DevRel Scribbles
  • What are Scribbles?
  • Index
  • Developer Advocacy
  • Developer Advocates
  • Life as a developer advocate
  • Modernising Red Hat’s enterprise developer program
  • Engaging 9-year-old software developers
  • Making 22-year-olds love 26-year-old software
  • Dogfooding developer products: gathering insights from internal hackathons
  • How far does your ethical responsibility stretch for the tech your devs create?
  • Outside the lecture theatre
  • How do you design programs for diversity?
  • Build the Platform Your Developers Actually Want
  • Measuring dev rel programs far beyond marketing activities
  • Developer Evangelism
    • Developer Evangelists
    • How to rock a technical keynote
    • The Art of Slide Design
    • The Art of Talk Design
    • The Art of Story Design
    • Dev events beyond 2021
  • Developer Experience
    • The Power of Content
    • Building a Developer Community in an Enterprise World
    • How to lose a dev in three ways
    • Developer relations, why is it needed?
    • The hierarchy of developer needs
    • GitHub is your documentation landing page
    • Docs as engineering
    • Commit messages vs. release notes
    • A11y pal(ly)- crafting universally good docs
    • Inspiring and empowering users to become great writers, and why that’s important
    • Solving internal technical documentation at Spotify
  • Community Management
    • Building community flywheels
    • DevRel = Community Management?
    • Creating high-quality communities
    • How to grow a healthy Open-Source community?
    • Managing communities at scale
    • Using community to drive growth
    • Useful community success metrics
    • Communities aren't funnels
    • How to mobilise your community during a pandemic
  • Managing a DevRel Team
    • Developer Relations + Product
    • Distributed developer relations
    • Understanding company goals
    • DevRel Qualified Leads (DQL)
    • Path to success for DevRel
    • How to move up in your organization
    • Four pillars of DevRel
    • Building your DevRel dream team
    • Managing the burnout burn-down
    • I messed up and I’m going to get fired
    • How to report on community relationships without being creepy about it
    • How to scale a developer relations team
  • Misc
    • Is developer relations right for you?
    • Tooling your way to a great DevRel Team
    • Planning your DevRel career
    • Success metrics as narratives
    • Get executive buy-in or else
    • Introduction to the AAARRRP devrel strategy framework
    • Strategy for developer outreach
    • Connecting dev rel and product
    • Performance DevRel
    • Ultimate cheat codes for healthier travel
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  • Summary:
  • Scribbles:
  • Responsibilities of DevRel
  • 3 C's of Developer Relations
  • Difficult to define DevRel. Why?
  • So, what is developer relations?
  • Why does it exist?

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  1. Developer Experience

Developer relations, why is it needed?

Explaining your role and function comes with the territory of working in this space, but why is that? It’s tricky to define, describe what developer relations is, and why it even exists?

PreviousHow to lose a dev in three waysNextThe hierarchy of developer needs

Last updated 3 years ago

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“Let’s start with a round of introductions. Sean, why don’t you go first?”, says the organizer of the meeting.

“Sure thing.

Hey there, my name is Zeus and I work in developer relations.”

Summary:

  • At the heart, DevRel is a people business

  • Building real relationships with internal and external engineers

  • 3C's of DevRel

    • Community

    • Coding

    • Content

Scribbles:

  • Developer relations -- a variety of tasks and responsibilities that can vary from company to company.

Responsibilities of DevRel

  • Now, like mentioned above ⬆️ can be a variety of tasks that can vary according to which category DevRel is focused on in an organization.

  • But below ⬇️ are a few tasks that are almost done by every DevRel.

  • Besides product management, DevRel is the only role that might be a part of various kinds of meetings.

3 C's of Developer Relations

Community

  • Building personal connections with developers

  • Growing awareness of the platform

Coding

  • Creation of resources to be used by developers

  • Great way to build trust

  • Forms the foundation for demonstrations of your platform

Content

  • Creating reference materials like documentation, guides, blogs and videos

  • Helps in extending the reach and educating the community

Difficult to define DevRel. Why?

  • Large breadth of tasks and responsibilities comes within developer relations.

  • Responsibilities change within every company.

  • DevRel might be in different parts within the organization

    • Engineering

    • Product

    • Marketing

  • DevRel is still a relatively new function for companies to have.

  • Applicable to companies with developer-facing products.

  • Somewhat niche, makes it harder to define to people outside of the tech industry.

So, what is developer relations?

The art of developer relations is to actually build authetic relationships within your community without selling or marketing to them.

  • The purpose of developer relations is to build relationships with and enable our technical communities.

Why does it exist?

  • One of the ways to put it would be that it "always exists".

  • Having a product where users are developers, you are already into developer relations then, even if you have a dedicated team or not.

  • So, even if your organization doesn't have a DevRel, there must be someone writing technical documentation, code samples, connecting with developers to solve an issue.

  • While developing a product, one of the first steps as a developer is to create documentation, samples, uses cases to get started.

  • If you want to learn more about community flywheels you can check the scribble below

As you can see, developer relations is highly cross-functional, dynamic, and includes a wide breadth of skills and responsibilities. According to , Director of Developer Relations at Slack, developer relations is “an interdisciplinary role that sits in a border space between product, engineering, and marketing”.

Bear Douglas
Building community flywheels
What is developer relations and why does it exist?Medium
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