Today, we're revisiting this New Year's episode from 2024. Our guest was Andrew MacLean, the developer relations manager at DevCycle, a feature flag management platform for developers. If you’ve never heard of feature flag management, that’s probably because it’s a relatively new space, despite feature flags having been around forever.

If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of feature flags, one of their main benefits is allowing you to update your platform without having to deploy so many versions that you lose the ability to maintain quality. As with many of the people we feature on Fireside, this service could have been a game changer in some of the startups Richard has worked on over the years.

Andrew dives into the history of feature flags, and what launched them into the mainstream. From Github devs, to articles, to implementation by major SaaS companies, word of mouth popularisation has made feature flags the staple they now are.

Andrew also gives us some insight into his history. It’s a typical DevRel story, of falling into the industry somewhat by accident, but in Andrew’s case his starting point was studying for a career in forensic science. With a background almost as interesting as the work he does now, Andrew makes for a fascinating interviewee.

Reach out to Andrew here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewdmaclean/

Check out DevCycle: https://devcycle.com/

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups:

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

Top tip: if you’re thinking of getting into DevRel, just know that you will hate boxes of t-shirts for the rest of your life. Or at least that’s how today’s guest, Phil Leggetter feels about them. Merch getting stuck in customs is a minor issue for sure, but it’s one of the pitfalls of DevRel we get into in this episode.

Phil is the Head of DevRel and Developer Marketing at Hookdeck, an event gateway that strives to be a backbone for event driven applications.

We talk to Phil about the utility of SDKs, and where their detractors tend to miss out on their ultimate purpose. We speak about the connection to revenue, and the key to demonstrating it, if you have higher ambitions for DevRel.

We also ask the question - is there an advantage for DevRel to stand apart from marketing, or does this cause us to miss out on another community that we might gel well with?

Reach out to Phil here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leggetter/

Check out Hookdeck: https://hookdeck.com/

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups: 

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

Today, we’re speaking to Kevlin Henney, who, if you scroll back far enough, you’ll see was one of our earliest guests on the podcast. We’re thrilled to have Kevlin back for a discussion on microservices, agile development and how developers can avoid the “factory line” work style.

Kevlin talks to us about how there isn’t one service or language that has “the answer”, and the approach to tools should be broad and open to change. When developing a system, you’re creating something new - it’s not manufacturing, there is always an element of novelty to what you’re making, and that should be understood and accounted for.

We also get into the subject of legacy code and systems, and how to interact with and manage them. The accommodations required to run such a system can often result in it making more decisions than the developers working on it. A code base that’s a decade old with multiple component systems fighting each other can present problems, but if everyone’s too afraid to change things up, then the maintenance costs will continue to rack up.

It was a pleasure to have Kevlin back and we can’t wait to see what he’s up to, 200 more episodes down the line!

Reach out to Kevlin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevlin/

Check out his website: https://about.me/kevlin

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups:

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

Today we’re talking observability, open source, developer education and the politics of conference speaking. And we’re doing it all with our amazing guest, Zameer Fouzan from New Relic.

If you don’t already know, New Relic helps engineers effectively deploy and run software with Full Stack Observability. Where other companies may do observability, but don't have a single language to communicate it, New Relic makes use of a single specification that caters to all languages and frameworks with the same APIs and languages.

Part of Zameer’s job is of course, speaking at various conferences and he chats to us about how he’s evolved as a speaker since first starting out, and gives us his best advice for both new and experienced speakers.

Reach out to Zameer here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zmrfzn/

Check out New Relic’s past and upcoming events: https://newrelic.com/events

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups:

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

Coding is like spinning plates, and before you even start you've gotta be spinning seven of them. Today's guest is Jim Bennett, the Developer Advocate at Pieces For Developers, where they’re trying to make that plate spinning act run just a little smoother.

Pieces For Developers works as a long term memory for your workstream as a developer, feeding across everything you do, allowing you to maintain flow and easily pick up where you left off after being away from your desk. If as a developer, you've ever struggled with the autocomplete style of LLMs that doesn't seem to work in a dense context, then Jim's work may interest you.

Jim's key piece of advice to DevRel's out there? Constantly evaluate and report. Don't get caught out by mismatched expectations. Know who you're reporting to and what they want. You may be doing a hundred things at once but your North star must be the thing that centers you. For Jim, it's daily active users, but for you it could be something completely different.

Be sure to listen to the episode to hear Jim's full thoughts on this!

Reach out to Jim here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimbobbennett/

Check out Pieces For Developers: pieces.app

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups:

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

Our guest today is Katie Wasilenko Miller, and if you’re at all curious about what it’s like to have worked in DevRel for Google, Asana, and Slack then this might be the episode for you.

Katie has spent a great deal of time across a huge variety of roles in the DevRel space, and after years of working for big companies, she’s now enjoying her time doing advising and mentoring as well as being an ambassador for the Developer Marketing Alliance, and a member of the steering committee for the new DevRel Foundation.

Katie talks with us about how DevRel might be in its teenage years. Think about it - wanting respect, craving independence, all the hallmarks are there! And while there’s a degree of frustration there, there’s also a wonderful opportunity to determine where we want to go next.

We touch on AI, events, onboarding and more, so be sure to listen to get Katie’s thoughts!

Reach out to Katie here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmillrunner/

Check out The DevRel Foundation here: https://github.com/DevRel-Foundation

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups:

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

John Gilhuly is the chief developer advocate at Arize.com, an AI observability monitoring platform, and he joins us for a great discussion on the rapidly evolving AI space, and what that means for a company built to work with LLM applications.

He talks to us about Arize’s new open source product, ‘Phoenix” - the Garageband to their Logic, and how the inspiration for building it came from how much the team feels they owe to the wider open source community. As much as it is a chance for them to build their own community, that element comes second to their desire to simply give back to people.

We of course, get to talking about the classic DevRel questions, proving value and defining your role. With a background in sales and solution engineering, John points out to us that in sales, your work is handed to you, whereas a DevRel must create and build their work from the ground up, creating something from nothing. Perhaps this is why it’s so often described by our guests as an incredibly creative job in a technical world?

Reach out to John here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johngilhuly/

Check out Arize.com: https://arize.com/

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups: https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

When Stacey Kruczek joined Aerospike.com, their community building needed a little TLC from a developer relations expert. These days, the community is 12,000 people strong, the meetups are thriving and she knows exactly how to prove DevRel’s business value. In this episode, we chat with Stacey about all of this and more.

If there’s one word to describe Stacey, it’s passionate. This is obvious from the way she has built an immense amount of trust with developers at Aerospike and beyond. Aerospike is a real time database handling massive amounts of data, and Stacey has been key to building the wonderful community they currently uphold. Of course DevRel is a complicated role, but as Stacey puts it, she’s really there to listen - and that’s what she does, responding in real time to developer needs.

Stacey is also doing incredible work with the Developer Relations Foundation, where she’s on a mission to be the spokesperson that DevRel desperately needs. The foundation’s focus is on promoting the value DevRel adds to business, and supporting their community in that goal.

The work that Stacey does is not only huge in its amount but huge in its reach, and we can’t wait to see what more she does in the future!

Reach out to Stacey here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceykruczek/

Check out Aerospike here: https://aerospike.com/

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups:

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

Nick Schneeberger is the developer behind Freepublicapis.com, which is no small accomplishment given that he’s also teaching at a university and studying for a data science masters degree at the same time. We’re thrilled to have Nick on the podcast, to give us some insights into how programming is being both taught and learned in the current age.

Nick teaches programming basics, and it was his own students that prompted him to found Freepublicapis.com. Every semester, Nick would have to go through the API list he provided to his students and individually check that those APIs were still up and running. Now he provides this service on a much wider scale, helping not just his students, but anyone looking to use an API, and be confident it actually works.

We speak to Nick about what it’s like to teach coding to beginners. He tells us that it's not so much natural ability, as it is interest that can help people excel. A key skill to develop is being able to find the flaw in your code without losing your cool. It's a tricky thing to teach something that mostly comes with time and experience.

Nick is very open to his students using LLMs to aid in their work. From his perspective, it’s more helpful to teach them how to use it in an effective way. Despite this, he still believes the old school ways are going to stick around too. Start with the whiteboard - then move on to the new technology.

After all, why stick to one way of doing things when you can take something useful from everything?

Reach out to Nick here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-schneeberger-814645154/

Check out Freepublicapis: https://www.freepublicapis.com/about

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups: https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com

Back in February, James Higginbotham joined us for a chat about what it’s like to work with increasingly large developer teams. Now he’s back to catch us up on what he’s been doing at his company, LaunchAny.

LaunchAny is an API strategy and design consultancy, and so James is the ideal person to ask this question: I’ve launched my API, now how do I run it professionally? James explains how he’s seen commercial forces create a shift, where APIs are now not only being taken more seriously, but an absence of them can create serious issues for otherwise stable organisations.

A key example he gives is of a company that lost a bid for a big silicon valley client due to their inability to present a solid API integration plan. A few years later, they bid again, and won. What happened in the years since? James and his team had been working with them to help build up their API portfolio, and they were then in a position to offer all the client wanted and more.

James also talks to us about lifecycles, and the deprecation of APIs. While so far he hasn’t had an influx of people looking to sunset their API in a professional way, he expects that in the next few years of API sprawl, this will become a lot more prevalent.

Be sure to give this episode a listen for some technical insights into the API world!

Reach out to James here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameshigginbotham/

Check out LaunchAny: https://launchany.com/

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups: https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com