Prompt: Effective DevRel teams are able to facilitate cross-company collaboration. What are the models and lessons learned for building cross team success?

Monthly Developer Digest

When "keeping the lights on" is in fact earning your keep

For developer relations teams, there’s often a reluctance to take on recurring tasks, especially ones that start to fall into the realm of content / marketing. From my experience, Monthly newsletters aka “Developer Digests” are the exception - when done well it becomes the drum beat for developer monthly updates. The tone of the digest should be that of developers talking to fellow developers, where any scent of marketing/gloss/“fluff” should be turned down significantly and the updates should be both actionable and useful.

Over time, the product teams building for developers will learn that the dev digest is the source of truth for monthly developer-facing updates — just make sure all the stakeholders know how to add content easily to the queue for review. In addition, make sure the digest sign up form is across the docs and other public facing surfaces (dashboard / api settings /etc).

Voluntary demos & previews

Brown bag lunches, all hands, and show & tell opportunities

When these moments arise, have your team take advantage of internal demo calendar events. It’s a great way to flex in the spirit of “show, don’t tell” and reminds adjacent teams what Advocates do best. It also helps senior leaders get a sense of how DevRel fits within the context of the organization.

Internal roadshows

AKA those “What do we actual do here” presentations

Just accept the fact that that most adjacent teams won’t understand what Dev Relations is or why it matters. There’s freedom and benefit in reminding your team that Developer Relations is only effective when it’s a tool to accelerate a companies top-line goals. Stay focused on what matters.

Practically, this means having a presentation deck always ready to explain the program, who the team members are, how you measure success, and what’s upcoming for projects. Accept any offers to present at other all hands teams and 1:1 with peers that should / could be working with Dev Relations more. Also make sure to write up a “How to work with Dev Relations” guide, so that the product, sales, and eng stakeholders understand when/how/where to engage with the team and what the timetables are.

Shared projects with Product teams

Dev Relations teams should be scouring the launch calendar for ways to add value and support the broader mission.

For example, if a product / marketing team is working on an upcoming launch, offer up yourself and an Advocate to help form the “developer GTM”, where we figure out what developer-facing content and call to actions should be available on Day 1. With enough time and planning, it makes launches so much more effective than just announcing something for developers without tangible features/samples/videos to explore.

Wrap up

Stay in the mix with the mission, goals, wants, and needs of the overall platform. Dev Relations teams are an accelerant and you need to be “in the trenches” to support your peer organizations for shared goals. Keep this as a North Star and get comfortable with changing priorities and responsibilities.

“Oh I’m just not a Tech person” 😑

Specifically, it’s surprising how much of the basic “getting started” tips gets lost during career conversations. For example, schools will often advise students to first decide if they are going the “STEM” or “Non STEM” path. This framing leads students towards dismissing major opportunites by thinking they are “not a computer person.” Whether it’s near the end of a school season, during a bootcamp’s demo day, or major career change moments - many people wish they knew the right steps during high school. So let’s fix that for the next batch of students!

💡 STUDENTS: To open as many doors as possible, I’m sharing a few tips to set yourself up for a future career. These steps will help you learn more options available across industries along with standing out from the crowd. Did I mention you can get this all done in one school block?

Step 1: Create a GitHub account

GitHub.com is where nearly every “techie” on earth has an account. It lets you contribute to discussions, share your work, post issues, and learn how people build products using code. Regardless of your interest in becoming a programmer, having a GitHub account is useful as another login option when trying out new apps online.

On a deeper level, GitHub is your real resume as it helps “show your work”. Tech companies use gauge what type of projects and samples you’ve tried out and how engaged you are generally. Recruiters and hiring managers often search Google and will now be able to see hackathons, samples, and projects that you’ve tried out over time. Beyond your interests, it’s a 🚩red flag 🚩 when someone wants to get into Tech or Science and has never signed up for GitHub before. “Oh I’ve never heard of GitHub before” - Well you do now!

GitHub’s signup is simple - head over to github.com/signup and create an account. Note: Make sure to use your own personal email address (not your school account) so that you can keep it overtime when your career takes off.

Step 2: Sign up for FreeCodeCamp

Anyone curious about Tech should try out one of the getting started courses on FreeCodeCamp.org. Skip all paid courses or tech books to give FreeCodeCamp a proper shot. Launched in 2014 by Quincy Larson, the site is an amazing resources to learn while trying out each step in their integrated learning platform.

Which course should I check out first?

They have a solid range of technical options to select - I think either the Javascript Algorithims or Front End Web Development courses are the best to get a quick sense for how FreeCodeCamp works. Give it a go and you won’t regret trying out something new.

Once you get a handle on how the answer their lessons, the best course to prepare for life after High School (freelance, college, intern, job, etc) is the Coding Prep Interview content. There’s no risk to taking some lessons and in the least you’ll have a better understand of how developers build the websites and apps you use everyday.

In addition to the getting started courses, FreeCodeCamp offers over a dozen certificates that you add to your resume and LinkedIn profile:

Step 3: Create a LinkedIn account

Ok, so hear me out before ignoring this step!

Many developers have strong opinions about business social networks and that energy is often directed towards LinkedIn. While the opinions are numerous, LinkedIn is an amazing way to improve your search engine listings and start forming connections that will grow throughout your career.

Beyond creating your profile, here’s a few additional reasons to consider creating a LinkedIn account:

• Linkedin has over 830 million users across 200 countries
• The majority of job application systems are powered by LinkedIn profiles and search tools
• LinkedIn allows you to connect with your teachers, mentors, and friends that are ahead in their career path.
• Job listings from across hiring websites are shown in agregate on LinkedIn jobs. Additional filters are available to explore as you get interested in specific Companies, Locations, and People for work.
• Introductions via LinkedIn are common and helps others connect you to opportunities as they arise

Why does this matter?

By setting up a LinkedIn profile, you’re helping future admissions officers, managers, and recruiters understand your work experience when you apply for new opportunities. Help yourself get out of the pile of candidates by putting in the work.

Remember your profile is never “complete” and certainly does not need to be “perfect”. A common fallacy for people is to procrastinate — preparing for future work is overwhelming. There’s a common saying to keep in mind when you find yourself stalling: “Great is the enemy of Good” — which means perfectionism and the fear of failing can cause us to not move forward. Don’t do that!

To start, I would suggest you do the following steps on LinkedIn ASAP:

1. Create a LinkedIn profile with your personal email address at linkedin.com/signup
2. Have a friend or family member take a good headshot for your profile photo
3. Fill in the basics of any sports, interesting school courses, jobs, and projects you’re working on. (Include a link to your new GitHub profile!)
4. Connect with as many of your friends, teachers, and family/friend mentors as possible. When you start to build up your number of connections, it makes it all the more easy for friends of friends to find your profile when hiring new opporitunites arise.

Recap

Take the 20 minute “Thank me later” tech career challenge!

1. (5 minutes) Create an account at github.com/signup
2. (10 minutes) Sign up for FreeCodeCamp.org and start the Javascript or Front-End dev course
3. (5 minutes) Create a LinkedIn account at linkedin.com/signup
4. Extra Credit: Create a gmail address that won’t embarass you in ten years. Perhaps your initials or First and Last name. Please please please make sure to avoid anygamerBoiii420@gmail.com type addresses.

Let me know once you end up following these steps. If you have additional recommendations for high school students to take, go ahead and add in the comments below! 👇

“How is this a job!?” ~ @Chris_Trag (2012)

I found myself asking this while sprinting through downtown São Paulo for an API workshop in the Spring of 2012. While preparing my talking points 6,500 miles from home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how different (and how far away!) this experience was from growing up in snowy Boston.

A few years prior, I had joined Silicon Valley startup to work on their website as a front-end developer. One pivotal moment in particular was a team meeting where Luis Samra (GM of LATAM) asked if I’d be willing to fly down to Brazil and help train developers on our SDK and developer tools. That meeting changed the course of my career path as I fell in love building in public along with the energy that comes with roles across Developer Relations, Evangelism, and Advocacy.

How it started

From as early as I can remember, I love building apps. It started with learning how to create keyframes in Macromedia to launching my band’s website on Geocities. In addition, I know many of us kids from the 90s that fell in love with web development by hacking the UI of Myspace through CSS injection 😆 Each of these memories was an early lesson in hands-on projects as a path towards tactile learning and teaching developers.

During the early 2000s, I had the opportunity to start working as a web designer / developer New England. One intern manager in particular, Ming Chow, took a leap of faith in hiring me (full story here). It was during these roles where I began attending developer meetups on Web Standards, JQuery, and how Flash was most definitely not the future. Websites like A List Apart and builders such as John Resig, Margot Bloomstein, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Cederholm, and Lea Verou inspired me to keep digging to make sense of how things works on the web.

The excitement of sharing knowledge led me towards giving talks, hosting meetups, and teaching developers starting in the mid 2000s. These events were mostly passion projects and community volunteering, with the occasional assignment at work to get multiple teams working together. Little did I know at the time all of this would build towards a future career in Developer Relations.

Long-term value

I love working in this career field as a way to contribute towards the success of those around me. Watching interns and students transform into leaders over time gives me such a sense of pride to have been part of their journey. When colleagues up-level their technical skills in order to open new doors, I'm motivated to focus and keep moving forward. Tech jobs and the individual desire to learn is one of the best paths towards economic upward mobility. The unrelenting desire to design, build, collaborate, and learn is the spirit that all the best developer communities share. As a Developer Advocate, you get to witness this firsthand and also improve your skills over time.

Additional reasons I love working as a Developer Advocate

• The inspiration of watching others learn & grow technical abilities
• Creative problem solving
• Learning through hackathons, workshops, livestreaming, and meetups
• Building and improving products through developer feedback loops, office hours, and champions programs
• Developer empathy - both internally and externally for a platform
• A “Fixer” spirit - discovering news ways to problems through integrating yourself

There’s been moments in my career when I’ve questioned the value of what I’m doing along with the potential impact being an Advocate may (or may not) have. It’s a role surrounded by a barrage of opinions, assumptions, bad actors, and lastly first impressions. These internal and external voices of doubt are worth contemplating on with intention, thinking deeply about “Why do I do what I do?”.

Launching developer relations programs across two decades along with watching multiple waves of builders rise up has been an experience worth the journey.

Advocate is an action verb

A quick google search for Developer Advocate will present over 42 million results with the top results clearly showing a trend:

• "What the heck is a Developer Advocate?"
• "What is Developer Advocacy?"
• "What exactly is the job of a developer advocate?"

At the end of this search, you will discover there's no singular answer. The shape of work depends on the organization's goals, the product offering, and existing expectations of the community. For many Advocates, the answer comes into focus through the context of an individual role.

New tools of the trade

Consider for a moment every available resource for developers, then map the value for developer advocacy:

📸 View in high resolution

From this mental model, the common characteristics of a developer advocate are:

• Dev Advocates interact with developers as they are building applications
• Dev Advocates champion developer products through speaking, writing, and code
• Dev Advocates gather insights from the community to improve the product/platform

After a decade in developer relations roles, I find these qualities worth contemplating:

1. Dev Advocates are the first line of defense in protecting the developer experience
2. Dev Advocates answer to the community as the true arbiter of their performance
3. Dev Advocates must fully support the top-line business goals through action

Dev Advocacy is a perfect role for lifelong learners who remain adaptable to change.

Known challenges for in-person dev advocacy

In a vulnerable moment, fellow Developer Advocates will commiserate in the shifting nature of measuring the effectiveness of our craft. When public speaking on developer advocacy topics, there are common hurdles to overcome.

For example, say you have the opportunity to present a technical topic to ~1k attendees at a top-tier conference. You hope at least ~300 attendees connect with your topic in the first 5 minutes and possibly tweet about the talk if they are engaged. Throughout the talk, you provide shortened URLs for the audience to remember and ~150 folks follow through to the site. Afterwards, potentially ~50 attendees remember the link and check out your sample code. From evaluating the sample, almost 20 developers end up running the sample end-to-end.

Practically, you're lucky to have a 2% to 5% activation rate from the stage presentation.

Global access to developer education

On top of challenges when measuring a presentation's ROI, there's another factor which deserves acknowledgement: The need for equitable access to developer advocacy.

Specifically, if you're presenting a developer keynote to a paid Bay Area conference, there are inherent gate-keeping factors at play:

• Attendees work/live in the San Francisco OR they are flown by their business with travel expenses covered ($$$)
• Conference tickets are on average over $800 and this cost is also expensed or the fee is waived by friends of the conference organizers (both $$ and privileged access)
• The talk content is either exclusive to the paid attendees or is uploaded at some later point
• Attendees are able to spend days away from home without the caretaking duties other developers may have in the moment

Since Developer Advocates tend to enjoy the perks that come with a travel-heavy lifestyle, the structural downsides of exclusive events are rarely discussed. It's time to rethink how we approach our jobs to better serve the primary consumers of our work: the developer community.

🍿 'Video-first' approach: Developer engagement is now measurable at scale

During the pandemic, our team at Stripe launched a developer-focused video channel (distinct from our company's main brand account) and began posting weekly how-to topics covering the fundamentals of our API, SDKs, and sample code. We put an emphasis on presenting as if we were directly talking with developers in person at a local meetup. Our team avoids the "Webinar"-style presentation and strives to maintain a Q&A dialog when teaching concepts through live streaming and YouTube Premiere.

Results

Since last year, our community engagement now vastly exceeds our measurable goals:

• Developers now ask hundreds of questions live and click through to our docs on a weekly basis
• We are reaching millions of developers annually with over 25% of the traffic coming from YouTube recommending our content
• Each month, we have tens of thousands of unique views accounting for thousands of hours watched
• Our audience is now spread across the world and evenly distributed between ages 18 to 64
• Analytics reveal which developer topics are the most captivating and where viewers drop off

So what?

You may ask "Why are you spouting these viewership stats?" and that is the central point:

As a developer advocate, the level of insights for who is consuming your technical content through video is a metrics goldmine.

More pointedly, these insights and feedback were previously impossible to fully gather from conference post-talk surveys. Beyond improved metrics, the increase in developer activity leads to an attributable rise in new product adoption. The more product launches we can support through developer livestreams and office hours, the more central our work is to the core business.

In addition, we're now connecting at scale directly with our subscribers: Developers with laptops following along as we step through code line-by-line. This new connection is lightyears beyond what we could ever expect at in-person conferences with multiple tracks.

Hybrid approach: Present anywhere then edit & re-purpose for subscribers

Unless your product is exclusively geo-fenced to the Bay Area (😑), as a Developer Advocate you should fight to have your content made available to the widest addressable target audience of builders to benefit from the topics.

Some basic suggestions for repurposing technical talks include:

1. Ask event organizers for permission to repost the talk for your developer audience channels
2. Re-present the content in a livestream format and field questions as a team
3. Edit the content for your long tail developer audience. Example: The "June developer meetup" with 3 speakers could get edited down to 3 compelling specific topics uploaded to YouTube
4. Combine video and written content to support both styles of learning
5. Participate in global online developer events where anyone can access

Main point: If you're making great developer content, don't limit who gets to consume and utilize your work.

Developer Advocates are the new "On-screen talent"

What do YouTube influencers, Peloton fitness instructors, political commentators, and developer advocates have in common?

Our effectiveness correlates to our video fidelity. When we break down barriers to communicate clearly through broadcasting, we deliver the best version of ourselves and our work.

📸 View in high resolution

Step up your Dev Advocacy game:

• For bootstrapped startups and indie hackers: My colleague Suz and I wrote a guide to up-leveling your remote work setup on a budget. Read on dev.to.
• To all global developer platforms: Professional-grade video gear for public-facing engineers is the new standard. If your team or role is presenting technical topics on behalf of a profitable developer offering, a single business trip's worth of expenses will cover a decent setup. High quality content deserves a high quality presentation layer.

🥂 Join the party: Industry growth and the sheer volume of new developer advocacy job openings

Developer Advocates are no longer disadvantaged when outside of US coastal cities. Prior requirements for an advocate's physical location are rapidly fading away. If you are an engineer looking to help thousands of developers at scale, it's time to join our field of work. As mentioned earlier, global developer programs have seen the reach that comes with scaling beyond the traditional keynotes and straight into developers computers.

Here are several globally-distributed Developer Advocacy programs hiring this year:

• Martin Woodward (based in N. Ireland) is leading GitHub's efforts to hire new developer advocates
• Ali Spittel (based in the Midwest) is hiring developer advocates to join the AWS amplify team
• Lee Robinson (based in Iowa) is building a new dev relations team at Vercel working on Next.js
• Tessa Kriesel (based in Texas) is tracking new advocacy roles over in the Devocate Slack community
• Not to mention the countless developer advocate openings at Zoom, Cloudflare, Plaid, Wix, Rasa, LaunchDarkly, Airtable, and many additional new roles

Recap

New ways to reach developers at scale, a growing audience of builders around the world, and a mission to measurably support builders makes this a perfect time to join our field of work. We are in the Golden Age of Developer Advocacy and it's just getting started.

🔌 Quick plug: Join our team at Stripe!

If this vision for scaled Developer Advocacy is appealing and you're comfortable with integrating APIs in web and/or mobile applications, please choose our Dev Advocacy team!

In the next few months, our team is tripling in size across Latin America, Europe, Asia, and North America. We're excited to support the community and meet developers wherever they are based.

👉 For more details, check out our jobs site: Dev Advocacy roles at Stripe

What makes for great Developer Advocacy? You'll know when you see it.