DevRel Weekly - Issue 83 - Top 10 DevRel Links

Welcome! 👋

hi DevRel friends! Long time, no see. Sorry for the gap in content these last few weeks -- I had some back-to-back conferences and then got hit hard by a whopper of a cold that I'm still recovering from. 😰

Kate and I have sorted through close to 3,000 links and I've narrowed it down to the top 10 for you (with a few bonus links here and there).

Special thanks to our new sponsors Spotify, Testim, and Hasura. Be sure to check out their job openings below!

Before I let you dig into the links below, there's one thing I wanted to highlight: Rachel Happe from The Community Roundtable is planning for next year's State of Community Management report and wants to know what topics you want them to pursue. This report continues to be the best in the industry, helping us not only understand the greater picture, but better represent ourselves to management. Let her know what you want to hear.

Til next week!
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

It Take More than "Word of Mouth" Growth

100% “word of mouth” growth is a myth or, at best, the exception.

Behind each “we grew through WOM!” story is a team who created content, optimized conversion flows, did outreach and anything they could to grow.

Growth always takes work. True for startups and for communities.

-David Spinks

Every API is Someone's First API

Experienced developers are experienced skip readers. Don't be afraid to spell out installation instructions in your README. Every API is someone's first API.

-Floor Drees, quoting Lorna Mitchell at API The Docs

7 Tips for Better Social Media Engagement

Social Media Quickstart:
(1) understand+share useful content for your audience
(2) generally attach images/videos
(3) add max 1 link
(4) engage with, don't alienate your audience
(5) track success (clicks/impressions) via analytics
(6) RT with comments
(7) don't overdo hashtags

-Jono Bacon

Tangibles 🤓

Toward Carbon Neutral Developer Relations

As we start to plan for 2020, the question of how to make DevRel sustainable is still top-of-mind for many. But as Bear Douglas says, it's not just a question of how to make our work sustainable, but how to offset the environmental impact of our travel. The Slack DevRel team recently implemented policies that will allow them to be carbon neutral in 2020. Read more about how they're doing it and how you can implement similar policies at your company.

Collaborating with Developer Relations Part 2: Sales and DevRel

An important part of DevRel is collaborating with the various teams around us, including (or perhaps, especially!) those that traditionally have conflicting priorities. Patrick Woods addresses one such team in a recent blogpost. In it, he talks through how DevRel should collaborate with Sales as well as the boundaries that should be in place.

Asking Questions is the First Key to Increasing Engagement

Engagement in online communities has been a hot topic lately, on Twitter as well as blogs. David Spinks summarized things on Twitter:

If your community engagement isn’t improving, a good first question to ask is, “is this a growth problem or a retention problem?”

Are you not getting enough new members in the door?

Or are your members not coming back?

Very different problems with unique solutions.

Rich Millington explores this topic in greater depth on his blog, emphasizing the point that you have to find the ultimate cause of the declining engagement in order to fix it. These answers not only help fix engagement issues, but can help shape your entire strategy, as Rich explains in this Twitter thread.

Chad Neufeld and Leisa Northcott wrap up this topic with an in-depth blogpost on how to drive community engagement, including tips like how to hand over the reins while simultaneously leading from the trenches.

Burnout Prevention Tips (While Traveling and Otherwise)

As we get into the thick of "conference season," how do we make sure we're taking care of ourselves as well as taking care of our community?

Robin Moffatt runs through a few of his top tips for staying functional while enduring a busy travel schedule.
Carrie Melissa Jones gives us 17 (17!!) ways to take care of ourselves.

If you have other tips on how to survive (or better yet, prevent!) burnout, I'd love to hear them! As always, feel free to shoot me an email.

The (Very) Many Hats of an Online Community Manager

I’ve come back to this article a number of times in the last few weeks since ModSquad posted it. It’s such a great representation of the various roles a Community Manager plays! In short, we do far more than just social media & forum management.

Storytime 📚

Lisa Jung’s Tips for Developer Advocacy Success

We all know that scaling the efforts of a small team is difficult. Lucky for us, IBM's Lisa Jung took on the task of scaling the event strategy for the San Francisco IBM Developer Advocate Team this past year and has some tips to share.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

The sheer number of relevant podcasts that have been shared in the past few weeks had me a little overwhelmed! 😅I've created a Toby Collection for you to explore in your own time this week. Know of others I should have included? Be sure to let me know!

DevRel Conference Talks & Recaps

The number of DevRel-related talks being released keeps increasing and there are sure to be more, with so many awesome events still to come! Check out the latest talks and conference recaps in this collection.

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

As many of you know, everything seems to be happening over the next few months as far as events are concerned. If you're especially interested in professional development for DevRel though, you may want to check out the events listed in our Developer Relations Events collection. We hope to see you at a few!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate Manager

We are looking for a Developer Advocate Manager that will join the Developer Experience (DX) team in Stockholm. You will be responsible for managing our team of Developer Advocates, including supporting their career growth, and driving Spotify’s developer relations strategy.

Technical Developer Evangelist

Testim uses artificial intelligence to speed-up the authoring, execution, and maintenance of automated tests. Here's a note from their Head of Marketing, Francis Adanza, about an exciting job opportunity:

Hello Folks, we're looking for a Technical Developer Evangelist to join our team. If you like to code as well as talk about it, then we should chat. Learn more about Testim and the role here or feel free to contact me directly!

Developer Advocate

Hasura is an open source project at the intersection of the GraphQL and cloud-native movements and empowers developers to build powerful and scalable applications easily. We're looking for a developer advocate based in San Francisco/ Bay Area to help developers who are using or interested in GraphQL & Hasura to achieve success with these technologies. Our idea candidate is someone well versed with application development, who loves to explain technical concepts in creative ways and most importantly is an empathetic individual, who listens to developers and is able to provide actionable input to the product & marketing teams.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Kate here: Lately I've had the "work work work work work..." part of Rihanna's song, "Work", stuck in my head, but my mind has replaced the lyrics with "jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs..." as in check out all these jobs in the DevRel Weekly Jobs collection! If you don't have work work work work and you want some, we hope you'll find some work soon. Good luck on the job hunt!