Education and Community Content

Warm Up:

In small groups, discuss the following:

  • What parts of Turing do you highlight when speaking about your experience?
  • Consider all the content and outside resources you found that helped you on your journey - which were the most useful? Blogs, videos, forums, workshops, or podcasts?
  • What kind of content would you create to empower other students and job seekers?

Developer Relations (DevRel)

Developer Relations, or Developer Advocacy, aims to build and nurture relationships between a company and its developer community. This role is different within every company. Some can be solely community focused while others focus more on the product. Generally speaking, Developer Relations (DevRel) is a multidisciplinary field that combines community engagement and technical expertise to drive product adoption through education, content creation, and developer advocacy.

Key Responsibilities:

  1. Advocacy: Acting as a bridge between the company and its developers, advocating for their needs to improve the product while promoting the product’s benefits to developers.
  2. Education and Enablement: Creating resources like documentation, tutorials, blogs, webinars, and sample code to help developers effectively use the company’s tools.
  3. Community Engagement: Building and maintaining a sense of community through events, forums, meetups, hackathons, and social media interactions.
  4. Feedback Loop: Collecting and communicating developer feedback to internal teams to drive product improvements and align with user needs.
  5. Evangelism: Representing the company at industry events, conferences, and online to raise awareness, excitement, and trust in the product.

Turing alum, Danny Ramos 2003, aka the person interviewing all the incredible alumni aka the person writing these lessons aka me, was hired as a Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic after Turing, and for the sake of continuity I’ll stick to 3rd person. Ahem, DevRel has been rapidly growing within the tech industry and tech companies look to bridge the gap between their product and their communities i.e. the developers using their product. During Danny’s time at New Relic he experienced the range of Developer Relations from highly community focused to product focused.

“When I was first hired at New Relic we were encouraged to never bring up the product. Our director wanted us to build authentic and genuine connections with developers. From Twitch streaming, Twitter posting, blog posting, conference attending, we were engaging with the overall tech community in any way we could to foster relationships. I was part of a team of 10 engineers that ranged in experience. This first month I was there I helped organize a 24-hour Twitch stream consisting of workshops, talks, live coding, and interviews while building a new Ruby meetup from scratch to launch the day of the Twitch stream. It was insane.”

Community Focused DevRel

A big part of Danny’s job was streaming on Twitch everyday. This was in 2021 and the world was still in the midsts of COVID19 so a lot of community strategy was moved to the virtual space. Danny was coding and building projects live on Twitch, so every time he was missing a little curly bracket or had no idea what he was doing there was always at least one person watching 👀.

“There were days I had a lot of anxiety streaming. Like a lot of us, I felt an immense amount of imposter syndrome, and was scared to fail in front of people. I felt if I failed they would realize I wasn’t supposed to be there and I’d be fired. However, I expressed this fear to coworkers and they were very supportive. ChaelCodes, had me stream with her every Tuesday, and we’d work on open source Ruby projects or build atop her side project. That made a world of difference in my confidence. After that I was able to code live with mistakes and all for 30 people or just two (one being my mom sometimes lol). My favorite thing to do though was interviewing other developers.”

This clip is Danny interviewing his high school friend, Eddie Neira on his story being a self taught game developer.

Check out Eddie’s website here: Slumber Star Land

Before conferences were back in full swing a lot of community education and content was done online. Nearly everyone had their own podcast, blog, youtube channel, etc., so you could stay pretty busy if you were in DevRel. And that was the goal: be an active community member and foster relations, and then people are saying to themselves, “Hmm, so-and-so seems cool and they work at blah-blah company. I should check it out.” Here is a video of Danny being interview by bdougie who at the time as the Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub.

Here is another interview Danny did with Chloe Condon at Microsoft (now at Google): 8 Bits

Product Focused DevRel

A year into Danny’s time at New Relic the director of the Developer Relations team changed and there for so did the direction. There is a debate in the DevRel space on how to best measure success. C suite doesn’t necessarily take “I made 5 great genuine connections at a conference, and now we’re going to co-write a blog” as a big impact to the business. This can inevitably make the DevRel team become a glorified sales and marketing team that only talks about the product. There can be a happy medium. Danny found himself somewhere in that area.

DevRel at a more product focused company is basically the same as a more community oriented one but puts that energy advocating for the product and their users.

“There was a huge shift. I went from organizing community hackathons, streaming, and running a virtual Ruby meetup to much more technical work. It was a big change but ultimately I thought it was for the best for me. It allowed me to wear many hats and get back to more technical projects. This is especially beneficial now that I apply to other jobs because although community work is great and needed, I’m glad I have bigger technical projects on my resume.”

Here are two examples of technical blog posts Danny wrote while at New Relic.

Why is cross-browser testing important?

Your guide to Node.js monitoring

Let’s Try it!

Building a Developer Community Initiative

Scenario:

You’re the newest Developer Advocate at a tech company that has just launched a new API for building social media analytics tools. Your manager has asked you to design a community-focused initiative to foster engagement and bring developers together to learn, collaborate, and share feedback about the product.

Challenge Steps:

  1. Identify Community Needs:

    Write down three ways you would research or engage with the community to better understand their challenges and interests (e.g., hosting surveys, monitoring forums, or engaging in social media groups).

  2. Plan a Community Event:

    Design an idea for a community-focused event that aligns with developer interests, such as:

    • A virtual “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) with the API engineers.
    • A collaborative hackathon centered around the API.
    • A community feedback roundtable for developers to share their thoughts on the API. Explain why this event would resonate with your community.

  3. Encourage Participation:

    Propose two methods to invite and encourage developers to join your event. Think about communication channels (e.g., Slack, Discord, newsletters, Twitter) and incentives (e.g., swag, prizes, recognition).

  4. Create Supporting Resources:

    Draft a concept for a resource you’d share during or after the event (e.g., a “Getting Started” guide, sample code, or a FAQ document).

  5. Measure Impact:

    Suggest two ways you’d measure the success of the initiative in terms of community engagement (e.g., event attendance, social media activity, feedback received).

Let’s Try it! Pt 2!

Planning a Technical Developer Relations Initiative

Scenario:

You’ve just been hired as a Developer Advocate at a tech company that provides APIs for building chat applications. One of your key responsibilities is to improve developer engagement and adoption of the company’s APIs. Your manager has tasked you with designing an initiative to connect with developers, showcase the product, and create useful resources.

Challenge Steps:

  1. Understand the Audience:

    Write down three questions you’d ask to better understand the developer audience (e.g., their needs, challenges, or preferred tools).

  2. Plan an Outreach Initiative:

    Propose a simple plan for engaging with developers. Choose one of the following formats and explain why it fits:

    • A series of technical blog posts.
    • A live webinar or workshop.
    • A tutorial or guide focused on the API.
    • A community event like a hackathon.

  3. Create Content:

    Draft a title and a short description for the first piece of content you would create for your initiative (e.g., a blog post, webinar, or tutorial).

  4. Measure Success:

    Suggest two ways you would measure whether your initiative was successful (e.g., engagement metrics, developer feedback, or product adoption rates).

Alternative job titles with similar responsibilities:

  • Developer Advocate
  • Developer Evangelist
  • Technical Evangelist
  • Developer Experience Engineer (DX Engineer)
  • Technical Community Manager

Let’s Challenge!

Take some time to review the two technical blog posts above. Now consider your time at Turing and write down three ideas that you could write about. For instance: Intro to Building an API, an overview of a project, or what it has been like taking a bootcamp in 2024 are great ideas.

  • Where could you post this?
  • How can you leverage posts like these during your job search?
  • How can you leverage the help of AI?
  • Who is your audience?
  • What story are you trying to tell?

Checks for Understanding

  • What are some pros and cons of being part of DevRel team that is more community based than technical?
  • In what ways does your background fit into the this role?
  • Is there alignment between these roles and your previous experience / skillset? Begin to search job postings with these titles. What is interesting about these positions?
  • What are some further questions you’d ask someone in DevRel?
  • Reflect with your cohort on your Turing experience. What parts could you highlight? What type of content could you create?

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