Fireside with Voxgig

Jorge Barrachina Gutiérrez may be an engineer by official title, but he hasn’t let those kinds of labels restrict him in his career, and neither should you. Jorge is our wonderful guest today on the podcast, and we’re delighted to have him in for a chat about authorship, adaptability and his work with AI.

Jorge’s book, ‘DevRel Puzzle’ gives a hefty clue as to its contents. He lays out his perspective on how DevRel requires those engaged with it to fit many elements together in different ways, and in different contexts. Underlying his whole outlook, is his interest in the social side of DevRel, and how humans communicate as a whole.

Jorge has spent the majority of his career between multiple fields, including DevOps, but is now focused on AI, an area that Jorge acknowledges can often be brought down by its bad actors. However this hasn’t stopped those with a genuine passion and curiosity from continuing to make strides in the space.

Jorge encourages us to think less about “best practice” and more about customary practice. In DevRel, the one-size-fits-all approach is rarely effective, and that means you need to be highly adaptable, and ready to mould your approach within a specific context. This is a highly relevant exploration of ideas that we feel will be extremely helpful.

Who said building robust, production grade APIs had to be hard? As we hope for all technology, the creation and design of APIs has only become easier and more accessible over time. This is due in part to today’s wonderful guest, Christos Gkoros, and his work at Postman as an API designer.

Christos comes from a software engineering background and he speaks to us about his journey to his current role. As it turns out, API Designer isn’t just his job description, it’s his job title, something he acknowledges as slightly unusual. What it means is that his major focus is applying a streamlined process when it comes to API design, and conducting user research that can be applied in real time. Postman is an API platform that helps its users to create, test and use APIs, and as a frequent user of Postman’s services, Christos jumped at the opportunity to join their team.

He breaks down how they support developers at all stages of the API life cycle, from conception to design, to testing. Christos takes us through some common API pitfalls, both in design and other areas of creation.

Namely, the murky territory of competing versions of SDKs, and the chaos that can ensue when trying to get them to cooperate with your shiny new API. To top it off, Christos discusses his role as organiser of the API Athens Meetup, proving that, on this podcast, DevRel is never too far away.

Reach out to Christos here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christos-gkoros/

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

Caroline Lewko has an immense wealth of knowledge and experience in Developer Relations, to the extent where she’s been involved in codifying some of the now ubiquitous aspects of it, including the evolution of its name!

Caroline is the co-founder of DevRel.Agency and according to her, she’s been doing community work pretty much since the day she was born - exactly the kind of thing we love to hear. Though she had a background in tech via telecommunications, this evolved into something a lot more technical in 2001, and she hit her DevRel stride just as mobile and internet devices began to merge.

As someone with almost a decade of experience hosting developer events, Caroline is well placed to educate us on facilitating healthy working relationships between the different areas of DevRel.

For example, you may be working with a freelance writer to develop some copy, a task which requires extensive back and forth between the writer and your developers. Over the years, Caroline has learned that a bit of hand-holding is often initially required for these connections to form, but once they have, they can form the foundation for future invaluable work.

Reach out to Caroline here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinelewko/

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 sitting down to chat with Sean Falconer. Sean is the head of marketing and developer relations at Skyflow, and he brings us a fascinating inside look at the growing field of data protection.

Skyflow's main selling point is their data privacy vaults, used in a similar way to an identity protector, but they've taken this concept from an individual service to one that can cater to entire companies with seemingly endless streams of PII flowing through their systems daily, vulnerable to attack from outside sources.

Sean describes their journey, and how their DevRel skills helped to bring SkyFlow, and data privacy vaults to such a massive audience in such a short space of time. According to Sean, the discussion of data protection, and how organisations manage it has moved up from the water cooler to the board room, and developers are increasingly feeling questions as to the state of their data security.

This is an interesting look into a really exciting area of technology, and perfect example of how a strong DevRel team can make or break a company.

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 taking a look back at our 100th episode with Andrew Grill. We spoke to him back in June of last year all about Digital Curiosity, Andrew’s book, which came out at the end of 2023.

We here are at the top of the hype cycle on AI (Generative AI in particular) it is hype that is prompting and causing government action. This is now mainstream.

And Andrew had a brilliant, brief and aha! take on Apple’s Vision Pro. For SciFi fans, there are even attempts to seek answers for the future from great authors!

Andrew doesn’t shy away from the risks and the needs for regulation, but does caution against hysteria. We are responsible, “we have a role” in where this goes.

This is both reassuring and thought provoking, and as usual with Andrew, he motivated us to get off the sidelines and engage with technology and digital opportunities for our own work, innovation and strategies. Leaders need to dedicate time to being digitally curious. There are costs to leaving this up to everyone else.

Enjoy this episode and whet your appetite for playing with and discovering new digital and technological opportunities for your business!

Reach out to Andrew Grill https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewgrill/

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

According to today’s guest, Diana Walsh, Developer Relations, at times, does actually require some real work. Of course most of us know this, but it helps to publicise this fact occasionally. Diana is the principal Customer Success Manager at Hubspot, and she joins us for a chat about the cross-functionality of DevRel.

Diana and her teams help Hubspot to manage their most valuable, and complex accounts, in a new subsection of the company’s workforce, and Diana expresses to us her happiness at being one of the first people selected for this new endeavour.

She speaks to us about the value of honesty in her work, and in Hubspot as a whole. It is just one of several core tenets they value as an integral part of their ethos, and an admirable step for any organisation to take. Diana goes into her role and the joy she takes in working across multiple teams with all different kinds of people.

Diana also takes us through some examples of what she feels works for companies when it comes to promotion. For example, you may think of cold calling as a relic, but modern iterations that are properly personalised and tailored can yield surprisingly successful results. When it comes from a former marketer, this is probably advice you can feel confident in taking!

Reach out to Diana here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianawalsh19/

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 throwing back to when Richard spoke with Salma Alam-Naylor about all things content!

Now had we invited Salma onto Fireside just so Richard could learn how to begin his Twitch streaming career? Potentially.

Salma is a live streamer, software engineer and developer educator. She streams on Twitch under the moniker “whitep4nth3r” -she dives into the backstory around the name in the episode (we think it’s great, for the record).

Salma gets into the weeds about live streaming, content creation and personality. Over the years, she has carefully built her viewership into a vibrant, supportive community that uplifts her.

As we learn, her journey began during the first covid lockdown, although unlike whipped coffee and homemade sourdough, her lockdown passtime actually outlasted the pandemic. As someone with backgrounds in coding, performance and teaching, live streaming herself coding seemed like the perfect intersection of her talents, and we couldn’t agree more. Although coding is what she does the most, cross-stitching and live music have also made appearances on her stream, and yes, her coder heavy audience still shows up for these lives too. This point can be understood when Salma goes into what makes people engage with content online, and what’s been obvious to her is that if people connect with someone online, it doesn’t matter what the content is. The audience will follow.

Salma tells us about the positives and negatives of Twitch, about the harassment she’s received, but also the incredible support from her community. There also turns out to be more similarities between streaming and working on a developer team than just the code. In both cases, a group of people come together with a common goal; whether that be to learn, to connect or to have fun. 

From a metrics perspective, viewer and subscriber counts can be a tough taskmaster, and it can be a challenge not to judge yourself through this very stark measure of “success”. Salma’s solution comes from Maya Angelou - people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. That metric is hard to quantify, but it’s probably also the best one out there.

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

Have you ever been on the phone to a company representative and thought “You know, if only this human on the other side of the call was instead a chatbot who would be even less receptive to my problems”?

Us neither. And yet the looming threat of LLMs replacing consumer facing roles continues to do just that - loom. But today's wonderful guest Mike Amundsen is here to explain why moving away from the human side of technology may ultimately be the death knell of any community your company may have built.

Mike has worked in the API space for the last 20 years. He's written many articles and books on the subject, as well as working with companies all over the world who have taught him more and more about how to use and get the most out of APIs.

Mike goes into the differences between working on small scale startup APIs and the much larger enterprise endeavours. The surprising reality is that while tech might be an issue for startups lacking resources, the problem for the big companies is people. Everything you need to create great work is at your fingertips, but you've now got 50 team members to wrangle. Pick your poison.

Reach out to Mike here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mamund

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

Who said building robust, production grade APIs had to be hard? As we hope for all technology, the creation and design of APIs has only become easier and more accessible over time. This is due in part to today’s wonderful guest, Christos Gkoros, and his work at Postman as an API designer.

Christos comes from a software engineering background and he speaks to us about his journey to his current role. As it turns out, API Designer isn’t just his job description, it’s his job title, something he acknowledges as slightly unusual. What it means is that his major focus is applying a streamlined process when it comes to API design, and conducting user research that can be applied in real time.

Postman is an API platform that helps its users to create, test and use APIs, and as a frequent user of Postman’s services, Christos jumped at the opportunity to join their team. He breaks down how they support developers at all stages of the API life cycle, from conception to design, to testing.

Christos takes us through some common API pitfalls, both in design and other areas of creation. Namely, the murky territory of competing versions of SDKs, and the chaos that can ensue when trying to get them to cooperate with your shiny new API. To top it off, Christos discusses his role as organiser of the API Athens Meetup, proving that, on this podcast, DevRel is never too far away.

Reach out to Christos here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christos-gkoros/

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

For today's episode, we're looking back to September of last year, when Richard spoke to Taariq Lewis of Volume Finance. Let's refresh ourselves on the activity within the Blockchain landscape from a true industry insider.

Taariq 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/