| title | datePublished | cuid | slug | cover | tags |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Breaking into Developer Relations |
Sat Apr 23 2022 06:45:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) |
cl2bhzcnu0639w4nv14af3iej |
breaking-into-developer-relations |
developer-relations, developer-blogging |
Developer Relations, or DevRel, is a domain that focuses on maintaining relationships with the folks building on an organization's technologies or products.
Essentially DevRel is the bridge between the code and the community. DevRel folks are often responsible for maintaining communication between organizations and developers to ensure a better information flow and feedback loop. These relationships become positive only when the company’s developer customers are happy. And for developers, happiness comes from a flawless product documentation, easy navigation of the website, responsive customer support, constructive on-boarding, helpful tutorials, engaging events/contests and anything in-between. This is exactly where the DevRel team’s focus is.
While many people say “Developer Relations,” “Developer Advocacy,” and “Developer Evangelism” are brand new terms, even these phrases have been around for longer than most folks realize.
Community is a group of people who not only share common principles, but also develop and share practices that help individuals in the group thrive.
How we define who falls into the realm of community at a particular company depends on the company’s goals and intentions, but in general, the community will include your company’s technical employees and your current customers, as well as prospects and anyone who could in the future be interested in using the product.
Even if job titles aren’t always accurate, there are seven or so broad roles that tend to fall into DevRel teams:
- Developer advocate: usually an all-rounder who acts as a public interface between developers and the company, which tends to involve doing a little of all the roles below.
- Developer evangelist: this can be interchangeable with “developer advocate” but some people use this to describe a role focused on awareness building.
- Developer marketer: looks after the developer journey, messaging, segmentation, research, campaigns, and other traditional marketing activities but focused on developer audiences.
- Technical writer: produces educational, technical marketing, and other content to enable developers.
- Community manager: ensures the smooth running of the developer community around a product or project.
- Developer experience engineer: focuses on sample apps, SDKs, and other development that helps people to use the product.
- Developer relations lead: sets the strategic direction for the team, acts as the face of the team within the company, and takes care of day to day management.
The correlation between level of expertise and job title is going to vary from company to company and between individuals. Nonetheless, everyone working in DevRel should understand broadly what the product does and how it compares to alternatives but not everyone needs to be a developer.
As with every aspect of finding a job in DevRel, a lot of this depends on the specific job you’re going for. It can be hard like coming from outside but do some work and trying to figure out what kind of role you want because again if we're targeting DevRel you could put together you know pretty generic resume but it's not really gonna meet you with anyone and so some more tangible analogy would be not breaking into DevRel but break into Developer Advocacy, break into Community Management, as it provides you way more focused and intangible sets of responsibilities to focus on. If some said breaking into DevRel, you could be get good at live streaming, know how to do talks, be able to write content, be able to set up discord servers, be able to make integrations, contribute to open source and much more, *that is wild, right? *
That's an astronomical amount of things to be able to do instead of you might want to focus on and you say developer advocacy and might try to create a couple of pieces of content that target pin point your experience.
By understanding the type of role you think you might want you can really target what it is your doing to secure yourself apart from rest. Become familiar with how different companies do DevRel and be able to talk about how their strategies and tactics differ from one another. Read blog posts, watch DevRel videos, attend events, and ask existing DevRel people for advice.
There are many great folks in DevRel whom I follow and learn from,
Cherish Santoshi, Atul Maharaj, Aditya Oberai, Prashanth, Liran Tal , Praveen, Ian Douglas, Siddharth Dayalwal, Taiji Eddie, Tessa Mero, Vera Tiago, Kunal Verma
There still so more whose work have created a great influence on me and my work, so I would suggest any inspiring folks in DevRel to find their niche and passion and kickstart their journey.