DevRel Weekly - Issue 96 - Budgets, Docs, DevEx, and More!

Welcome! 👋

Welcome to another jam-packed week of Developer Relations content! As job titles like Developer Advocate and Community Manager are becoming more mainstream, I think we'll start to see more references to our roles in a variety of television shows and media, but until then, clips like this one are still pretty rare. My favorite part has to be when Sue struggles to put a label on what she does on a day-to-day basis 😅

In other news, if your DevRel team helps to manage an online community of any kind, please take 15 minutes this week to fill out the annual State of Community Management survey. As you've heard me say in past years, this survey is one of the most important resources for our industry. The information they release every year helps us make a better business case for DevRel teams around the world.

On that note, I'll let you dive into this week's content. Scroll down for more information about budgets, documentation, developer experience, and more!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

We Invest in Community from Day 1

“When should our business start investing in community?”

You already invested in community when you worked to earn the trust of your very first customers.

Hire a FT cmty lead when you no longer have the bandwidth to build those relationships. Never STOP building community.

-David Spinks

DevRel is about Substance, not Social Presence

Controversial thought: #DevRel is not something you just decide to do. It’s not something you do to be “internet famous” and be adored.

If that’s your motivation, your team, any community you work with, and you, will be disappointed.

-PJ Hagerty

Build Relationships Internally as well as Externally

As a developer advocate you need to build trust with developers, but also within the organization so your managers would listen to the feedback and take it into account!

-Anita Kirkovska

DevRel Advice Column

Take a few minutes to help out your fellow Developer Relations professionals!

Dear fellow community managers: Why did you choose to become a cm? I want to look at the "why" for this choice of profession in my next podcast.

-Denise Henkel

What metrics or KPIs do you wish you could track in a community dashboard?

-NeedSampleCode

How do you teach folks that the real skill of DevRel isn't the artifact like a blog post, video, talk, or open source project, but that the real skill is helping a community solve their real problems and advocating internally for better products?

-Aja Hammerly

If your company consists of both remote workers and office workers, what tips do you all have for maintaining equal communication and experiences for all employees?

-David Spinks

Your best @discourse pro-tips?

-Knut Melvær

Tangibles 🤓

Rewarding Documentation in DevOps

When given a choice, developers will choose to write code rather than documentation, almost every time. But if we've established that writing documentation is indeed engineering work, how do we incentivize our engineering coworkers to write documentation, and more importantly, set them up for success? Taylor Barnett explores how to reward this work as well as what types of metrics we should consider in this recent blogpost.

Developer Experience Crash Course (v2)

Developer Experience is becoming an increasingly popular topic among Developer Relations professionals, which is a trend that's exciting to me, given my long-standing belief that DevRel is supported by the three pillars of Advocacy, Experience, and Community (stay tuned for a blogpost coming soon!). I'm particularly stoked to see solid articles and books being written on the topic, filling a need that's been present for some time now. There seemed to be a particular influx of articles over the last few weeks, so I've chosen a few of the best for you today:

These two tweets do a great job of summarizing the value of spending time on Developer Experience:

"The best way to impress a community of devs (in a new job or online/is community) is to figure out a way to improve their developer experience. Boiling it down to a simplified view, I'm only as happy as my developer experience allows me to be. And I only get unhappy/frustrated when feeling a lack of control or lack of ability to work within my domain.

Glen Keane

Every individual developer experience impacts thousands of user experiences.

-Ian Jennings

Community management in a crisis: Coronavirus Lessons (Part 1)

As COVID-19 continues to spread, we as community builders need to be aware of how this is impacting our community members. How do we respond? How do we handle their questions? How should we react to events being canceled our postponed? Sarah Thiam covers these questions and more in her recent blogpost.

Spend 10% - 20% Of Your Resources On Monitoring And Evaluation

Whether you're in the midst of defining a budget for your team or trying to figure out if your current budget is well-allocated, these tips from Rich Millington will come in handy. He suggests spending 10-20% of your budget on monitoring and evaluation, which leads to a better understanding of your community and the ability to build a stronger strategy as a result!

How to use Slack and Airtable to Easily Collect Swag Information

Looking for an easy way to track which community members you've sent "thank you" swag to? The team over at Orbit has been automating all the things lately, and this tool is their latest creation.

Tangents 🐰

6 Easy Tips To Positively Engage With Your Community Through Social Media

Looking for ways to better engage with your community on social media, or considering starting a developer-focused social media account? Mikaela Hill's recent blogpost covers six essential things you'll need to do if you want to actually engage with your community rather than simply broadcast information to them.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

Communities Are Made of People with Jono Bacon - Arrested DevOps
Community Over Code with Shawn Wang - JAMstack Radio
Zoologist Becomes a Developer Advocate with Kim Maida - DeveloMentor
Starting a doc group/process when you're the first with Cynthia Ng and Amy Qualls - Write the Docs Podcast
Chris is Confused! Super User, Customer Advocacy, MVP, Ambassador... - Peers Over Beers
The Role of AI in Online Communities and Networks with Venessa Paech - The Cohere Podcast
Hiring API doc writers -- an inside look at fixing broken processes with Andrew Davis - Write the Docs Podcast
LEGO Ideas and the Building Blocks of a Successful Crowdsourcing Community with Tim Courtney - Community Signal
Creating a Support Network for Maintainers with Don Goodman-Wilson - Sustain

Events 📆

Community Leadership Summit CFP is Open!

The Community Leadership Summit was one of my first forays into community management back in the day and I have a soft spot for this amazing event. It's a fantastic combination of interesting keynotes and open spaces mixed with one of the best hallway tracks I've ever experienced. Whether your title is Community Manager, Developer Advocate, or something else entirely, if you're involved in building technical communities, you're sure to get something out of this event. Their CFP is now open for the discussion session portion of the event. If you have an interesting question or a conversation you'd like to facilitate, be sure to submit before April 10th.

Developer Relations Events

When was the last time you went to a DevRel Professional Growth event? Take a look at these Developer Relations Events if it's time that you invested in your professional growth again.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Bill Gates once said, "Well, I don't think there's any need for people to focus on my career." Can we agree with him? We don't need to focus on his career, we should really focus on our own careers instead. If you or someone you know is looking for a job in Developer Relations, why not take a look at our Developer Relations Jobs Toby Collection. Wishing you all the best in your career!