On March 9th we’re back in the Japanese capital for the third edition of DevRelCon Tokyo! If you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit one of the world’s most fascinating places, then they don’t come much better than DevRelCon Tokyo.

This time, Atsushi and the team at the Tokyo DevRel meet-up have put together a programme featuring:

• Matz, the creator of the Ruby programming language
• Madoka Chiyoda of Microsoft
• Andy Piper of Twitter
• Jessica Rose of Mozilla
• Brian Douglas of GitHub
• Peter Moskovits of IBM
• and others including, Cristiano Betta, Melinda Seckington, Baruch Sadogursky, Seigo Tanaka, and myself.

What can you expect?

I asked Atsushi, lead organiser of DevRelCon Tokyo, what attendees can expect at the event.

Atsushi Nakatsugawa

Atsushi: More people than ever are now aware of developer relations in Japan. So, we’re focusing on how to get better at developer relations. We’ll have case studies, frameworks, and more that help people learn what to do.

I expect we’ll also have a number of developers attending as they’ve heard about developer relations and they’re interested to see if it could be a good next step for their career.

Matthew: How has DevRelCon Tokyo changed over the years?

Atsushi: The first year I was the sole organiser. Last year, 2018, was a community effort with the Tokyo DevRel meet-up. Other people helped organise the event and took on the MC duties. This year, it’s even more of a team effort. For me, DevRelCon is not just a conference but it is a community. We love organising the event and we hope that the attendees love it just as much!

This year we have some changes. For the first time we’ll have three tracks. The new track will be a lightning talk track, with ten minute talks. A lot of our local Japanese audience are less confident with English, and we felt that lightning talks would be an ideal way to let people share their knowledge without having to give a 30 minute talk in a different language.

We’ll also have an API The Docs meet-up the day before the main DevRelCon event.

Matthew: What would you say to someone who thinking about whether to come?

Atsushi: There’s still a lot that’s new about developer relations, so every marketer, support engineer, evangelist, and advocate should attend the conference to learn about developer relations. DevRelCon Tokyo is the only conference in Japan, maybe Asia, that can give you that global dev rel perspective.

And Japan is the third biggest economy in the world. Many technology companies have or are launching branch offices in Tokyo. DevRelCon Tokyo is a great way to come and learn about Japanese developers. 

Matthew: What advice would you give first-time attendees?

Atsushi: In Japan, we have a culture of exchanging business cards with each other. So, if you want to make a relationship in business, a business card will help you to make connections that last after the conference is over. But be careful: if you are very aggressive trying to make a business relationship, they will ignore you. So you have to be careful.

And we will prepare sticker exchange place. So please bring your service cool stickers.

My hope for this edition is that more Japanese speakers will get an opportunity to spread their names globally and build relationships with other speakers. And I hope that every foreign attendee will enjoy and love Japan. I also love Japan, and I hope they will be like me.

If you want to work with developers in Japan, you should come to DevRelCon Tokyo to understand how we work. For example, in Tokyo we have 30 to 40 tech meetups every night. We love real world communication and relationships.

In fact, in Japan those real world relationships are rewarded with loyalty. Apple spent a long time making strong relationships with customers in Japan and now Japan is the only Asian country where Apple has the highest market share for smartphones.

I believe developer relations resonates well in Japan. If you make a good relationship with developers, they will choose your service for a long time.

Join us in Tokyo on March 9th.