Tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi there, I am Patricia Parra, but people know me as Pachi :).

Born and raised in Brazil, where I started law school and dropped it after two years to go on an international adventure, I have been in the USA for almost 9 years.

After a decade as a Nanny, I started to learn how to code with free online resources at age 28, whenever the baby in my care would nap.

After a while in the tech community, I learned about DevRel by accident and have been in love since. I also love anime, reading romance, my cat Shion, and hyping people.

What do you feel is the most important part of your job?

Caring. I personally think that to be a great DevRel person, you have to truly care about the communities and the people in those communities.

We are always influencing people, liking it or not, when I write an article or post on Twitter, it may influence people someway, so if I don’t care about those people, my content may influence them in a bad way.

I am not famous by any means, but when you are a public person, it can make you feel influential and special, which is not a problem unless you let it make you feel better than others, so if you truly care about the communities you are in, this will help you to keep that in check.

Also caring is how I create meaningful connections rather than networking.

What is something you’re struggling with?

Keeping leveling up my tech skills. As a Developer Relations Engineer, I can’t leave my programming skills behind, but as a content creator and community person, I do lots of different things, so finding the time, energy, and focus to learn and code new things.

Specially in my case: I only had one developer job before getting in DevRel and honestly, that wasn’t a great job, so I feel like I don’t have much hands-on experience as a Developer.

But I am happy to share that with the support of my managers and team, we are working on a plan to help with that in 2022, and I am super excited!!!

Tell us about a time you were inspired by someone or something in DevRel.

I have always loved to write, since I was little, but when I started learning to code, I didn’t consider writing about that. But after watching Ali Spittel on Codeland 2019, when she gave a talk about why you should start blogging, even if you are a Newbie, I started blogging about my tech journey and things I was learning on Dev.to. I had no idea what DevRel was, but that talk made me start blogging, and blogging was the first step into getting in DevRel even if I didn’t know it at the time, so I will always be thankful to Ali for that talk and want to inspire people like she did to me!

What’s one change you’d like to see in DevRel?

I would like to see more structure and guidelines in this field.

DevRel means too many things, and we wear soo many hats! So what is and what is not DevRel can be confusing.

Also, what is the difference between a Developer Relations Engineer and a Developer Advocate? I would love to see the DevRel community get together and get clear on responsibilities and titles.

Also, I would like DevRel to have more space for less or non-technical people. Technology is much more than code, and we miss great insights for focusing all the DevRel energy in Technical concepts and people only.