Trust

Haiku for Community Managers:

Apostle of tribes
Architect of belonging
It begins with trust

-KiLi L'Italien

Jason St-Cyr has a great article about trust this week as well. If you're curious about the part that trust plays in a successful DevRel team, be sure to check it out!

Simplify and Expect to Iterate

Most people and organizations are trained to over-complicate [strategy and planning] (systemically) but complexity breaks complications. Simplify and do minimal viable strategy and planning. Expect to iterate.

-Rachel Happe

Tangibles 🤓

What I wish I knew five years ago about building a career in “content”

A good portion of Developer Relations roles often revolves around content, but what exactly does that mean? What kind(s) of content? What topic areas? And how do you know whether you want to build a career around content? Sean Blanda wrote about his career in content and what he's learned along the way, including this gem:

To truly increase your value, you need to understand what drives the company’s long-term growth and focus maniacally on that. This means elevating your mental frameworks from tactics (i.e. “I must publish three articles a week”) to strategy (i.e. “I must find a way to help our events team sell more tickets”). And it means structuring the content operation to lead to outcomes (i.e. “webinar signups”) and not outputs (i.e. “publishing 10 tweets a day”).

Trends in Community Management from the Last 6 Years

ESNchat celebrated their 6th birthday in style this past week, covering trends and patterns from the Community industry. Interested in how things have changed over the past 6 years? Read what everyone had to say.

Recent DevRel Talks, Recaps, and Videos

As we move into the heart of conference season, it only makes sense that the number of videos and talk recaps released has gone up! Here's the latest batch of slides, twitter threads, and videos that you might be interested in.

Towards a More Inclusive Developer Portal - Adam Duvander
Why is live coding important? - a Twitter thread from Tyler Leonhardt's talk
git fetch coffee: Thoughts on Interns and Junior Roles in DevRel - Lizzie Siegle
From Software Engineer to DevRel: The Good, The Bad, and The Rewarding - Amanda Moran
Building Open Source Communities - Tierney Cyren (YouTube video)
Passion… Like Magnets, It can Attract or Repel - Tamao Nakahara and Baruch Sadogursky
Tips from 15 years of Experience Doing Live-demos - Vinicius Senger
Built with ❤︎ - Why Developer Experience Matters - Arthur Maltson (slides)
Marketplace Management: Managing Difficult Partners - Jeremy Glassenberg

How to Start Your Community Leadership Program

If you're considering a "Champions" program or something similar for your external community members, the advice that Carrie Melissa Jones imparts in this blogpost is invaluable.

1) Identify potential leaders.
2) Make these leaders feel welcome.
3) Recognize and reward their work.

Two more pieces of content related to community champions that might come in handy for you this week:

Tangents 🐰

How to Cultivate the Human Side Of Leadership

If you're interested in pursuing a management path, this article from Steffen Maier is a great TL;DR for how to set your team up for success. From making sure that the team feels safe making suggestions and taking risks, to having clearly defined goals and roles, there are a number of tips in here that can help you be a better boss. Not in a management position? You may find something that helps you better communicate your needs to your current manager!

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

Open Source Community Management with Rain Leander and Sherrie Rohde - Community Pulse.
How Gaming Community Knowledge Translates to Other Industries with Craig Dalrymple - Community Signal.
Discourse, Stack Overflow, and Building Online Community Platforms with Jeff Atwood - Conversations with Bacon.
After Pulse: Moving Day: How to Change Jobs with Grace - Community Pulse

Events 📆

Future Developer Summit 2019

How do you build a developer program from scratch? How do you hire your first 5 people in DevRel? Join 80 Director/VP/GM-level thought leaders at the Future Developer Summit, September 24-25, as they get together to debate best practices, learn and design better developer strategies and share their experiences.

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Still need to attend a Professional Development conference before the end of the year? Take a look at these upcoming events related to DevRel and community building.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

I'm excited to announce that we've taken the first step towards finding a better way to organize the Developer Relations jobs we find!

Along with our sponsored jobs in the DevRel Weekly Jobs collection, you'll now find that jobs are organized into smaller collections; DevRel Manager Roles, Senior (Sr) DevRel Individual Contributor Roles, DevRel Individual Contributor Roles, Entry-Level DevRel Roles, and DevRel-Adjacent Roles. We know it's not perfect and we hope that Toby adopts sorting soon, but until then we hope this improvement helps with the job hunt. We're sending good vibes to those who might be looking for a new role.

Developer Avocados 🥑

Developer Avocado Stickers 😍🥑

Kelly Mahoney released these amazing stickers this week and I just can't get enough of them. Be sure to pre-order yours!