Fireside with Voxgig

It's an exciting episode today, for everyone we’re sure, but particularly for Richard, as today’s guest is none other than Peter Bryant, the Founder of RimuHosting, and something of a personal hero of Richard’s.

Richard in fact, was a client of RimuHosting, and he still recalls that what first attracted him to the service was their friendly attitude to developers. Peter goes into RimuHosting’s origins and tells us all about his initial vision for the company and how they've managed to maintain that vision for all these years.

As a developer working for a startup in Washington, Peter felt the entrepreneur itch. He saw a gap to fill, and inspired by those around him, he made the jump and founded RimuHosting. Back in the early 2000’s, data space was scarce on the ground, and this was something Peter knew needed to change.

Despite the lack of Zoom at the time, Peter successfully launched RimuHosting in his home country of New Zealand, defying predominant business advice to “go local” before expanding. He knew that the market for what he was offering was further afield, and if he wanted them to get on board, he’d have to start making a lot of calls.

Today RimuHosting prides itself on its customer retention rates. As Peter puts it, it's a good sign when your customers forget you exist - it means you’re doing your job very very well. Despite this, they still manage to remain customer-facing, and with consolidation swallowing up independent hosting services left and right, RimuHosting is an example to all, of the quality and worthiness of independent companies.

Reach out to Peter here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterbryant/

Check out RimuHosting: https://rimuhosting.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 with Jack Coldrick, the Senior Technical Partner Manager at Personio. Jack joins us to talk about what goes into managing an app marketplace and how his background as a solutions engineer may have set him up for success.

So why does Personio have an app marketplace? Well it's simple - Jack tells us that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, they'd rather divide and conquer. Personio supplies all the tools needed to support HR processes within businesses. The space for HR support technologies has expanded massively in recent years, meaning many people are at work in the same fields.

Personio has created a place where people can connect and collaborate on technologies that complement each other. They operate at the late stage of these products, where most of the work has been done, and a lot of the time, what's needed is a final push for an acceptance into the App Store.

Jack talks to us about the importance of documentation. As he puts it, you can have the best integration in the world, but if the developers can't make sense of it, things tend to go downhill. Usability, and user experience is key at Personio, and Jack tells us how this has helped significantly in avoiding the dreaded 'churn' that can be a real problem for SaaS companies.

We were delighted to have Jack on, and can't wait for you to hear our chat with him!

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

Michiel Mulders is a wonderful example of a creative developer, driven to share knowledge and committed to quality documentation. He delivers a module on documentation and technical writing at DevRel University, free online course dedicated to Web3 DevRel.

In this episode, Richard and Michiel have a thorough exploration of documentation philosophies, approaches, tools and analytics for content engagement. Listen up here, understand the real benefits of paying attention to your documentation creation and its use.

Lots of food for thought here, but also practical steps and proven tools described to help get you started on your overdue Documentation Improvement Project!

Reach out to Michiel here : https://www.linkedin.com/in/michielmulders/

and find out about DevRel Uni here: https://www.devreluni.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

Please enjoy this chat from last year with Carter Rabasa!

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

Tune in for an in-depth chat about how companies can improve their revenue through fully understanding their open source project and software. Emily speaks truthful sense. This is a tough message for the overly optimistic among you. As Richard so rightly points out – knowing the right thing to do vs doing it are two different things!

Emily outlines the many, many ways a company can leverage open source in their offerings and is beautifully frank about source available vs open source… So where does DevRel come in to this? Well – unless a company has clearly identified its positioning, then how can DevRel communicate the benefits your project, service or product deliver?

You need the template – visit Emily’s website (link below) – to clearly define your company’s positioning.

Now with clear positioning, the first thing you should do is raise your prices…what? Crazy! But no. It’s a real and possible strategy.

Emily shares her background with us, and issues a warning about choosing journalism as a career…a good way to get comfortable with not having any money. Do not ask Emily to write a Kubernetes 101. She’s had quite enough of that, thank you very much. But the repeated requests did wake her up to the opportunity to help companies to take their messaging and positioning seriously.

Reach out to Emily: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyomier/

Our guest today is none other than the wonderful Matteo Collina. Matteo is a returning guest on the podcast, and we are so excited to catch up with him. There's a lot of ground to cover here, including philosophy, the highs and lows of being a maintainer, and the world of TypeScript.

Matteo leads us in a discussion of testing infrastructure. The sequence of events should be simple. Write an application, write a test for it. But when the test doesn't accurately reflect the running environment, the results won't be of much use. Some tests may be good for determining if your business logic is sound, but do they actually do what they say on the tin?

We also chat about the muddy world of aging frameworks, especially if you’re a maintainer trying to juggle everything. Picture it as a game of guacamole. You patch one bug, but now five more have popped up out of nowhere. It's an unfortunate reality. Then there's the matter of the one person thousands of miles away who was relying on that one bug to hold up their whole system, which you have now ruined, and they will definitely be letting you know about it. Strongly worded email incoming.

This leads us on to the topic of (as Matteo dubs them) “open source vampires”. Those who suck the life out of open source maintainers without ever expecting to give anything back - least of all money. It can be easy as a developer to fall into this parasitic relationship, which inevitably leads to burnout, and potentially even more serious mental health issues. It's important to value yourself and your time, even when others don't.

Thank you Matteo for reminding us of this!

Reach out to Matteo here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteocollina/

Read Matteo’s blog about the stats on Node.js:

https://blog.platformatic.dev/nodejs-is-here-to-stay

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: http://www.devrelmeetup.com

Today we welcome back Alvin Bryan to the Fireside with Voxgig podcast! Alvin Bryan joined us over a year and a half ago. Alvin is the Developer Advocate at Unleash, and he joins us for another chat about Developer relations, meetups and open source.

We sat down with Alvin to chat about the lack of DevRel tools for individuals, and what this gap means. Alvin's work at Unleash centres on feature flags, a useful tool for making the process of integrating new features as smooth as possible.

We dove into the crossover between DevRel and journalism, witn both Alvin and Richard having had experience in both fields. It might suppose you to learn that, with demands on your creativity, time and people skills, there's actually many similarities between the two areas.

You'll be delighted to hear that Alvin is in the process of welcoming a new DevRel team member to his operation. Yes - it's true - Certain companies are in fact still hiring more devrels, as opposed to cutting down on their numbers!

This was a great catch up for us, and we're sure it will be for you too!

Reach out to Alvin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-bryan/

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

Joe Pettersson joined the podcast last year 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.

Thank you Matteo for reminding us of this!

Reach out to Joe here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepettersson/

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 revisiting this chat we had with Robert Kaminski from last year, where he talked us through the practice of positioning.

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/

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

After the excitement of our 200th episode earlier this week, it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming here at Fireside. And what’s become regular for us, along with seemingly the whole world, are discussions of AI and the current and potential consequences of its use.

We’re chatting to Jason St-Cyr, a returning guest to the podcast, who stands as a perfect example of the way DevRel roles might be evolving in the workforce. Last year, when we spoke to him, Jason’s title was Head of DevRel - it’s now VP of engagement. And while there’s only so much that can be contained within a title, we think it serves as a very real indication of the direction the DevRel tide is flowing.

The nature of DevRel as a practice, and the skills involved, means there’s a great deal of crossover with other fields. This is something that appears to be inspiring not just just DevRels themselves, but employers in other fields, and we chat to Jason about what this means for people who may be considering making this leap.

We also discuss the influence of LLMs on technical writing, and the pitfalls of worshipping the ground they walk on. Many people are eager to make the leap to fully AI-produced content. This might work for now (though not to a degree of high quality) - but what happens when all those writers have transitioned into their new ChatGPT consultant roles? The work they would have otherwise been producing no longer exists - and the LLMs don’t have anything new to train on, resulting in their redundancy as a tool of “efficiency”.

We discuss all this and more in the episode!

Reach out to Jason here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonstcyr/

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