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The countdown is on to DevRelCon London 2023! Back in London for the first time since 2019, this year’s event is made up of two days of talks, discussion sessions, networking, and socialising. Among other topics, we’ll be covering developer education, DevRel in a downturn, community data and operations, core skills, DevRel for web3, and more.
Join us to learn, share, and hang out with your fellow DevRel professionals from across the world. And to give you a taste of what’s on offer, here’s another of our quick fire speaker interviews.
Speaker: Randall Degges
Company: Snyk
Position: Head of Developer Relations and Community
Talk title: Building resiliency into your DevRel team
Randall runs Developer Relations & Community at Snyk, where he works on developer security, engineering, and education. In his spare time, Randall writes articles and gives talks advocating for security best practices. Randall also builds and contributes to various open-source security tools.
His realms of expertise include Python, JavaScript, and Go development, web security, cryptography, and infrastructure security. Randall has been writing software for over 20 years and has built a number of popular API services and open-source tools.
Tell us about the talk that you are planning to give at DevRelCon London 2023
We’re going to be talking about building a really resilient DevRel program that is able to adapt in weird economic conditions. That’s the main theme of the talk.
There are a few different things that we want to focus on in our presentation this year. First, what are the current challenges that DevRel organisations are facing right now in 2023? The global economy is not doing great. As many of us know, the tech sector in particular has been hit very hard. What are the things that you as a DevRel leader and a DevRel team need to understand in order to have a successful DevRel function at your organisation? We’re going to be going into a lot of depth with that.
We’re also going to look at how to make sure that your DevRel function is really closely tied to the key business value metrics. This is something we do particularly well at Snyk, and so Matt Jarvis and I are going to go into a lot of depth around that.
Another big challenge that we’re going through currently is the rise of generative AI. With tools like ChatGPT and OpenAI, and all the different things coming out very fast right now, what are the things you need to know as a DevRel team and as a DevRel leader in order to successfully embrace the big things that are going to change in our field in the very near future? Some of those things are already changing pretty substantially. So we’re also going to talk about that.
As regards the business value side of DevRel, we’ll be focusing on adaptability. This is something that DevRel teams are particularly good at. We’ll be looking at the particular set of skills that a typical DevRel employee has. They are often very senior engineers, with great communication skills, who understand developer experience. These three skills make a DevRel person very valuable. There are lots of areas you could go into at an organisation.
We will talk about how you can leverage that massively-wide skill set, and really shift the function of your DevRel program around in times of economic uncertainty. We will be using Snyk as a case study. We will share the challenges we’ve been going through, and how we have shifted our key focus. You will also learn about the programs and actions we are working on to better support business needs in different situations.
Why should people attend your talk? What should they expect to take away from it?
I’ve been in the DevRel space for more than 10 years. I was the first DevRel person at a very small company. I’ve also had the pleasure of being a DevRel IC, engineer, CTO, technical founder at an organisation, as well as a DevRel leader. at both small and large companies. So, I’ve had the chance to see the situation of DevRel at a lot of different organisations, in good economic times and bad. I believe that people can learn from my knowledge and experience in this talk.
We have a very large, successful DevRel team at Snyk, our group is fairly large. This is something quite unusual in organisations. We will be giving concrete examples of real world things that we actually do. We will not be simply talking about theoretical stuff. This talk will be really interesting, a little different to what you usually see at these events. It will be a really cool talk for people to enjoy and get some value out of.
What are you most looking forward to at this year’s DevRelCon London event?
I’m really looking forward to just connecting with everyone. For the last couple of years, we’ve all been a little bit isolated. I’m much more selective since the pandemic about what I actually do, so I’m really looking forward to this. This is going to be the one and only DevRel event I go to for the whole year. I’m looking forward to making friends, hanging out with people, and seeing how other people are adapting to the weird times we’re currently living in. I think this year in particular is the most interesting year in DevRel in my entire career by far.
We have brand new applications in AI that are coming out that are dramatically shifting what people are working on, and what is going on in general. It’s completely changing the way that developers work, the way that companies work, what’s happening in the economy etc. Due to this, the whole tech field has never been as interesting as it is today, in my personal opinion.
So I’m really looking forward to showing up in person this year at DevRelCon London 2023 to hear what everyone is talking and thinking about. We’re in very interesting times!
To secure your space to hear Randall’s talk and more, get your ticket today. You can also become a sponsor of the event to reach the unique DevRelCon audience; get in touch.