Developer Avocados

Aisha Blake

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 19:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi! My name is Aisha. I’m a powerlifter, silversmith, board gamer, dog lover, and Lead Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic. Officially, I’ve only been in DevRel for about a year. Before that, like many folks in DevRel, I did a lot of writing, conference speaking, and community organizing well before that. I started my career writing curriculum and teaching at a coding bootcamp and took a meandering road to get here.

I co-organize self.conference and <title of conf> (both of which will be back once it’s safer to gather) and take every opportunity I can to support new conference speakers and anyone entering the tech industry. I’ve always seen myself as a very community-driven person. Sometimes that means I’m too quick to say “yes” but, more often, it opens doors. I do what I can for other people and, as a result, I have an absolutely wonderful network of friends well beyond the largely JavaScript-focused communities I spend most of my time in.

You can find me singing and talking about developer education as AishaCodes on Twitch as well as tweeting about ice cream and tech as AishaBlake on Twitter.

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

Maintaining my authenticity, in every part of my work, is the most important thing. That means being honest even when it’s uncomfortable, modeling behaviors I expect from my teammates and prioritizing collaboration over competition.

What is something you’re struggling with?

One of the toughest and most rewarding parts of my work this year has been taking on a leadership role within my team. My goal is essentially to unblock and empower everyone else to do their best work, so I’m finding it that much more difficult to describe my impact. I care (and therefore worry) so much about the members of my team. In a lot of ways, it feels like supporting members of any other developer community. Am I understanding their needs correctly? Am I connecting them with the right people and resources? Do they feel safe? Have I earned their trust? Can I keep it?

I’ve been trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge by reading more about engineering and, specifically, DevRel leadership. I’m also fortunate to have some incredible leaders in my corner. Ben Greenberg, Mo McElaney, Kurt Kemple, and Jason Lengstorf have been so generous with their time and shared the benefit of their experience with me. Articulating my concerns with people who understand, at least to an extent, what I’m going through has helped me to navigate through them. Even if you don’t think you have anyone in your network you can have those sorts of conversations with, consider hiring a coach or mentor!

What do you look for when building your team?

First, I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of work to do on my end as a hiring manager before I can expect anything from a candidate. I need to clearly articulate the specific needs of the role and lay them out in the job description from the beginning. I need to design a process that prioritizes safety and inclusion. I need to build in opportunities for candidates to shine. Once I’ve done that, I can start looking at which candidates might thrive in the role.

I’m a firm believer in looking for “culture add” versus “culture fit” because, especially in DevRel, we need the benefit of all kinds of experiences. I don’t necessarily want someone who appears to have all the same opinions as me or anyone else on the team. I’d rather hear from someone who overlaps with our pool of understanding and also brings something new to the table.

I care less about which specific technologies you’re familiar with and more about what you’re building with them. Are you considering the accessibility of your work? Can you explain your architecture decisions clearly enough that a beginner could understand the tradeoffs you made? How do you continue to build your skills as you progress through your career?

A little more specifically, I look for people who are already building community. That can mean anything from actually working as a Community Manager (or tummler) to being intentional about your personal relationships. It’s likely that you’ll be working directly with internal and external developers at least part of the time. It’s even more likely that you’ll build some kind of content for them. To do that well over time, I think you need to be able to empathize with the people you’re building for.

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

I’d like to see a little more consistency in the terms we use to define our work. Is it Developer Relations or Developer Experience? Where does Developer Evangelism fit in? What do we expect of a Developer Advocate versus a Developer Relations Engineer versus a Software Engineer who happens to be on a DevRel team? Do we belong in Marketing, Engineering, or in our own reporting structure?

There will always be differences as you move from company to company but wildly varying expectations, among other things, make DevRel difficult to explain to newcomers. I’d love for us to get really clear on our goals as a discipline even if our strategies continue to differ. As an individual contributor, your day-to-day work could still look completely different from the next person’s even as you’re driving your community (and/or product) in the same direction.

I think this lack of clarity is often a more acute issue in early-stage startups because the burden is so often placed on a single person before there’s even a fully formed product. In that scenario, it takes a lot of experience and strength to avoid pitfalls like being expected to create a following from nothing, held to inappropriate metrics, and given too wide a range of responsibilities.

Even when there’s an established team, that team will often operate with a ton of ambiguity. To cope with that ambiguity, we end up hiring highly experienced and successful developers who have also been able to develop the necessary communication skills. I’d like us to get to a place where it’s common practice to bring in truly entry-level ICs, give them the training and support they need to thrive, and level them up in DevRel even if they don’t have prior engineering experience.

Kurt Kemple

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 18:00:00 +0000

Kurt Kemple is the founder and Principal Advisor at Forthright. He’s the creator of The Developer Advocate’s Guide series, Developer Experience Audits, and the Developer Advocacy Value Cycle. He’s led developer relations and engineering teams at Apollo, AWS, and MLS and is now focused on helping others create better developer experiences.

In this episode, Kurt shares about his journey into DevRel, the company he started in DevRel, the things he looks for when building teams, and the struggles that came along the way.

🎬 Timestamps

00:03 Tell us a bit about yourself.

01:33 What do you feel is the most important part of your job?

02:29 What is something you’re struggling with?

04:15 What do you look for when building your team?

06:33 What’s one change you’d like to see in DevRel?

Brandon Roberts

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a Developer Advocate, focused on community engagement, content creation, and collaboration. I enjoy learning new things, helping other developers be successful, speaking at conferences, and contributing to open source. I’m an Angular GDE, technical writer, and a maintainer of the NgRx project building libraries for reactive Angular applications.

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

I feel the most important part of my job is helping developers be successful, and connecting with them in the right ways to do so. I’ve often tried to always work to be the best individual contributor I could be, but helping others has always given me much more satisfaction and helped me want to get better also. Giving back to the developer community has paid me back many times over, so to keep that cycle going is very important.

What is something you’re struggling with?

I struggle with saying no to people, even though it may turn out to be more than what I was comfortable doing. I always want to be mindful of opportunities given to me as a black person in tech, and to be in a position to take on opportunities, and in turn give those opportunities to others who look like me. There is always a balance to be had when deciding which opportunities to take on for my own mental health, but I want to always treat those opportunities as if I may not get another one.

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

I’m always inspired by people in DevRel who are relentless in helping others find their way and find jobs in tech. That amount of dedication to creating content, hosting safe spaces, and building communities challenges me to do more in that area, and be in a position to open doors and inspire others to get into the field also. There are many challenges to getting into tech, but I think that it’s definitely worth it for those interested in starting a career or making a career change.

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

One thing I’d like to see in DevRel is more education and training for those moving into DevRel. The responsibilities of DevRel are different from job to job, but there are some things that are common between them, such as creating content, connecting with the developer community, tracking different types of metrics to gauge engagement and adoption, and more. The strategy and metrics side of DevRel was one that I really had a challenge with moving into DevRel full time as opposed to it being a smaller role as a software engineer. A natural part of DevRel is learning new tech, tools, and strategy, and I’d like to see more information out in the open about the journey and the process.

Yuri Lee

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Hey, I’m Yuri and I’m 22 years old.

I was a traditional college student before learning to code and breaking into the tech industry.

I’m a self-taught web developer, and I’m now motivated to learn more about Web3 and the blockchain.

I originally started Twitter in hopes of sharing my learning journey, especially things I’m struggling with. As a person with no technical background at all, I was hoping for other beginners not get discouraged by all the challenges I personally faced on my own learning journey. Every time I struggled with something, I made content on Twitter trying to explain that difficult programming concept in a way that’s easier to digest.

I got lucky with Twitter. Within 2 months, I gained 25,000 followers and got a job at Hashnode as an advocate for the platform.

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

I think that the most important thing about my job is being able to be the bridge between the platform and the people. You gotta have empathy and understand what it is that the people need and the struggles they are going through in order to build a community. I personally think that being able to relate to others in the community is a big part of the job; it helps you build meaningful relationships and helps you better cater to and help those people.

What is something you’re struggling with?

I honestly struggle creating content every day. I think that content creation is actually way harder than what it seems because of all the things you have to think about. It’s not just making one Tweet promoting the platform. You gotta think about your audience and how they would benefit from using the platform; you’re always putting yourself in others’ shoes, and that’s not always an easy job, especially when you have a big audience with different niches. It’s also very time-consuming, as you have to make sure that the information you’re putting out there is always correct. You also gotta think about saying the right thing with the right tone…you don’t want to come off as passive-aggressive or a know-it-all, or you don’t want to branch off too much from your own personal brand. It’s these small details that I personally had to worry about that made my job harder.

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

I honestly don’t know people in DevRel, and I haven’t been in the industry for long, so I can’t really pinpoint someone or an experience that really inspired me. I will say this though: when I first broke into the tech industry, I didn’t know that there were tech jobs that didn’t require much coding. I thought tech jobs were all 100% coding/programming type of thing. I didn’t know DevRel/Advocacy was a thing at all before I got a job in Hashnode. So I think that it was really cool and inspiring to know that the tech industry is actually HUGE and that you don’t have to be a master coder in order to break into it. I also gained a huge respect for other fellow content creators, this shit isn’t easy.

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

The stigma around it. The stigma around it is that we ‘just’ create content and that’s it. A really easy job. I feel like a lot of people, even in the tech industry, don’t really know what DevRel people or advocates do, whether it’s coding, writing docs, or ‘just’ posting on Twitter. Also, I’ve heard of people in DevRel that are expected to do coding that should be done by backend developers, or in my experience, I was rejected from a lot of advocacy jobs because they expected me to do/know coding stuff I didn’t know.

I understand that it can get confusing though, it’s like mixing two different things that usually don’t have anything to do with each other. I feel like it’s like the sweet spot between marketing and developing. It’s not really either-or.

I really hope to see one day that people in DevRel get the credit they deserve, DevRel/advocates work really hard! Also, I think that DevRel people belong to the DevRel team. I’ve seen that in newer startups they have a separate developer, marketing, and advocate team. So that’s a huge step!

Sandra Persing

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m Sandra Persing, and I have been actively involved in the web world for most of my technical career. A few years back, I noticed that some of the brightest and most curious minds were leaving the browser companies and joining various web3 orgs - blockchain, crypto, distributed systems. There is so much optimism and potential in this industry, and I felt the pull to help developers learn more about building in this space. I joined blockchain crypto, first with the Libra/Diem Association, and now with the Stellar Development Foundation to lead their Developer Relations team.

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

I serve our developers and empower my team by providing all the resources and opportunities that build their success. It’s also my responsibility to frequently take a step back and strategically assess all of our efforts to ensure we are progressing towards our mission. The most important part of my job is to make time to listen to our community and my colleagues. They provide me with the right intel and feedback that helps me do my job.

What is something you’re struggling with?

One of DevRel’s key aspects is sharing critical information with our community in a timely manner. The blockchain crypto industry moves at a pace that feels beyond overwhelming at times - there is so much information, factual and bloated, new and revisited, that needs to be curated and shared responsibly. It can be a challenge to know when to pump the brakes and seize an opportunity to rally the whole team to go big. Personally, it’s been a learning curve for me to keep pace with the evolving tech and the momentum within this industry.

What do you look for when building your team?

DevRel is an industry where we are always “selling.” I know most folks retch at hearing/seeing/reading that word - sales, selling - but it’s a core part of our world. We make persuasive cases internally and externally about the value of our roles and what value we bring to the community. I look for contributors who bring passion and optimism. I look for teammates who understand that sometimes all the small things can add up to huge rewards. Relationship building is a long game, and I absolutely value our colleagues and teammates who understand how to create and nurture this with our community.

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

Making it acceptable and more accessible for engineers to move into DevRel roles and back into engineering roles. I believe many talented engineers who are curious and capable of serving developers in a DevRel role hesitate because of this current uncertainty in the industry. A certain stigma persists for wanting to practice the “liberal arts” side of developer engagement.

Stuart Clark

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

As a developer advocate, I basically consider my job as a technologist and storyteller (like a minstrel without the lute). I’m a person who has problems with moderation. For me it is all or nothing. Binge and purge. Grey is not a colour I wear well. My daily existence is a toss of the coin—one side, fear, the other side, gratitude. I can flip that coin all day long and as a result, I navigate through the world with the excitement and determination of a child. Unfortunately, more often than not, that childlike energy is the maturity level I bring to many circumstances. It is about the prize; it’s about the work. Advocacy is the one thing that determines my success. Logically, I know all of that. I can get exhausted by my own obsession for recognition. It goes deeper than just pride and ego. You can say many bad things about me and they’d all be true — I can be arrogant, abrasive, narcissistic, juvenile, and over-sensitive. But I’m also a person who lives in a perpetual state of change. I have no choice. There is no stasis. If I’m not moving forward, I’m sliding back. The world does not reward mediocrity. If you cannot focus on one thing, you will miss the point of winning because you cannot concentrate.

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

Empathy, understanding customer, partner or community needs and frustration. I made this one thing my priority and stayed the course. I embedded this into my mind and burnt it into my soul. In today’s increasingly digital business environment, the need to continue honing and upgrading skills is a given. Whether you’re a CTO reimagining a corporate technical strategy or the developer creating systems that bring that plan to life, translate the “people skills” you’ve built through your own unique experience to advance your IT acumen—even if you started out as a hairdresser, like me. Those 15 years behind the chair as a hairdresser taught me that success is 50% technical skills and 50% communication skills. Demonstrating genuine empathy is a true superpower – one that can offer valuable insights that can make difference between a collaboration’s success or failure.

What is something you’re struggling with?

Anxiety, depression, lack of confidence, imposter syndrome…

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

After an alligator kills and after it eats right after it eats, it gets satisfied and it goes into a state like it’s paralysed. It has had success. When I was in engineering, I felt like I was paralysed. I had success. Success which others I know had not done. I wasn’t hungry anymore…. What did I eat that made me so full that it left me not hungry anymore? Watching various advocates for motivation, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to help people grow, I wanted to help and show people that we all fail, we have times in our lives when things are not great with our work, careers and how this impacts our personal lives.

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

Developer journey mapping, more written content on successful devrel. It’s critical to listen to your customers’ needs. That’s easy to say but sometimes hard to do. For one thing, people don’t always need something fixed, at least not immediately. Sometimes they just need someone who has been there and done that to look at something with them and share ideas. For another thing, what clients want is not always what they need – and that is not always something they want to hear. Active listening and discussions yield visibility across the client’s “stack,” to translate “I want to look like the latest magazine cover model” or “We need to be more agile” to “I want to feel more confident when I start my new job” or “We need to move all our infrastructure to the cloud.”

Suze Shardlow

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name’s Suze Shardlow, I am based in London, England and I currently head up Developer Community at Redis. I’m also a coding instructor, tech event MC and technical writer: I had my first book published this year. Inside and outside of tech, I’ve always loved making things that people use and enjoy, particularly crafts which involve needles or scalpels!

My love of tech and coding began when, as a small child, I got my first computer which was a BBC Micro. I spent many happy hours programming that machine, connected to the only TV in the house (which helped me hone my negotiating skills). However, the UK education system didn’t and, arguably - nearly 40 years later - still doesn’t know what to do with girls who like computing. So I was never shown that I could code for a living.

As a result, I took the most versatile degree that I could think of (Business with Marketing) which kicked off a 20-year career in marketing, management and logistics. I worked in industries including government (UK and Canadian), higher education, mechanical engineering, IT consultancy and law enforcement but never really felt that I had found my calling.

A few years ago I made a career pivot into software and also began running developer communities on a voluntary basis. I’ve organised two of the largest coder groups in London and successfully took them online when the COVID pandemic began.

My current roles are the perfect combination of all the skills and expertise I have developed during the various stages of my career. I was excited to be selected to speak at DevRelCon this year about the principles of marketing and how we, as devrel practitioners, can use them to create more effective developer relations strategies. You can find me at suze.dev - hit me up if you want to chat about anything you’ve read about here!

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

Developer community is the foundation of devrel, in my opinion. So it’s crucial for me to provide a good base for our team to work with. This means creating and maintaining a safe, welcoming space for our community to come together and engage with us and each other.

Being present is also important - both in the community spaces we own, as well as the other places where people talk about our product, where appropriate.

As a leader in the devrel organisation, and with devrel being sometimes misunderstood by, or mysterious to, other parts of the business, it’s on me, along with my colleagues, to champion what we do and the value we bring, as well as advocate for the community itself and be their voice within the company.

One thing that my colleagues have already commented to me is that now I’m here they’ve been able to deliver a number of things they’d been thinking about doing for a while, but didn’t have anyone who could plan, organise and bring them into fruition. So a big part of the value I bring is not only having a clear vision but being able to execute on that, and enable my teammates to deliver and grow too.

What is something you’re struggling with?

I’m fairly new in post: I started my job in August this year. The previous community manager left the company a long time before I joined, and there were significant organisational changes after that. So I’m currently doing an audit of all recent Community activity and the available tools. As I had no overlap with the last person, there are a lot of loose ends. I’ve also had to leave the in-person events on ice for obvious reasons, but this presents me with an opportunity to innovate and generate some ideas which are completely mine and not a continuation of what someone else started.

My team creates a lot of content. Every week, a new idea pops into my head and I’m finding it hard not to overcommit! In October, I decided to live stream my onboarding for five weeks, as well as organising Redis’ first ever Hacktoberfest project. This month, I’ve put together a season of daily live streams. They’re only 15-20 minutes long, but delivering events every day requires a lot of mental and physical energy. I’ve also set up some cool collabs and have had to schedule them for the new year so I don’t get burned out. If you’re working in devrel and want to collab on some content with us here at Redis in the coming months, hit me up!

One of the most interesting things about my job is that we have an open source community as well as a user community. The challenge is to best serve the needs of both types of developer. They all love creating things, but their priorities are different and they approach it from different directions.

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

I didn’t know what devrel was until 2019. I went to a public speaking workshop and the mentors were all developer advocates. Being from a communications background and with a lifelong interest in coding and tech, I was amazed that such a job existed. I realised that devrel was the ideal field for me to go into because it represented the perfect combination of all the skills, experience and knowledge I had gained in my career so far. Two years later, I ran the same public speaking workshop for the whole of Europe, I’m working full-time as a developer community manager and I have spoken at DevRelCon!

I’m always looking for new ways to engage developers and I’m inspired by some of the things I’ve seen fellow devrels in the industry produce, especially the coding challenge-type initiatives. When I organised our Hacktoberfest project this year, I was blown away by some of the contributions, especially those from people who had never used our product before.

New and different content inspires me, too: I’ve seen a lot of people live streaming and have been experimenting with that medium. I want to see how I can do more with that next year.

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

I would love to see more content that is aimed at beginners. A lot of stuff (tutorials, demos, explainers) that you see out there seems to start at step one or two when there is a big segment of the community that needs to know what step zero is. Beginners doesn’t just mean junior developers, either: it can include folks like managers who don’t code every day and are trying to start from scratch with creating something.

So why don’t we produce things that start at step zero? I think it’s because when you’re used to something, it can be easy to forget what it’s like to be a beginner. But this is a form of privilege. As devrel people, we need to be able to empathise with our communities and not leave anyone behind. We need to make our products accessible to all. I took our RU101 (Introduction To Redis Data Structures) course in public as part of my onboarding to show people what it was like as someone who knows how to code but hadn’t used the product before and isn’t building software daily. I would actually love to see a step zero version of that course which caters to those who are new to coding, too.

Anil Kumar

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 18:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a Technical Product Manager in Berlin focused on improving the developer experience. I’m a community builder & prototyper with 10+ years of Frontend product development experience from companies including SAP & Sapient. I’ve been speaking, writing about prototyping, and helping career switchers and graduates land their dream Frontend/UX job.

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

Community-driven product innovation. Continuous community engagement to understand the developer’s pain using your product and identify top opportunities worth solving those drive business outcomes. Bring more empathy to the developers using your product by understanding their pain and challenges, touchpoints, tools they use, and how their journey looks now.

Some of the questions to start thinking about - What stops them from getting their job done quickly? What part of the journey can you make it easy? What tools can you provide to get the developer job done quickly? How can you make developers live easy?

It is important to have a shared understanding among product team members; by frequently involving engineers and designers participating in pair programming sessions and user interviews with community developers to understand the context of the problem space. So product team members have the same shared knowledge to design better solutions to the user problem. It helps you to shape the efficient solution for the right problem and is easy to align.

What is something you’re challenged with?

It’s essential to have a shared understanding of the problem and context of community developers. You should encourage everyone in the team to talk or observe how developers use your product. Develop empathy for your users.

I have tried sharing the pair programming session videos with my team. They never look back at those videos! It’s always a low priority for engineers and designers in the team to watch an hour-long video recording. What seems to work is Inviting the engineers and designers for the pair programming sessions with the community developers. They get a chance to observe the struggle of the community developers, having the debriefing session immediately after the pair programming session and collecting all the observations, where the team always has access to it, such as the MIRO board. The team can reference these notes anytime to get a better understanding of the user problems.

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

The way Stripe team provides excellent tools for digital builders by working backward and continuously listening to developers and their challenges. Innovation of great products happens better understand by listening to customers constantly. Example: Tweet from Patrick, CEO of Stripe, asking the community, “What would you like it to do a command-line interface for Stripe?”.

We're building a command line interface for Stripe! What would you like it to do? https://t.co/lNdzUUToxI
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) August 2, 2019

Importance of building a community around the problem space and running product innovation through the community. How can you leverage the quick feedback loop on the product ideas?

Peter Yang, Product Lead at Reddit, summarized the benefit of the community in his recent LinkedIn post.

What makes a great developer experience? Address specific needs of different developer personas. Example: Learn React guide provide docs for different developer persona

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

“Product thinking in DevRel”

Besides marketing and community support responsibilities, how can you make DevRel more product-focused? How do you innovate along with the community?

Let the DevRel team bring the product teams closer to the community.

Usually, product teams work on the problem space during the product discovery phase to learn about the customer pain and needs. So how can you make this discovery process continuous? By making it easy for the product team(Engineers and Designer, and Product Manager) to engage continuously with the community to better understand the customer problems and the developer touchpoints.

In my experience, I usually hear the product team giving an excuse for not participating in the community, busy, busy! More focused on their product feature solutioning part.

Get product teams closer to the community by talking about the benefits of helping community developers. Show them the value of community. Some of them are -

Beta testers to get feedback on their early access product features.
With a better understanding of the user problem and need, the product team can provide a better solution.
Hypothesis validation. Less risky, less effort, and quicker feedback from the community.

Pachi Parra

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Eddie Abou-Jaoude

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I am an Open Source fullstack and DevRel expert, with experience in Javascript, Typescript, SQL, NoSQL, automation testing and DevOps. I was awarded GitHub Star of the Year 2020 and the GitHub Community Growth Award in 2021.

My clients range from UK Government departments, UK banks, global fintechs and startups. I have had the opportunity to work with all disciplines in the tech industry; from developers, testers, UX/UI designers, technical writers, to product owners.

Having had the opportunity to learn from so many great colleagues, I have always believed in giving back to the tech community with particular focus on creating and supporting opportunities for those wanting to start a career in tech, through diversity and inclusion programmes. This started out by mentoring and delivering workshops in association with tech for good charities, to creating and building my own community, EddieHub.

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

This could be summed up in two words: “communication” and “collaboration”.

I believe in this so much that I decided to make these two words into key components of EddieHub. We pride ourselves in being a community which promotes communication and our motto is “Collaboration First, Code Second”.

Knowing how to communicate is key at all levels and no matter how you are involved in a project. It is important to learn how to give feedback constructively and with the end result being adding value. I strongly believe that this is not just about the technical input of that feedback. You need to make sure that you feed back incorporating context, using an appropriate tone and in a respectful manner. Additionally, you also need to embrace receiving feedback and how to respond and adding this, where appropriate, into the work that you are doing.

As a DevRel, if you do not communicate effectively, this reduces your reach: not only in getting feedback from the product team and working with the community.

A big part of being a DevRel is collaboration. You need to make sure that you work well with people and are able to connect them with each other. However, introductions to collaborations are not enough. It is important to instill the sense of collaboration with your team, to achieve success.

What is something you’re struggling with?

Without a doubt … GitHub notifications!

Although I am lucky enough to have a super supportive community, who addresses many of the notifications I receive, I do still find it hard to keep on top of them. This comes down to the volume of notifications as a result of having so many active projects.

It is exciting to receive all these notifications, but at the same time daunting. No one likes to feel behind on their work, but most importantly I feel bad that great contributions might not have been addressed as I have not got to them yet.

What do you look for when building your team?

Overall I am looking for the “right attitude”. What I mean by this is, that I like to see a team that has a “can do” approach and most importantly asks well-thought-out questions with context.

A must is also an active GitHub profile that is not just about code but reflects change reviews and project management. This is a great way to see how someone collaborates, gives, and receives feedback - which is integral to working in a team. In addition, I look for progression in their GitHub profile. It might have started with correcting typos but progressed to reviewing documentation and then on to automated testing, for example. I look for someone who is keen to add value however they can and push themselves out of their comfort zone and learn new skills.

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

Recognising the importance of the DevRel role. This comes in two parts:

Often I have seen companies consider DevRel as an extra, with the approach that “if there is time and budget” then a DevRel will be brought in. For me, this role is key to the success of any product or platform, as it bridges the gap between the product itself and the end-user. Having a DevRel in the team means that the end-user feels there is someone who speaks their language and understands their requirements and challenges. This only promotes good communication which benefits the whole process. In fact, I would say that the DevRel role should be one of the first to be filled; to ensure familiarity with the product from the outset, as well as immediate user feedback.

There are fantastic DevRel experts out there, from whom we can learn so much from. However, I do think that to widely recognise the importance of the DevRel role, it is important that the barrier to entry for it is lowered. This will give the opportunity for new blood to break into the industry, which will also have an impact on the DevRel community growing, learning, and collaborating with each other.

Kat Cosgrove

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Kat Cosgrove, and I’m a Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi. These days I spend most of my time with Kubernetes and DevOps folks, but I used to be a web developer and then an embedded linux engineer. Before all of this tech, I was a bartender and the resident horror expert at an indie video rental store. I still collect horror films, and I still love making drinks for people, but my current fixation is film photography. I live in Seattle with my cats, Espresso and Spookie. Espresso is actually ghostwriting all of my tweets.

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

Advocating for people who otherwise may not have a voice. That doesn’t just mean like, Pulumi’s current users or whatever – it means people who might be users if we weren’t ignoring some aspect of who they are. That may mean changing the way I talk about our tool and the way I teach people how to use it, or it might mean listening to a complaint about a UI/UX issue and then throwing my weight behind that issue with our engineering team to make sure it gets addressed.

What is something you’re struggling with?

Working in DevRel and a large part of your presence being your personal Twitter account means you don’t really get to “turn off.” There’s this pressure to be “on” all the time, at least to some extent, because you’re always acting as a representative of who you work for and anyone could ask you a random product question at any time. That translates to a feeling that I’m not allowed to have a bad day, because if I do, everyone will see it. Not just my friends, but all of my co-workers and 30k people following me on Twitter. When I didn’t work in DevRel, having a rough day at work meant my immediate teammates would know and maybe my manager, but that was it. It sucks, but you kind of get used to it.

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

Ugh I’m sure he’s super tired of hearing this, but I’m constantly in awe of the stuff Austin Parker comes up with. It’s not just the Animal Crossing conference, though that was a banger – it’s that he seems to just like… casually come up with all of these weird, over the top ideas without making them feel forced at all, and then he somehow manages to convince companies and the community to come together for it. How do you do that, Austin? All I can do is shitpost.

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

Developer Advocates tend to burn out really, really quickly. We normally travel a lot, and because we spend so much time around each other in cool cities, we tend to kind of forget that we’re working, and as a result, don’t take as much time off as we should. Y’all, taking your weekend in Bangkok because you flew 18 hours over a Saturday and spent Sunday jetlagged so you can give a talk Monday is not taking time off. That isn’t a free vacation. That’s taking your weekend after you gave it up to your employer in the world’s longest commute. Take a week in Bangkok instead. Your mental health matters, and burnout takes a long time to recover from.

Rene Pot

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Rene Pot, 33 years old, and I live in the Netherlands. I’ve been a software developer for as long as I remember. From a young age, I’ve been exposed to BASIC, and I built my first website when I was about 12. Since then I have been obsessed. For the past 10 years, my work has been all about JavaScript, and for the past 3.5, I’ve been in developer relations. Currently, I work at Ombori as a Developer Advocate, working on the strategy for exposure and developer experience, among many other things. As probably everyone in this field, I have more to do than I have time for, but I enjoy every bit of it.

But of course, I’m not my job, in the end. I only work 40 hours and many more are spent differently. For one, I really enjoy a very good cup of coffee. So every city I visit I try to find a local roaster, a great coffee shop, and the best flavour beans. Which is also basically my number one souvenir whenever I travel for the job, a local bag of coffee beans.

And then in the evenings? Well, that very much depends on many factors, but very often I find myself deep in PC games like Factorio, Satisfactory or other simulation and strategy games. I even stream this often on Twitch as a fun side project. Though right now, as I’m in between houses, I don’t have the setup to do this.

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

The most important thing I always focus on is improving developer experience, and the relation we have with our developers. It is incredibly important everyone involved with our company feels they know what they’re doing and they’re happy with doing it. Working with tooling shouldn’t be a struggle but should be all about enjoying the process. So whatever I do, I always keep the experience in the back of my mind. “What would a developer think when they get into this process”, and “What would potential roadblocks be in this flow”. Not only am I trying to think of these things beforehand, but also try to pry this information from those working with our tooling. They might not even know they’re encountering issues and think it’s how it is supposed to be. In the end, it is up to me to identify these roadblocks and sit together with the engineering team to resolve these issues as soon as possible, sometimes even before we go live with something.

Then there’s collaborations. Right now my main focus within Ombori is strategizing and starting with partner integrations/collaborations. This is very interesting to me as I also always get a lot of great ideas, and interest in products when I see collaborations shared online. There are so many possible collaborations it’s always hard to choose, but in the end, I try to find those collaborations where the other party is also interested in partnering with us. It is rewarding to work on a collaborative project, and hopefully we both gain experience from this process. It might help bring two companies closer together, and it might inspire many developers to pick up the tooling we’ve worked with.

That said, I’m always on the lookout for new collaborations so we can add 3rd-party (your) products into our marketplace. So if you’re reading this and are interested in a collaboration with Ombori, then do let me know. Ombori’s core product is Ombori Grid, a SaaS platform to help you manage IoT devices, deploy .net/Python/NodeJS/Web apps or containers to any connected device, and never having to worry about managing the device lifecycle and monitoring again, so anyone can focus on building apps for, for example, raspberry pi’s, and not software updates or updating the device in person. You can try this all out free of charge (3 devices, forever) on omborigrid.com, and if you use coupon code JOINGRID21 you even get $250 towards any paid feature.

What is something you’re struggling with?

One of the hardest things right now is justifying what I’m doing with my time. Everyone in the developer relations community, and what also was discussed during DevRelCon, is trying to figure out how to measure our actions, and this is something I struggle with personally as well. “What makes for good actions that have the most impact”, is the question of the day. Right now I’m a solo developer advocate, so I have to do all the work a DevRel team should be doing. This also means I need to not only work on strategy but also implement it. And with only 40 hours a week to work with that is a hard choice to make.

Luckily I have great discussions with stakeholders in our company, and everyone is giving great input in what should be done. Especially now when the transition from strategy to implementation is happening for me, it can be tough to make this switch.

How much time should I spend on a blog post, a sample application, or making a video? When I spent 2 full days on a blog post and only a handful of people read it, does that make it worth it? These questions are justified, but at the same time, blog posts are not meant to be short-term. Maybe over the course of an entire year it will bring in great leads, it might help some random developer solve an issue they’re having 2 years later, or it might help inspire a potential user to do something of their own, even if it is not with our product. In the end that is what Developer Relations is for: helping developers. Even if that turns out to be with a competitor product, if that is the best solution, then I did my job well.

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

I must say, there are plenty of examples of great developer relations people in the community. Joining the DevRel Collective on Slack and watching 14 hours a day of DevRelCon made me incredibly inspired.

To take an example, a lot of discussions that have been happening recently in the community, as I already mentioned earlier, is about metrics. There are so many interesting discussions about this topic, and plenty of talks during DevRelCon went into depth on this subject as well, and that makes me feel more in my place. Not only do I struggle with something, but this is a general consensus in the community as a whole. The classic Imposter Syndrome comes around the corner here as well. And thanks to all the topics discussed and the blog posts shared I feel no longer alone in my role, despite the fact I’m solo within my company. There are people to lean on, and there’s a welcoming and strong community to go along with that.

Then of course there are the bigger, more popular (on Twitter) developer relations people. I follow quite a few of them, and they always share great, fun, and interesting articles, videos, podcasts, books, and obviously memes. Twitter is a great place to follow tons of DevRel and I should be more active there! At least I often try to interact with great content there, and I read plenty of articles that are being shared to improve my job as well.

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

DevRel is still relatively new, even though it’s been around for decades. Yes, it sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. Only in the past few years has DevRel truly been growing and public. Suddenly every open source project has DevRel, every company with public-facing APIs has DevRel, and many companies look into getting a DevRel person or team on board.

This is great! But it also means a lot of companies have no idea what DevRel is. I’d love to see a general better understanding of the role, and what it means to be in DevRel.

The line I saw, of which I lost the source (sorry if you wrote it!), “Developer Advocates are not in sales”, is important to me. I’m not trying to sell a product, I’m trying to help people use our product. The distinction between these two situations is lost on many people, and therefore many open positions for DevRel are basically marketing and sales with a different flavour. Of course, this also brings us back to the struggle of justifying my actions. So all in all, it’s quite complicated and this doesn’t help the image at all.

Thankfully a lot is already happening in this front, and many people in the DevRel community are working on improving this, so I can be very grateful to all of them. I am trying my best as well to clarify this with the limited means I have.

Edidiong Asikpo

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 18:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I like to think of myself as someone who loves to take chances on myself and try new things. Yes, it is always scary ALL THE TIME, but I’ve learned it’s better to give something a try than to give it a try a few months or years later.

My name is Edidiong Asikpo and I recently transitioned from web development to the cloud native development ecosystem. I love writing technical articles, building developer communities and sharing knowledge about the things I learn.

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

Effective communication! Why would I say that you may ask? In my role as a developer advocate, I’m either trying to inform the engineering team about feedback from the community, sharing knowledge about my company’s product through articles, videos, code demos, etc, empathizing with our users and helping them answer questions.

..and if you look at all these things critically, you’d realize they all revolve around communication. If the communication is done effectively then it is a win-win for me, the developers I interact with and the company I work for.

What is something you’re struggling with?

As weird as this may sound, it is actually building relationships with people. Yes, yes I know that’s what developer advocates do. But as an introverted person, kickstarting conversations and building relationships is something I struggle with.

I do love meeting people and getting to know them, but every time I do that, it’s me getting out of my comfort zone.

I would say I have significantly improved on this over the years, but I’d love to do even better at it as it is a critical part of developer advocacy and is also really dope to be an outgoing person.

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

I was so inspired and impressed when I heard that the Test Automation University started by Angie Jones of Applitools reached 100k students. To think this was something that started as a DevRel initiative but turned out to be so big and impactful to the lives of over 100k+ people. What? I was blown away.

Another inspiring scenario for me is when I see Developer Advocates who not only share knowledge ( through technical writing, speaking and content creation on social media) about their companies tools but also share knowledge about different technologies or what they’ve learned in their career. - These type of Developer Advocates are rockstars in my book!

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

I’d love to see the folks in developer relations be more public about the code-related things they do. There’s an untrue myth across the ecosystem that Developer Advocates are not technically sound and that’s very untrue.

So, I’d love us (including myself) to share the technical impacts we are making in our various companies. For example, I wrote an article titled “Overcome Kubernetes Application Integration Testing Challenges with Telepresence” which highlighted the challenges of integration testing and how a CNCF tool called Telepresence can help to solve those challenges. - The fact that I knew about these challenges is because I’ve actually performed integration testing with a number of microservices, meaning that I do know the technical bits of Kubernetes.

As much as we (Developer Advocates) try to talk about our companies products or frameworks we love, we should always remember that we are not marketers but people who interact with other developers and these developers we interact with are technical people so we need to share the technical bits and let them know we actually understand their pains and are trying to help them build better products, and supercharge their productivity amongst other things.

Peter Friese

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

👋🏻 Hello - I am @peterfriese, a Senior Developer on the Firebase team at Google. I focus mainly on our SDKs for iOS and Apple’s other platforms, but I’ve done some Android in the past (mostly Android Wear, in my first role when I joined Google).

The products I work most closely with are Cloud Firestore, Firebase Authentication, and Firebase Extensions (these are ready-to-use modules that you can add to your Firebase apps, e.g. for image resizing or to easily integrate services like Stripe or Mailchimp into your app).

Before joining Google, I worked at a bunch of consulting companies, building all sorts of apps and systems using a wide range of technologies (J2EE, Spring, Eclipse, OSGi) and languages (Delphi, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Objective-C, Swift). One of the companies I worked with was in the business of building a DSL for building DSLs, so I got to implement a couple of little languages myself - one of them actually was pretty similar to SwiftUI.

When I am not busy writing sample apps, drafting video scripts, or writing blog posts, you will find me reading a book, playing the bass, or listening to a podcast - I developed a voracious appetite for podcasts during the pandemic. My favourites are 13 Minutes to the Moon, Decoder, Land of the Giants, and Swift by Sundell.

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

Mediating between the developers who use our products and the product and engineering teams that build them. As DevRel, our job is to act as the zeroth customer of a product or API and make sure that it actually is useful and solves the problems our customers are facing. This means actually using our products and APIs in a scenario that is as close to reality as possible. To put this into practice, I rebuilt Apple’s Reminders app using SwiftUI and Firebase last year. My goal was not only to figure out whether it’s possible to build a meaningful app using those two large API surfaces, but also to work out how to architect apps that combine Firebase’s APIs (most of which are asynchronous in nature), and SwiftUI, which itself follows a reactive approach. This not only gave me some really good opportunities to connect with our iOS/Apple community but also forced me to exercise Firebase’s APIs in ways that were new. This resulted in the addition of Combine support, made sure the team was aware of async/await support early on and opened the door for some fantastic community contributions for Firestore, Cloud Functions, and the Realtime Database. And since a lot of things have changed since I first built this app, I have just started rebuilding it from scratch in public, using the latest versions of SwiftUI and Firebase.

What is something you’re struggling with?

Time management (side note: I am writing this on the subway on my way back home to make the deadline for the second week of Adventcado)… There are just so many cool things to do, I often find it hard to pick, and so I fall into the trap of overcommitting myself.

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

I am continuously inspired by the women in DevRel who have to endure being told people would rather speak to “someone technical”, and worse. I have had the privilege to work with some amazing women at Google and other companies, and they are among the finest technical people you will be able to find. So - if you attend a conference or an online event, why not assume both men and women are technical…

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

I think we need to get better at explaining what we do, how we do it, and why it is important. I am looking forward to a time when the job roles of Tech Writers, Developer Advocates, and Developer Relations Engineers will be as widely understood as Software Engineers, Product Managers, and Site Reliability Engineers.

It never ceases to amaze me to see that Developer Relations still seems to be somewhat of an unknown discipline to many people. I guess this is partly due to the job titles we use (not very many people outside of DevRel know what an advocate is - they most likely think it’s some kind of lawyer). Also, still too many people think we’re just marketing. It certainly doesn’t help that some companies still use the term Developer Evangelism - it definitely has a much more marketing-oriented sound to it.

Ana Cidre

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi! I’m Ana and I work as Head of International Developer Relations at Auth0. I got into developer relations for several reasons, but the main ones were to give back to the community and to (hopefully) inspire women and girls around the world who want to get into tech. I strongly believe the tech world can do better: We need more diversity and we need to be much more inclusive.

I have a degree in Fine Art and it’s something I am still passionate about. Even though I do not have a lot of time to create art, I try to visit museums and galleries whenever I have the chance. For me, coding and painting aren’t that different - In both scenarios you have a white canvas that you will fill with content. Also, the art I used to create was more on the installation side and also quite technical.

My biggest passion and what I dedicate most of my time to are my 2 amazing kids who never fail to surprise and entertain me. That being said, I would not be able to do what I do without the help and support of my incredible partner Eoghan Henn.

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

Being a manager of a developer relations team includes a lot of important tasks, such as making sure we never lose our main focus of helping the developer community, maintaining an event strategy, as well as all the “manager things” like headcount and budget. But for me, the most important part of my job is that my team can always count on me.

When I started the transition into this managerial position, I quickly realised that I cared more deeply about my team and their growth than I did about my own. For them to be able to thrive, I always want to make sure that they are supported, that they have a safe space to work and ask their questions and that they are able to come to me about anything and everything.

So the most important part of my job, to me, is creating that safe space for my team but also helping them grow, making sure that they do not have too much on their plates and that they enjoy their jobs.

What is something you’re struggling with?

Something I’ve been struggling with is saying no to speaking at all the events. In my new role I just do not have the time to continue doing an event or more every month, and it’s also not the core part of my role anymore. I recently had to ask one of my colleagues to take on a talk that I had accepted because of this. It was a life lesson for me as I felt awful for my colleague and for the event organisers.

But some good came out of it and it was that I have learned a valuable lesson and I will be mindful about what events I accept in the future. A part of me felt like I am letting down the community by not being on stage and giving a talk, or being on a stream, but I have come to terms with the fact that if I help my team, my team can help the community more than if I were to try to do it alone. Also, I will still go to an event or two, just not at the same capacity as I could before, and I will contribute in other ways too.

What do you look for when building your team?

Diversity. Which comes in all shapes and sizes. The more diverse the team, the better. There are many factors that contribute to diversity, but I first look for people who come from different cultures, races, or genders. Then I want people who will bring diversity to the programming and spoken languages we have already on the team.

But I don’t stop there because I believe the key to having an inclusive team is to have empathy and that’s something I look for in a person who will be joining our team. This does make the process of hiring someone take longer but it is 100% worth it.

I’ve already briefly touched on inclusion and I think that when you build a team this part is quickly overlooked. A lot of managers want more diverse teams, which is great, but if you do not have an inclusive place for everyone, you will quickly lose that diversity. Creating an inclusive team means making sure everyone is respectful to each other, creating a place where people can ask questions (there is no such thing as a silly or simple question) and most importantly, being an empathetic manager so that when there is an issue, they can come to you openly.

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

I get the feeling that a lot of companies see developer relations as purely marketing, but it’s not. Of course, at the end of the day, the long-term goal is to get developers to use our product or service, but we can only achieve that if we gain trust. So what I would like to see is developer relations being moved out of marketing, product and engineering. It should be its own department in the company.

I believe that developer relations sits at the top of the funnel. We should aim to create awareness about the service/product in the company we are working for. We do this by speaking at events, being present at community meetups, being a part of the community both online and/or offline, doing workshops,… - Being there for the community.

If we focus on aspects lower down in the funnel and start to track the typical marketing metrics we will quickly lose trust in the community as our main focus won’t be serving the community but on how many [insert marketing metrics here] we have generated.

However, there is another part of the funnel that DevRel does touch on and it is retention. But again this is through showing up for the developer by helping them with questions or providing them with support, for example, if they wish to be part of an Ambassador program.