DevRel Weekly - Issue 90 - Thanking Your Communities

Welcome! 👋

It's a short week over here in DevRel Weekly land! With the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday here in the States, I'm sending this out to you a day early to beat the rush.

For those of you who are spending time with family and friends this week, enjoy your holiday! For the rest of you who are halfway through a typical work week, thanks for sticking with us as we talk about turkey, football, and tryptophan-induced naps.

Wherever you're from and whatever you're celebrating, I'm thankful for all of you! Thanks for your feedback, your dedication to the DevRel industry as well as this newsletter, and your continued support over the years. It wouldn't be nearly as fun without all of you by my side.

See you next week!
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Teamwork: DevEx and OpEx

Observation from > 10 years of working at both of the OG PaaS companies:

Developer Experience (DevEx) attracts new customers.

Operational Experience (OpEx) keeps customers.

-Edward Muller

DevRel Advice Column

What are the top onboarding tactics you use when you have a new person register to the community?

-Chris Detzel

New Community Manager Question of the Day:
How do you handle taking time off from your community? Do you have backup or volunteer moderators?

-Mary Green

What Even is a Developer Advocate?

This question has been making the rounds again. Jonan Scheffler took the time to write up a fantastic explanation of what a Developer Advocate is (and isn't). Read the full thread and let me know what you think!

Tangibles 🤓

Thank Your Members!

Looking for a way to say thank you to your members as we gear up for Thanksgiving here in the States? Tirza Austin has a few tips in a recent article, from public recognition to face-to-face meetings.

How Far Can You Go Without A Community Platform?

Sometimes, the right question to ask isn't "how soon should we launch this?" but "how long can we go without it?" As Rich Millington says in this short blogpost,

The best time to launch a platform is after you’ve created a large demand for it. A platform should improve what you’re already doing...

Perhaps it's best if we let our community's needs drive our actions instead of trying to fit them into a solution that we've come up with independent of their feedback.

Video Content Strategy

Amruta Ranade has been producing a fantastic YouTube series on DevRel topics and concepts. This week, she talked about video content strategy, walking through some of the companies that do video tutorials particularly well and some of the common pitfalls that most companies run into.

DevRel - 3C Framework for Becoming Engineer Friendly (English Translation)

For my Japanese speaking audience, there's a new book available for you! I can't wait to hear what you think about it and I'm more than a little envious of your Japanese skills. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it soon!

Storytime 📚

Kelsey Hightower's KubeCon Keynote (and other DevRel-related Talks)

While I didn't have an opportunity to attend KubeCon last week in San Diego, I've seen a flurry of tweets both during and after the event and it looks like folks had a great time! My fellow DevRel Weekly curator Kate Pond pointed me to Kelsey Hightower's keynote this week, calling out the emphasis on empathy and inclusion in communities. I'd encourage you all to set aside 15m to watch it this week -- trust me when I say it's worth your time!

If it leaves you itching for more conference videos, be sure to check out the Fall 2019 Conf Talks & Recaps collection. There's lots of great content to keep you busy for the rest of the week!

DevRel Podcasts

After Pulse: What's After DevRel? - Community Pulse.
Hosts PJ Hagerty, Mary Thengvall, Jason Hand, and guest host SJ Morris sit down to discuss the finer points of Episode 42 - what's the answer to life? (Or at least life after DevRel.) We take a look at some of the antecedents leading to leaving DevRel and the options we’ve heard folks consider in our travels and conversations.

Events 📆

DevRelCon London Dec 9th-11th

Join dev rel professionals from across the world for a day of training and two days of conference and unconference. Tickets available now: london-2019.devrel.net

Events 📆

DevRel Events

While the 2019 conference scene is drawing to an end, more webinars and local events are still popping up. Be sure to check out our collection of upcoming events to see if there's anything happening in your area or any online events that catch your eye.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Senior Technical Community Manager

As data & data center usage continues to grow exponentially around the world, ITRenew and the circular economy are positioned to play an increasingly important role in the global Internet infrastructure and ecosystem. Interested in data, DevOps, sustainability, and open source? The Sesame team is looking for a Senior Technical Community Manager to help them build an internal community that is excited to engage with the ecosystem of customers and partners, as well as participate in the wider technical community that will build on and with Sesame data center products.

Developer Advocate

Pulumi is looking for a passionate Developer Advocate to lead our community outreach, spreading the word about how Pulumi can help developers and operators build innovative cloud software together. The Pulumi community is warm, welcoming, and already growing fast organically. You will be a part of realizing a vision where every team can program the cloud.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

How 'bout them jobs? Looking for one or a few? Please take a look at our collection of jobs from around the internet. We hope that you find a job or two that bring you joy!