Fireside with Voxgig

What to do if you don’t have magic pixie dust to sprinkle on your role in devrel? Jono Bacon and Richard discuss this and other relevant career conundrums in this entertaining episode.

There needs to be clear understanding of each role within the many parts of developer relations function. Founders and executives needs help and support to understand the good fits for each role and the expectations.

Too many professionals in developer relations have not fully managed the business aspect of their role. If you’re a business owner r founder, you need every function in a business to work and be seen to work. While DevRel has a value, it must be easier to map out that value. In the Community Core accelerator they help the people in these developer relations roles and the impact on the business.

Don’t make Jono sad. Do what gives you energy.

Did you realise that enshitification is a gradual change? We’re back at the business function impact again. Hold your fire on marketing and sales roles, there are great teams in marketing and sales that understand the value of devrel. Don’t dismiss them. And you don’t also have to climb the career ladder unless you WANT to. It’s a valid option to be good at what you enjoy and stay doing what you’re good at.

Jono is a fabulous guest, an experienced founder and an enlightening figure in our community of developer relations professionals. Check out his accelerator, Community Leadership Core to benefit more from his wisdom…now that’s he’s older!

Community Leadership Core accelerator. https://pages.jonobacon.com/core

Reach out to Jono here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonobacon/

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

Carter Rabasa is Head of Developer Relations at Courier and joins Richard in this Fireside with Voxgig chat. This starts as a history of developer relations, but exposes a question, a gap; who were the devrel leaders in the API/cloud era? The activity of developer relations as it is recognised today could be argued to have begun from 2010 onwards and perhaps GitHub is the genesis of this stage.

They also clearly emphasise the need for empathy and how to harness that superpower communicating in both directions – to developers about a product and from users back to product and technical teams.

Let’s get personal. How do you understand your role and performance as a developer relations professional? Maybe it actually starts with your company and not with you! And it should involve some awareness about what your company is building and trying to achieve.

Reach out to Carter via LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carterrabasa/

https://www.courier.com/

CascadiaJS Fest can be explored at this website https://2022.cascadiajs.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

Here at the Voxgig podcast we’ve decided that we’re sick of talking about DevRel all the time. So we’ve decided to switch it up with something completely different for this episode - DevOps! Marino Wijay joins Richard to talk about operator relations, and his work for solo.io as a developer advocate. Solo helps companies unite their services into functional applications using Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. So what’s Marino’s role? To make sure developers only have one thing to worry about: developing! All the explaining and talking to people, well that’s his job - it’s why he’s on the podcast.

As Richard has lamented before, Marino and Solo’s services would have been invaluable to him back in the days of combing through Kubernetes by hand. But what about their DevRel? Richard has known DevRel to be introduced to companies via CEOs or even investors, but it was Marino who was the major force in introducing DevRel to Solo. He now has two other team members working with him. He speaks about his journey of convincing colleagues to give this whole “developer relations” thing a try. He was the patient zero who “infected” Solo with DevRel and now it has successfully spread throughout the entire company.

He explains why he believes Kubernetes won out over Docker. Apparently a lack of observability (which stunts improvements) can be a real nail in the coffin. Docker used DevOps to garner early adoption, but wasn’t able to keep up with the demand of its customer base, allowing someone else to sweep in and offer what they couldn’t. Along that line, he and Richard explore the recent announcement from Terraform, regarding their decision to pare back their open source offerings. Is this another death knell, or a savvy decision that will give them a competitive edge? Tune in to hear Marino’s thoughts!

Solo https://www.solo.io/

Reach out to Marino here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwijay/

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

We’ve invited Rohit Ghumare to speak with us in this episode of the podcast, not just to ask him about his impressive Twitter following (although this will come up), but also to find out how he organises his time as a community organiser and developer advocate. As Richard knows all too well, startups require everyone to become a multi-hyphenate. But even in bigger organisations, with a whole team surrounding you, the work of a developer advocate can never be categorised simply. So Rohit talks us through what an average day looks like for someone in his position. From advocacy meetings to speaking at conferences, to coordinating between large groups of people. You’ll see why people skills are a must-have.

As we mentioned, Rohit has built up an impressive network across a variety of social media platforms. He’s fortunate in this regard, as follower numbers have become more of a concern for developer advocates in recent months - no thanks to the increase in job openings with follower requirements. How does Rohit feel about these roles? Well… they’re a bit of a red flag. And although he says not to quote him on that, we can’t help but agree. For him, it’s about what kind of person you are. Hiring someone with a high follower count may get your company some engagement, but it doesn’t mean that the person themselves will gel with your team.

He also has some great insights on the point of internal vs external hiring. What are the pros and cons of both? When it comes to speaking, he prefers to bring in people who already possess those skills. But for other devrel positions, he believes that people already working on your team have knowledge and interpersonal skills that would take an outsider months to grasp. By giving them a chance to prove themselves, you potentially unlock parts of people they themselves wouldn’t have thought to access. We think this logic checks out pretty well!

Reach out to Rohit here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-ghumare/

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

What even is positioning? Isn’t it that thing you do when you’ve already established your company and you’ve kind of already got everything figured out? According to this episode’s guest, Robert Kaminski: Absolutely Not! Robert is the co-founder of Fletch PMM, where positioning is their bread and butter, and he’s here to tell us about his belief that positioning should be one of the first considerations when getting a startup on its feet.

Fletch works with companies to adjust their website messaging. From overcrowded and confusing to simple, clear and informative. But how do you even get to that point? You need to establish your positioning. Richard admits that a common flaw in the startups he’s founded over the years was that he never sat down with the other founders to discuss positioning. A bad move, as there may or may not be a clip of him on Irish TV trying to explain what his company did through a rather unwieldy steam engine metaphor. Yep. Robert and Fletch are on a mission to stop founders from doing things like that.

In an age where software building is more accessible to people than ever, good positioning and marketing are kind of the only things that can give you that much needed advantage to stand out from the crowd. And yet, it’s an area that so many overlook. Fletch often offers their clients 75 minute workshop sessions, and according to Robert, if people can’t tell you who they are and what they do in that time - they’ve got a problem. And it’s not that people don’t know what they're talking about. They do! They just don’t know how to communicate it effectively, and that’s where Fletch comes in.

Reach out to Robert here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heyrobk/

There’s a large population of technical writers in devrel. And a big number of these technical writers don’t necessarily come from technical backgrounds. So how do they do it? In this episode, Richard has a fascinating discussion on this topic and more with developer evangelist, Pavan Belegatti. Pavan transitioned from a marketer to a highly skilled technical writer. He’s a self-taught developer and he gives us an insight into the marriage between writing and coding.

In developing, there’s often either a developing to writing pipeline (Richard’s path) or a writing to developing pipeline (Pavan’s), and as someone who came to writing later in his career, Richard picks Pavan’s brain on the discipline of writing. How do you move from being a ten pages on Monday, one page on Tuesday kind of writer, to someone with a more consistent output? Pavan explains that a common oversight in technical writing is not knowing the product well enough. As the saying goes - in order to sell something, you have to buy it yourself first. And how can you do great technical writing without great knowledge of the subject matter?

Pavan is also a content creator and a conference speaker and organiser. All of this as he explains, is a key aspect of a career in devrel. It’s all about building trust with potential colleagues, and having a reputation you can refer back to. When it comes to all of this, consistency is key. It’s easy to feel down about low view counts, but what Pavan explains is that a small number of followers who love engaging with your content is so much more valuable than a thousand eyeballs who don’t.

With the devrel community in India growing rapidly, Richard asks about the recent advent of people leaving devrel to go back to developing. Is this just a micro-trend, or an indication of a bigger shift? According to Pavan, it comes down to knowing what industry you’re going into. He’s found what he loves to do, and he’s happy here. We couldn’t agree more!

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

Technical writing is an essential element of countless products and services. So why is appreciation of it on the decline? Our guest, Chris Ward (or Chris Chinchilla as you may know him), is a talented writer. Not just of technical content, but also of fiction and music! He’s here to kick our writing brains into gear with a simple piece of advice: just start. Richard agrees that he needs to hear this as much as our listeners and that it’s one of the biggest hurdles for people who want to write - sitting down and actually doing it.

A lot of people in DevRel either write, or think about getting into writing. So how do you move from the group of people who want to, to the group of people who do? And why would you want to do it in the first place? There are many reasons. Whether you joined a team for your code and now you’re expected to write an eloquent newsletter on the uses of that code, or you’d like to write a book on your specialist subject to promote your expertise in it. Technical writing is a skill with endless applications. Writing a book for example, can be a fun challenge, as well as an asset you refer back to for years to come. Notice how we didn’t put “to make eye-watering profits” on that list. Yeah. That’s the first lesson in writing books, and Chris tells us all about it. The respect (and money) given to technical writers isn’t what it once was. And yet the services they provide are more relevant than ever.

There’s also the small factor that when you finally publish your book, you’re going to be talking about the contents of it for months and possibly years to come. So you’d better make sure the subject matter is one that you won’t easily get sick of (Chris may be speaking from experience on this one). Chris is also a musician, and he speaks about the connections between music and coding, how pattern recognition makes these two a lot more similar than you might think. And Richard makes Chris’s day by bringing up OctaMED, a long-forgotten Amiga music programme that they both lost hours to back in the day. How far they’ve come!

Reach out to Chris here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrischinchilla/

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

Content warning: laugh out loud moments and irreverent attitude to “boring” insurance companies.

In this episode Richard chats to a very positive blast from his past. Taariq Lewis gave Richard work when Richard needed it many years ago. They’ve each gone on and had several start ups and overcome lots of entrepreneurial hurdles since then, but that core decency informs not only this episode but Taariq and Richard’s philosophy about hiring and people. As Taariq put it about his previous and current ventures, “if we don’t make it, my team will make it.”.

And what about that team? What does it do? Well, Volume.finance started life as a consultancy to help blockchain companies get their products to market. Now, Volume Finance is the main developer on Paloma, a blockchain. So where does the DevRel come in? Well, everywhere. Taariq is very open about the challenges he and others in the Blockchain and crypto space face. For Taariq, he uses DevRel to help developers navigate the “non-stop new” and choose quality, well funded projects on which to work. Taariq and Volume spend time building credibility and trust with their community. It’s not easy, but it works and is worthwhile.

This episode is important because it exposes the reality that there are decent people working in Blockchain, helping this decentralised, distributed computing become more relevant to more people and businesses - even boring insurance companies!

Reach out to Taariq here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taariq/

https://github.com/palomachain

https://volume.finance/

Rory Madden, Co-Founder of UXDX, joins Richard on this episode of the podcast to talk us through his journey to creating one of the most dynamic, barrier-free conference series’ in tech. UXDX (UX being user experience, DX being developer experience) was born from Rory’s frustration when he couldn’t figure out how to implement innovative solutions in the companies he was working in, and he was always looking for case studies of people who had done it before him, as a way to boost his colleague’s confidence in new ways of doing things. His partner Catherine had a wealth of conference experience, so they decided to collaborate. They created UXDX, under the principle of connecting people from across every stage of the development process.

Rory talks about how the attendees of UXDX may work in a huge number of different fields, but underneath it all, they’re all united by a common interest - getting things done. It’s what the conference is all about. Many of their attendees have common frustrations; projects getting shelved or dropped with no explanation from their higher-ups, lack of transparency, etc. Rory feels the solution for this comes down to communication. Management sharing their vision with developers can help immensely when developers need to make decisions that require knowledge of the company’s overall goals. Lateral communication between different workers at the same level is another key element, and something that UXDX is just the place for.

Rory has a varied background in product development, and he dives into the pros and cons of really catering to your superusers, or going the other direction and changing things up to try and impress the people who just feel “meh” about your product. This decision applies to conferences too, as he reveals that he himself has thought about trying to cater UXDX for more of a niche audience. But ultimately, the multi-faceted crowd is what makes UXDX such a special event.

We also hear from him on the topic of community building, and how you begin that task from the ground up. The trick seems to be avoiding loaded expectations. Like product development, your desire to foster a community should stem from the desire to solve a problem that you see around you, and UXDX is truly a wonderful example of this.

Reach out to Rory here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorymadden/

Joe Pettersson joins the podcast, to talk all things devrel at banked.com. Banked is a global payments network, and if you’ve ever tried to order anything online, you’ll know that the payments systems used by various websites are far from perfect. Banked is on a mission to fix that. They want to get users through payments systems as smoothly as possible. As Joe puts it, the payments industry is big, but old-fashioned. So the question for him and the team at Banked became “how would we build Visa, or Mastercard if we started in 2023?”

Alongside all of this, Joe and his team have also made waves in the devrel space, and we were excited to hear about their innovative new system for measuring developer relations. At banked.com, their sales process is developer-enabled. Now you might remember our discussion about developer-first marketing with Anna Redbond on the podcast a few weeks ago. So what is the difference between developer-first and developer enabled? It comes down to whether you’re selling directly to developers, or trying to avoid the developers “nope”-ing your product when it’s put before them.

Joe explains that a huge part of banked.com’s success has been down to their focus on the developer experience. From his perspective, payment systems are already complex enough without needing to pass that complexity onto developers. For Richard, this represents a huge leap in efficiency from the days when he spent hours trying to integrate a credit card payment provider with a website, and had to personally calculate the encryption hash. PTSD, anyone?

Joe tells us that accounting for the developer experience while designing your product can be directly translated into increased revenue. Developers won’t always be choosing the products they use, but they are often given the power to say no. But how exactly do you measure the benefit of time and money invested into devrel? Joe and his team have a system that involves finding out what percentage of your prospect’s developers have heard of your project. It sounds simple, but we think this system is a gem that will soon be spreading to other companies. Listen to Joe explain HOW they implement this system.