Fireside with Voxgig

Motivation, Advocacy, and Leadership are the three themes for this week’s #DevRel podcast.

This time around in our #DevRel podcast series, Richard Rodger speaks to Colm Doyle. We bring up some big tech company names such as Microsoft, Apple, Open-air, Slack, and Facebook and zero in on what it takes to making #DevRel work. One of the most important things, in that regard, is leadership.

Colm is an experienced Developer Relations and Engineering Manager and is, currently, head of Developer Relations at Intercom.

As we jump to some API discussions, we get into the role of the leader when it comes to setting up a #DevRel team.

Once an API takes off, how difficult it is to manage it as a #DevRel person?

Having worked for big tech companies and with a lot under his belt, Colm can tell us a thing or two about that – such as the management and distribution of API long-term, the importance of leadership and much more!

Learn more about Colm here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colmdoyle/

To get a weekly dose of the experiences of DevRel professionals or news on DevRel meetups sign up to the Voxgig newsletter.

View all show notes, links, and more brilliant public speaking resources at voxgig.com.

If you like what you hear on Fireside with Voxgig, don’t be shy―tell everyone!

Use #firesidewithvoxgig on your social media.

Be warned: this podcast contains kindness and care and a decent description of how Guns&Roses are a guide for startups!

With that being said - this week, we have an inspiring chat with PJ Hagerty as he brings the spirit of Guns&Roses and Buffalo, New York!

PJ is a developer, writer, speaker, musician, and Community Advocate. He shares with us his life story of getting into tech and founding one of the first DevRel communities. In his journey to DevRel, the combination of luck and curiosity came in very handy – when back in the day you could do only so much with computers.

As a member of a musical band, he learned the first bits and pieces of how a community can contribute to a lot of success and how people, rather than computers, are the heart of everything.

PJ Hagerty was there at the dawn of Developer Relations – the primordial ooze from which DevRel grew in 2012! Is DevRel even a career choice and how to get into DevRel?!

This is about the journey in to DevRel and the ethos that can make you successful in the role.

It is also about community care and finding the person in the room who feels they don’t belong and help them to feel like they should.

Learn more about PJ here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pjhagerty

To get a weekly dose of the experiences of DevRel professionals or news on DevRel meetups sign up to the Voxgig newsletter.

View all show notes, links, and more brilliant public speaking resources at voxgig.com.

If you like what you hear on Fireside with Voxgig, don’t be shy―tell everyone!

Use #firesidewithvoxgig on your social media.

This week, we decided to revive the 2018 podcast with Andrew Grill as we bring up public speaking, the rough journey of becoming a public speaker and such. If you are in DevRel you are probably a public speaker, or want to be one. Listen to Andrew for some great advice.

Andrew Grill calls himself a ‘practical futurist’. He is a professional writer, blogger and conference speaker—which means he gets paid to talk. And he wants to help you do the same.

You’ll learn why the first 90 seconds of a talk are vital, how clichés kill your talk, and how to tell when you’ve hooked your audience. Andrew also gives us tips on how to survive when the tech lets you down (something many of us can identify with). He shares his insights on why Blackberry failed, why we need to broaden our understanding of quotas, and why digital diversity is the next big idea in tech.

In this day and age, we can use smart devices to perform better as speakers, so we touch on how technology can benefit us when adversity kicks in.

Learn more about Andrew here.

To get a weekly dose of the experiences of DevRel professionals or news on DevRel meetups sign up to the Voxgig newsletter.

View all show notes, links, and more brilliant public speaking resources at voxgig.com. 

If you like what you hear on Fireside with Voxgig, don’t be shy―tell everyone!

Use  #firesidewithvoxgig on your social media.

When we talk about Developers' Relations, we often talk about the three Cs: Code, Community, and Content.

This week's podcast talk makes a turn at bringing those three together. Service design helps us achieve that with its principles for DevRel strategy.

Delivering and designing a service is critical in making your DevRel coherent.

In this podcast, John Lynch who is a Service Designer breaks down the service design thinking in the technical world with real-world examples as well as his experiences.

With John as our guest, we get to discuss:

- Types of Design

- What defines a service?

- Are services all around us?

- What defines a product?

- Reading and Maintaining Documentation

- Working with APIs and third-party services

A how-to guide on building a community and successful event creation! Spoiler alert: it takes work, commitment and patience. Vicky Twomey-Lee is a diversity in tech & community veteran.

You need community BEFORE you have an event!

So, you're a developer, but you feel you need a change of role, but not industry. Well you've come to the right podcast today! In this episode we talk to Alvin Bryan, Developer Advocate at Contentful and a coach at Codebar, a really interesting initiative to help people learning to code and starting out in various languages. Alvin generously and openly walks us through how he moved from being a frontend developer to his current role. We talk about when organisations just don't get the value of developer community building and supporting meetups, something he and Contentful very much have in their plans!

Listen to hear about the 3 Cs of DevRel, and a little frustration at our own industry for our perhaps lack of attention to details when it comes to SDKs.

Breaking out of the DevRel bubble - our conversation with Joan Mulvihill, Digitalisation & Sustainability Lead at Siemens. We discuss the big company perspective and how large organisations need help innovating and dealing with developers. We also discuss the openness so valued by developers and embraced by Siemens to tackle sustainability and every other challenge and responsibility facing their customers. A breath of fresh air!

Daniel Bryant is the Head of Dev Rel at Ambassador Labs. In this fast paced conversation, Richard and Daniel discuss several aspects of developer relations and developer advocacy. From changing attitudes to swag through to the art of positioning (hat tip to April Dunford) via open source, real vs pretend community and the recurring question of where developer relations sits in a company or is a sales cycle, this is a DevRel tutorial not to be missed.

Daniel and Richard are deeply knowledgeable on the practical challenges of, but also the opportunities afforded by, implementing consistent and professional developer relations function in your organisation. We know you'll find it informative.

In this week's episode, Richard talks to Suze Shardlow, marketer, coder, published tech author, speaker and event emcee! Suze is the Developer Community Manager at Redis. In this conversation Suze offers really great insight in to the relationship between sales and DevRel and how you have to be really careful in your organisation not to position DevRel as just another part of the sales funnel because nothing turns off developers and damages a community of developers as trying to sell to them directly! We also discover how Suze got started in public speaking and the differences she sees between delivering a talk at an event and acting as emcee. Listen to this chat to get a very good understanding of how your organisation could think about DevRel and its DevRel strategy.

In this repeat from 2019, Orla speaks to Matthew Revell, founder of Hoopy, and DevRelCon, an important event on the DevRel calendar. This year, DevRelCon is in Prague from Dec 6th, but this interview, carried out before the pandemic, gives wonderful insight in to Matthew's own interest and pedigree in events, but also the genesis of DevRelCon. Listen to Matthew's perfect description of developer relations too!