DevRel New Year's resolutions

Matthew Revell: Hello and welcome to the first DevRel Round Table of 2023. And for this time, we are going to be taking as our topic DevRel New Year's resolutions. Now I'm joined by a new regular co-host, Rebecca Marshburn from Common Room. Hi.

Rebecca Marshburn: Hey, Matthew, I don't know if anyone has told you this yet. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it's 2024.

Matthew Revell: Oh, what have I been asleep for a year.

Rebecca Marshburn: It was a really great year, and every resolution that people made in 2023 has come to fruition, and now it's 2024, and we're here to celebrate all the things that people did.

Matthew Revell: Well see, I was wondering why my hair's a little bit grayer this morning. I hadn't realised, but yeah, so New Year's resolutions is one of those things that we talk about and newspaper gossip stories get posted about it and so on like that. But actually it is a great time to reflect, isn't it, at the start of a new year.

Rebecca Marshburn: Yeah, I absolutely agree, and I think it's a great time to take stock and inventory. I guess it's another word for reflect or another way of reflecting what you did the past year, what worked, what you loved, what you didn't love, what you might want to improve, what you might want to do differently. Some people call it keep, stop, start, and yeah, and then look toward the future. So super excited to be able to be your co-host here.

Matthew Revell: Yeah, thanks. And well, would you mind introducing yourself to the DevRel Roundtable audience? Because people from the uncommon community around Common Room will know you already and people who tuned into the DevRel Awards last year. We'll know you and maybe people who at DevRel Prague as well, but for those who don't,

Rebecca Marshburn: Thank you for that tee up. I guess I totally forgot about that as like a, oh yeah, maybe I should say hello. I am Rebecca. I'm the head of Community at Common Room, as Matthew said. We call it the Uncommon Community. It's community of DevRel and community professionals, community leaders, community managers, builders, strategists, and it's a community of practise. So talking about the strategies behind building better communities, what they need, and then how to know what you're doing with your community and those types of work and efforts and how that translates or might translate into business impact and business outcomes, especially for those folks who are building communities for SaaS companies or B2B or B2C or whatever spaces where it's also part of a business function.

Matthew Revell: Great, thanks. And I will also say thank you to Common Room for sponsoring this podcast and live stream. So thank you. Go to common room.io if you want to find out more. Now, back to the topic of New Year's resolutions. We have with us today three amazing guests from the world of developer relations, and we're going to bring them in later. But first we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the approaches to, I guess asking the right questions about where you are and what you're doing with your community.

Rebecca Marshburn: If this is a tia, because I wanted to make sure that people knew that we had created a guide with our community members. Then I will go ahead and say that, so one of the biggest themes that we heard, at least from our uncommon community members and then them from their networks and from the people who are their stakeholders in the business functions that they're working at, is they're basically like most common theme last year was, I need to do more with less. We have a really lean team and we're looking into 2023 to see how we can connect our community work and the community members who are active in this space, who are active in giving us product feedback, who are active in co-creating educational content. We need to connect that to our business goals so that we can have stakeholder alignment early so that the things that I'm doing every day as a community professional and as a DevRel leader are actually at the end of the year also seen by the business and by stakeholders as being intersectional, that they're both moving into the same direction with a shared vision.

And so from discussions with our community members, we put together a really quick guide. It's like five questions. It starts with keep, start, stop, you reflect on the past. Then it says five questions and in one column, the first question is like my roles and responsibilities and what I think is most important to the community, and the column exactly next to it says what the business expects. And so then those columns are directly opposed to each other, so that as you check box one or the other, you get to see where the alignments are between where you are at and where you want your community to be, and then what your business actually expects. And that's meant to highlight both the synergies and the gaps between what stakeholders, between the conversations you should be having early with your stakeholders to make sure that is that alignment. So anyway, it's a free guide. You can find it at common room.

io/resources, and it's see it in the resource hub and it's just called the community work in Context. Five Questions to Ask for Stakeholder Alignment. So I hope people use it in that they get to have conversations really early that get to set those New Year's resolutions that get to set 'em up for success in the new year.

Matthew Revell: Great. Well, I certainly going to, I have to admit, I haven't really made too many New Year's resolutions, but one of them is to be use more frameworks that other people have produced. And so that's a great opportunity for me to dive into what you and the Uncommon community have produced there. So let's bring in our first guest who is Julia Biro, who is head of developer relations at Info bp. And so Julia, you're a long-term DevRel person having worked at other places before Info bp, but people might know you as well as one of the curators of the DevRel Avocado's Weekly newsletter. So can you tell us a bit about the newsletter and what people might find there?

Julia Biro: Hi everyone. Thanks so much for having me. Funny, actually, as a part of reflecting back on past year and past couple of years, actually, I remembered how we started the newsletter. We started together with Alex Lakatos back in 2018, I believe, and it was an effort for us to learn more about DevRel. He was just starting his first DevRel role. I was looking to move into that area. So while we were doing all this research and trying to figure out how to best do that or how to best acquire the skills for that purpose, we thought, how about we just put them in a newsletter and share it with the community as a way to help other people find that information as well. And we carried on with it.

And I'm actually quite happy because usually we get a good feedback that people find it useful, and we carry on doing that every week. Well, every Sunday, Monday, we look at what new came out from the community in the past week and share that information, whether it's blog posts, streams, podcasts, everything about de and surrounding areas. We put that in the newsletter and hopefully people can enjoy that as well.

Rebecca Marshburn: I also just want to applaud you and your partner in that newsletter creation because doing anything weekly, at first you're like, yeah, weekly, and then you're like, whoa, weekly. And so thank you for your work and effort there because it is no small feat to continue doing that. Curatorship actually sitting down to actually write that newsletter and then share it out with all of us. So thank you for that. Highly acknowledge how much work that takes.

Julia Biro: Thank you. It's mostly weekly, and it definitely does help that there are two people doing it because to be honest, without Alex, that definitely would not have been a weekly.

Rebecca Marshburn: I like though a mostly weekly newsletter is a good, you're like, Hey, it's a mostly weekly. Yeah, I fully endorse that. So next up is Wesley Faulkner. He is a senior community manager at AWS who builds and runs developer programmes, mostly focused in North America to help devs learn and grow their AWS in cloud skills. He's also the co-host of Community Pulse, which is a monthly podcast for community managers and developer evangelists, which is focused on community building strategies. And he's also also a friend, a person who makes me and a lot of other people laugh a lot. He's a big thinker, a passionate collaborator, and if I do say so myself, I'm super excited to have him as a guest here on Roundtable to kick us off for 2023. Hey, Wesley, thank you. Say

Wesley Faulkner: Hello. I'm honoured to be here, and the amount of people and the quality of people on this panel is just really impressive, and so I'm a little nervous, but hopefully I can live up to the hype of that introduction.

Rebecca Marshburn: We're happy to have you. You're already living up to the hype. Don't worry. Also, Matthew and I are not exactly known for our hype, our hype ness, so you're all right.

Matthew Revell: So let's bring in our third guest who is PJ Haggerty. PJ hello, welcome to DevRel Roundtable. Hey everybody.

Rebecca Marshburn: Hello, PJ. Hey,

Matthew Revell: You might know PJ from Community Pulse also, but PJ is a developer advocate who has worked at many places, including running DevRel eight do IO as a dev relations consultancy and is currently at Spotify, which kind of ties in nicely with the fact that if you've seen him around the place, then we were discussing before the Stream started how PJ is one of the key karaoke members of the DevRel community. So absolutely, you might've seen him singing at conferences around the world somewhere. pj, thank you for joining us.

PJ Hagerty: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me. I'm super excited. I think that a lot of times we come off the New Year's holiday break and we're like, oh, exhausted. But I think that this gives us an opportunity to celebrate new resolution, new Year, new me. So I think that this is going to be a fun conversation. I'm really excited to be here, so thanks for having me.

Matthew Revell: The idea of New Year's resolutions is one that I think applies really well to develop relations because even if you're not in a very sales-driven company, or maybe your financial year isn't aligned with the calendar year, then coming out of one year into another is often a time that companies generally reflect on what went before. But for us as DevRel, we've had that bit of a buffer. People don't travel so much in December, January, so there's time to plan ahead and focus perhaps on content and community projects. So I'd love to know from each of you, what is your DevRel New Year's resolution? Let's take it in the order of the introduction. So Julia,

Julia Biro: As we are quite a new programme, my main resolution is to keep it simple, keep it, and get the basics covered. But then I also, like I've seen this approach apply to people's lives and New Year's resolutions and it went on social media. How about we don't set big resolutions and focus more on habits and things that we can actually build into our lives? And I found that quite manageable mentally and then also quite a good idea. So from that perspective, I would like to get out there a bit more often. Hopefully we are coming out the other end of the pandemic, and I'm really excited to get back into communities and engage with people in person more all that while still having a clear structure and having the fundamentals covered.

Matthew Revell: So Wesley, how about you? What are your DevRel New Year's resolutions for 2023?

Wesley Faulkner: Well, mine was to get on the DevRel Roundtable, but since that's already done,

Rebecca Marshburn: You can retire.

Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, I was like, check that off the list success. So what I experimented with what year, and then I want to continue or at least emphasise is that I think we're all learning from the surveys and the reports that they're generally net new people doing DevRel that didn't do it a few years ago. So there's a lot of people who are just looking for information. And in order for me to contribute to the knowledge for people coming on board, I'm going to try to not just say things that are considered knowledge. One of the things is saying that giving someone just like a $25 voucher or credit is not enough incentive to get them to really be interested and invested into learn more about your platform. So what I'm going to do is I'm going be more cognizant of that gap and really tie it into fundamentals.

Like I did a Twitter thread about this and saying that it's not just talking to people, but really connecting to the higher order thinking of understanding what their needs are, what they're interested in and how they grow. And that is the reason why the conversations need to be deeper. They need to be more sensitive, they need to be really related to not just the need of the now but need of the future and how to grow as a person, as a professional, and as a person who values their time and their experience over money or some sort of perks. So my emphasis is just tying concepts with actual concrete human thinking and how people are motivated.

Matthew Revell: I think I probably mentioned this book far too often, but Drive by, is it Daniel Pink or Daniel Pink? Now? I can't remember his surname now. I love the model of the intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations, and I think that ties in with what you're talking about there of really trying to understand what drives people for real rather than just almost giving them the equivalent of a sugar rush every now and then

Wesley Faulkner: With one of my goals for 2022 last year was to do more research on metacognition. So learning how people learn, learning how people think and the different ways that the manifests. And so that totally just ties into that.

Matthew Revell: Pj, how about you?

PJ Hagerty: Yeah, I mean, I should start off with I'm resolved to ride Wesley's coattails as much as possible for 2023. But in all seriousness, I think that my idea for resolution is kind of twofold. Similar to Wesley trying to give when it comes to mentoring, because I do have a lot of people, I've kind of been doing this a long time, so I do have a lot of people who come to ask questions about Why do you do this? Or why do you do this this way? Or how do you do something? And I want to focus less on giving the big guru thought, oh, well DevRel is a performative, blah, blah, blah. I'd rather give people actionable advice that they can actually take home and say like, Hey, maybe this isn't the exact answer you're looking for, but let me give you the first step.

Let me give you a bite-sized intro that you can then take action on and then come back to me when you're ready for the next steps. So kind of like the Let's Teach to Fish approach. That was the one side of it. And the other side is continuing my rally against the idea that DevRel is about the person on stage, not the people in the crowd. I do think that this is an issue that's come up far too much where it's like, and I mean Wesley and I have talked about this, but we've talked about it on this community policy. It's a difficult thing to manage because you are that one shining person on stage, but what you're trying to deliver, what you're trying to impart isn't about you. It's about what the community needs and focusing on that and making that a greater part of our sense of what we do in DevRel from the recruiting and hiring process to actual delivery of the final deliverables that we have.

Rebecca Marshburn: I want to mention here it's something that is a through line between all three of your answers, which we did not rehearse this before. So I'm so interested in how this all came to be and what's coming together to Synergize in 2023 is a focus on fundamentals like Julia, you said fundamentals, Wesley, you said fundamentals, pj, I think you described it in the sense of saying the teach to Fish approach, right? What do you start with first? What's like maybe it's first principles or fundamentals or starting from the beginning, not saying things necessarily, or when you say them, you just assume that everyone is not necessarily starting here. Some people might be starting here. So how do we make sure that we're clear in our language and clear in where we're trying to get people to go and then clear on what they need in their step of the journey?

And I think fundamentals, they seem simple, but they actually take a lot of focus to stay focused on, so easy to be like fundamentals, you got that, let's run. And some people we're all in a different part in terms of where we're going and how we need to get there and what types of learners we are. So before move on and we toss in a new question, I'm curious if any of you would like to expand a little bit on the idea of fundamentals for your own communities. Maybe the Spotify community fundamentals are a little different than AWS are a little different than Info BP or how you see what people need in your communities from a fundamental point of view.

PJ Hagerty: Well, I think you're actually hitting on a really important point there, Rebecca, and that's the fact that there is no universal golden hammer for how DevRel has done at any particular organisation. I think that a lot of times when people come and they ask, especially when I was at Dev relate, say, well, how do we have successful Dev re? And it's like, well, what does success with a community mean to you? I know that at previous jobs it was adoption of open source projects or something like that. At Spotify, we're looking for people to engage and use our API. So I think the difference in success also changes what you consider fundamentals. I think there's fundamentals to doing DevRel that are somewhat universal, but could also be culturally different. When I was working with Schach, I can tell you when he first started coming from a very different place culturally, and that changed the way that he viewed the landscape, and it was super eyeopening for me, and I thank him so much for sharing his journey when we talked about it, but I think that's something that we don't just assume like, oh, we work in tech, therefore this is an A, B, C situation.

We all walk the same path. And realising that and then also creating actionable information that you can share with other people based on that. It's a balancing act, and I think that, so fundamentals isn't universal, but I think there's certain things that we can teach people to make the job a little bit easier.

Wesley Faulkner: I love piggy back on that, just

PJ Hagerty: Everyone's like,

Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, say that. Yeah, it seems as if it's not formulaic in terms of the approach for Vel. Everything is bespoke, and if you don't understand the driving factors for both engagements, attachments and stickiness, and if you don't understand where those come from and you're just copying what you're seeing, you're just putting it into some sort of AI and it's telling you what to do without divorce from real reality and the human experience, then you're stepping away from those things where then you'll find yourself in a point where things are going to go tragically wrong or they're going to choose to remove a whole DevRel department and think everything's going to be fine because they misunderstand and misinterpret the underlying structure.

PJ Hagerty: Can I mention something about that real quick? I know that I put it on both Twitter and Macon and every discord and place. I had a thought, this is the thing, because we're seeing a lot of layoffs, and I know we're going to get into this, but one of my big concerns for 2023 is a lot of people are going to say, you know what? There's a recession coming. Let's get rid of the Dev Rel team. And I hope that people realise that the DevRel team is the team that makes you the most money. Yes, we're not directly sales, we're not directly marketing. We're not directly engineering your product or any of those other things.

However, we are the face of your company, and if you get rid of the face of your company, people have no way to interact and relate. If they can't relate, they can't buy or they have no interest in buying. So for those of you big time who are listening to the DevRel Roundtable right now for as far as my voice can go, don't get rid of your DevRel team helping you build the business, keeping you recession proof. Yeah. Yeah.

Wesley Faulkner: I saw one third of Spotify's revenue is from Holyan account. I think so,

PJ Hagerty: Yeah. We're going to, let's table that. Let's table that a little bit.

Rebecca Marshburn: Julia, did you have something, Julia? I saw that we all kind of PJ's original answer about the fundamentals, and then I want to make sure that if you had something to share on that.

Julia Biro: No, I absolutely love that idea. And I think it was also doubling down on how important it is for us to teach people how to fish as opposed to giving them the fish because there is no universal recipe or solution. Because yes, what are the fundamentals? Well, you need to figure out your community's needs. How do you do that? You talk to them, you learn to deeply empathise with them and then figure out your own fundamentals. So absolutely, that was just hitting it on the head. Yeah,

Matthew Revell: I think one of those fundamentals that it's easy to, when you're first in DevRel and excited about all the things you can do, it's easy to perhaps not pay as much attention to the reason why there is an organisation investing in developer relations and that fundamental driving reason why someone's paying money or to DevRel rather than to some other activity. If we get that foundational thing right then and we're aligned with that, then I think that helps to, it doesn't prevent it, but it helps to shield derell teams somewhat from those worries of, oh, we're going to be the first to let go. So I know that we have a full agenda, but I'd love to know from each of you, how is it that you make sure that your own work and your team's work is aligned with that initial reason that as Ben Greenberg calls it, that origin story for your DevRel programme?

Julia Biro: For me, it's coming in and asking questions. I was quite one of the first people and then building up the DevRel team over at Info WebP. So for me, it was very important from the start to understand why are we here? What is the purpose of this team so that we can align to that? Because having done DevRel before, it's easy to come in and while it doesn't really, it's not a universal solution, but there are a couple of core activities you do in DevRel, so it's easy to just go on autopilot and knock them out. But I try to hold myself back a little and then see in this particular case, what is it the business feels they need from us? And okay, how can we align with both the developer community's needs and the business as well? And actually that ended up coming together into a nice enough plan.

So I think questions first and then build things up from there.

PJ Hagerty: Yeah, I like that answer. I think that especially when coming into a new team, it's like ask what they believe dera, and then some of this will actually happen through the interview process as well, but interview process, everybody's like, Hey, everything's great and shiny and perfect. You're coming into the most perfect job ever and nothing will ever go wrong. But as you get to the orientation the first couple of weeks, the onboarding, you can start to ask those questions like, alright, so I understand what our goals are, but again, what do we consider success? What do we feel are maybe not our metrics, but what's our north star? And that goes back to, and I think, Julia, you mentioned this too, don't default to autopilot and be like, all right, I'm coming in and we're going to start writing some blog posts and creating some content just like I've done at every other job.

I don't think that we evolve or even grow our skills when we do things like that. I think it's learning to ask not just the people internally, but the external community and saying like, Hey, what do you expect of me? I'm new here. What do you expect of me? Are you expecting me to deliver content? I can do that, but what more do you want? Do you want interaction? Do you want advocacy?

Do you want someone to just show up with the T-shirt to remind you that we're part of this? I think that the line that's always been straddled, especially in the case of advocacy, is figuring out how do I firmly but courteously bring feedback back to my company? And I think that's something when you join a new team, when you start a new programme, you need to figure that out. And almost like a three-year-old continually push that line to see exactly where I can bring this information back to the company and oh, now they're angry at me, so I need to pull back a little bit. But figuring that out, establishing that, and Julia is 100% right. The only way to do that is by asking questions. You have to ask everyone questions until you feel like you have enough information to act upon.

Rebecca Marshburn: Totally. Wesley, anything to add there?

Wesley Faulkner: I totally agree with Julia. She is exactly correct there. And so same with pj, and I'm just going to repackage and re-sit out what they just said.

Rebecca Marshburn: Love

Wesley Faulkner: It to Wesley. It comes to what PJ was saying, leadership needs to have some of these answers, and if they aren't responding or they're not communicating, you have to ask them to make sure that there is the fundamentals and core that we talked about before is not just known but communicated and pushed down so that everyone is swimming in them personally. One of the things that I feel that I don't know flaw, but sometimes it's a superpower, is that I like to be internally consistent. And so whenever I'm approaching anything, I want to make sure that is consistent with our values, consistent with what we're trying to do, our goals. And so as long as those are communicated and if they're not communicated to ask about them, I try to push what I do and how I'm driven to make sure it's consistent with everything that is said from a leadership perspective.

Rebecca Marshburn: So it sounds like, I mean we are already going in a bit of this more serious direction and how this really comes together. I do want to do A PSA, which I always love to do when we're talking about these communication and does leadership know what they want that I think pj, you had mentioned it even in the interview process, as much as a company might be interviewing you are also interviewing them. And so it's very important that even in that moment that you say to them in the interview, what are your goals for building a community? Why are you building a community? And if they don't know, then you have to decide if you're willing to take that on and you're going to step into a role where there aren't even goals set out for it, or you're going to be able to get alignment on those goals.

And the answer is likely yes. If you take the time and you get that stakeholder involvement and you ask those questions like Julia said, and those people have to be bought in, or you can at least take that time and the interview to educate them about, well, here are things that you could or maybe should expect from your community or what I would bring if I was to build community here. And although I might not take this role, now you are educated so that you have a better answer and can get alignment before you hire for someone who is then not set up for success because there are no goals. So no matter what, you're still helping the next community endeavour leader that might be interviewing for that role. If you use that moment as an education moment to be like, you should know your goals.

When I ask this in terms of you hiring or interviewing me to hire, I think it's easier said than done. And I usually say that out loud as a PSA, because I have to remind myself that if you're in an interview process, it's going both ways. And so yeah, I love that idea of alignment from the beginning, asking the questions of the stakeholders and if they don't know, help them notice where their gaps are that they don't even know yet, and they should probably have a goal for your role before you step into it and they're like, oh, we actually don't know what we want you to do.

PJ Hagerty: I like that, Rebecca. And I think that one of the things that we often talk about when we talk about interviewing for DevRel position is watch out for certain red flags. Definitely not having goals as a red flag, but what we don't talk about is the other side of it, the actionable side of it. If you see a red flag push back, I mean you've seen a red flag, chances are you're not taking this job. You are no longer invested in taking the position unless something very drastic and miraculous happens, push back on that red flag, say, well, you don't have goals. Why is that? What exactly are you looking to get out of a DevRel position? Is this just a checklist item for you?

Did some advisor or board members say we should get DevRel and that's why you're hiring us? Why exactly are you doing this? And like you said, you're setting up success for the next person to come out. Maybe not complete success, but more success than you're going to have. So you see a red flag pointed out to them, wave it in their face and say, Hey, what are you doing about this? This is not right.

Rebecca Marshburn: And hopefully it ends up making the company stronger and then the next candidate stronger and then gives everyone a more solid foundation. So I think Matthew, you wanted to say something about Discord comments, and then I will introduce the next question on the coattails of what PJ just said.

Matthew Revell: Yeah, so if you are watching it live developer relations.com, then you'll see the discord is embedded in the screen. And Mike Elsmore, a colleague of Julia's has commented that one of the techniques that he uses to uncover what's really going on is to ask the question what chaos is happening when he first joins a job? So I think he says the responses are amazing to that question,

Rebecca Marshburn: What chaos is happening is an amazing question. I think even to just ask your friends who you meet daily life instead of just like, Hey, how are you? It's like, Hey, what chaos is happening? That's a great, so if you have any answers you can share, please share that in the comments too. I would love to hear what some of those answers have been. And on this not a little bit more serious tone. So it sounds like you said red flags or what chaos is happening. What do you all think we should be wary of in 2023?

Or on the flip side, if you want to just go on the positive of this, what should we be looking forward to in 2023? And Julie, I'd love to kick off with you unless you want to pass the popcorn.

Julia Biro: That's all right. I'll do a quick kickback to Mike's comment because that question is actually very valuable and I think he had the fastest onboarding out of the whole team and probably is due to that question. So I can definitely recommend. As for 2023, we were actually having a conversation about this the past couple of years just kind of went, so 2020, what are we doing? Everybody turns content 2021, okay, figuring out online events, 2022, oh, now we got to do this in person as well, but then we still have part of the community that's online only, so how are we going to do? And there were a couple of successful hybrid events and the couple that maybe fell short a bit, and I think I'm excited about 2023 to see what we've learned from this succession of three years and what can we take away from it and how can we implement it. I am still looking at a hybrid way of engaging with the community, but definitely going back more in person and also really paying attention to if something is hybrid, then let's make it hybrid, not just an afterthought, whether that is putting on an event or from a deral side, engaging with communities, making sure that we are engaging with them both in person and online line and just figuring that dynamic out. Still work in progress.

But I'm excited to take on that challenge and hopefully do well by our communities in there.

Rebecca Marshburn: I love it. I think you are already on the path to doing well for your communities on there. Wesley, anything on your mind in terms of what to be wary of or what chaos is happening or what we should be looking forward to?

Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, so we're talking about predictions. So just looking at some indicators about the economy, looking at the indicators of more advanced tools and techniques and services. My worry for 2023 from all fronts, meaning companies, practitioners and even audiences, is that missile lined incentives could create some bad gamification behaviour. So if someone in management is pushing a certain metric or numbers, then that's going to move to gamification to make sure that number happens because the people are worried about their longevity and the things that means for the people in the community, they are seeing these structures where they're getting rewarded for hitting these numbers to help someone else meet their metric. And so that also might be gamified. So creating artificial intelligent bogs or content that they're pushing out their guides, images charts to be able to duplicate themselves using Zapier or any kind of automation tools that when they see something, monitor something, it triggers something else.

So they're able to get first, move your advantage. I think Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster had the same issue with Swifties, and I see that type of incentive structure because of misaligned or misinformed theories about what they need to do and how to do it with this kind of new kind of crop of people who are in Dev rel or in trying to find developers and get them engaged or they need some numbers to hit their next round of funding that we're going to see a lot of things that are just going to happen and the numbers may look good, but if you look at the underlying value or the perceived effort that's done, I think that's all going to be degraded. Just generally speaking.

Rebecca Marshburn: That is definitely something to be wary. Actually, many things I was like, oh, yeah, I didn't think of, oh, I am kind of wary of that. What about something we might want to be looking forward to in 2023

Wesley Faulkner: Forward to the other side is I think we're going to get more participation in general. I think people who were afraid of cracking open some of this technology are going to be more curious and open to learning more and the things around it. I know people talk about chat GBTA lot, but the thing is when they talk about it, they don't talk about the technology so much, but more of, I use chat GBT to do X. So real world usage for technology, how the tools can be used to help people in places that they are having troubles is kind of where development and coding comes from, where people want to solve real issues. And so I think the good thing about the conversation around this whole AI is less of will the Terminator come and kill my son? Who's going to lead the resistance, but more of how can I work less but more efficiently, but also create more high quality content, whether it's an email, whether it's a cv, whatever. And so people are now going to be using that newfound possibility to open up their imagination, which also makes people then feel less constrained about the current tool set and be more explorative or actually create and share their works. So that's what I'm looking forward to.

So more people just in terms of the development side, just flooding the market, wanting to learn more and discovering this new skillset that they may not have even considered in the past.

Rebecca Marshburn: Yeah, I love that. It's sort of like the taking away the burden of the blank page where you're like, I just don't even know how to start, and it's really helpful to have a place to start, or it's like someone said to me once, if I never gave you an example, why should I expect you to know? So there are these tools that help you at least get started, at least have an example to work from, and then you can build off of that, and that is something really nice to look forward to. So thank you for bringing that up. pj, anything on your end things to be wary of, something to look forward to? Chaos you want to talk about?

PJ Hagerty: Yeah, I think I'll start with the chaos factor. One thing that I've been concerned about for a little while is how we quantify or qualify someone as being ready to take on a re role. We've seen a lot of new people, we've all talked about that, and I think a lot of the new people are new, exciting, and they're ready to go. They kind of have the pedigree of, I've been organising meetups or I've been writing content, or I've been delivering talks for a while, but what I'm seeing over the past couple of months is I've never been in tech and I'd like to do DevRel because it's seen as an easy or I was in sales at a car dealership. I think I can do like there's no linear, that's not the same thing. So that's my biggest concern is that the market, our jobs will be devalued by people who aren't qualified to do the job because they're seeing it as an Instagram fun thing to do, a way to get into tech without having to learn any tech and the cheater's way into the world of Silicon Valley.

And that's my big concern. I think that's going to create a lot of chaos over the next year or maybe two. The thing that I think that I'm most concerned about is of course, finances. I am afraid that a lot of these people who are qualified, who are doing the job, doing great things and building great communities aren't going to lose their positions because companies are worried about bottom lines and they don't, not you, Wesley. No, I'd hire you in a second, but I think I'm concerned that that companies are going to lay people off or decide that Dore isn't necessarily, let's get rid of it. We saw that a lot at the beginning of Covid and Julia mentioned, oh, we switched to content, we switched doing this. And that was tough. A lot of people lost their jobs.

They couldn't figure out where to move fast enough.

I think that that's going to cause a large scale suffering to tech in general over the next six to eight months, if not longer. But the thing that I look forward to, because I feel like this has happened before when recessions hit in the mid aughts and people were worried about what was going to happen in tech, what was going to happen to the communities that we work with, what happened was there was a growth of the meetup where things became hyper localised and meetups on a large scale went away during Covid. People didn't want to sit through another Zoom meeting at seven o'clock in the evening after being on Zoom all day with everyone that they've working with. So the goal of the meetup was to be able to sit down in a pub, in an office in someplace, grab some pizza and talk about the similar and differing problems you had and the technology that you were working with.

It was beautiful because it was something that hearkened back to the old days of everyone meets in the pub at the end of the day to talk about how crappy it was to work in the mines. But I think that we're going to see now that things are getting a little bit healthier, things are getting a little bit open, the meetup's going to come back. Some of these conferences that we lost during Covid, especially, I'll point out the O'Reilly conferences, they're never coming back. O'Reilly's made that statement. They've made it very clear that's a lot of conferences, it's a lot of opportunities people had to learn. They're not going to have, I think that this year the meetup is going to come back strong. We're going to see a lot of meetups that may have been super tiny in the past, become larger. And I think through that we'll see the growth of events, community-based events growing and growing through 24 and 2025.

So that's my positive spin on the chaos of the world today. I hope that people start to self-organize and people start to build the tools. And I think that Common Room is a great one that actually helps people get the idea of where the community is and how they can coalesce some of the other tools that we used to use that sound a lot like mup.com, maybe we don't use those so much and we focus on self building and go back to things like building our own web pages, building things in GitHub to organise the local community. But I think that people are going to take the steps to do that themselves because there is that want and need to have an external, are you showing me a plug? Did I plug something?

Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, common room

PJ Hagerty: Plug. Oh, cool. Yeah, I don't work there. But no, I think that there's going to be a new set of tools and a new attitude towards building meetups to promote things in local areas. And that's where we and Dev Re are also going to get a huge benefit to finding out what are people actually doing out there? What are they interested in? What are the languages that are important? What's the state of Kubernetes?

Do people really care? It's going to be a huge boon and that's where I'm really hoping takes off in 2023.

Matthew Revell: Lots of people suddenly want to get into Dev Rel, and I don't think it's just developer relations because I, I'm subscribed to the technical writing subreddit, for example. And I'd say every other post on there is how do I get into tech writing? And it'll be someone who has zero background in writing or tech or education or anything like that. They just see it as a good place to go and more power to them. But I don't think it's just, it seems to be, let's face it, up until this point, who knows what will happen this year? But tech in general is a high status in many cases. Oh,

PJ Hagerty: It's shiny

Matthew Revell: High salary environment to work in. You see these stories about look at the food that get a Google and the foosball tables and all of this. And I remember in my first jobs, nothing would happened like that. And you can see why people look that way. So I wonder if there's more of a movement to identify roles that look easier to transition into Endeavour just happens to be one of them.

PJ Hagerty: And I'm not saying it's exclusively happening in DevRel, but I wanted to keep that spin on it.

Rebecca Marshburn: What I'd love to dig into there is, and I think it's our job, right? And I think you had mentioned this Wesley, where there are people newcomers to the space and to the career path. Is that, let's say it is. I think you, PJ used the example of a used car salesman. It's our job to say like, Hey, you might not have a background specifically in DevRel having done it before, but you do have applicable skills from your past roles. And now it's our jobs as people who have been in the space. How do you apply the skills that you have to building communities? What are the skills you have today that would actually be applied and be super useful in the DevRel space?

And then how do we help you find the skills or the resources you need to build the skills for the ones that you don't have yet?

And so I'm wondering if there are some of those, and I'm sure from people coming in from other backgrounds we're like, whoa, I never thought to approach it that way. That's really cool. I am curious if there are any core fundamental skills that people might bring from other backgrounds that aren't typically in the tech space that you see as really, really valuable to say like, Hey, really use that skill to your advantage that you learned in X other industry and it's super applicable endeavour because if there's any of those skills that we should highlight for potential newcomers to the space.

PJ Hagerty: Definitely. And I think that one of the first ones I'll mention is one that's so exemplified by a person I'll refer to as the other pj. PJ Metz. PJ was a teacher, but his ability to communicate clearly and concisely is what really lent itself to being an excellent at re. He could take very complicated concepts and he was primarily in English and break them down and have younger kids and high school kids understand the finer points of a very complex piece of literature. That's something that we essentially, we do that a lot in DevRel. I mean, we're taking documentation and turning into a conference talk. Those two things are not the same, but they're similar and they have the same point of origin.

So I think that communication is the most fundamental foundation. And also relationship building, your ability to establish rapport with someone is super important and that you can definitely get from another industry. I think where the drawback comes in is, but you don't understand the technology or you've never worked in this space to understand that you can't sell AWS the way you sell a Chevy Silverado. It doesn't work the same way. The response won't be the same. So while you might have some skills, you have to measure and be honest with yourself about how can I grow this and take the time to build this before I just start applying for jobs, thinking this is the easy way out. I'm good at talking to people.

Always people are saying, well, I'm good at presenting, I'm good at public speaking. Okay, that's like this much of the job. That's the shortest part of the job. Everything else that comes before that to gets you to even get on the stage, can you do that part? And that's the thing that I think people need to be honest with themselves. Could I do that? Could I write a blog post that's technical? Could I write documentation?

Could I write a case study? Could I do a Twitch stream beyond getting started? Can I go deeper into the things that I think I'm studying? And if people are honest with themselves, and I'm trying not to keep it too gatekeeping, I think people can learn these things. They can definitely learn these things, but they have to be honest with themselves at the outset. This isn't easy. Learning to code isn't easy. Learning to do things in tech, learning databases, learning infrastructure, it's not easy.

You can have a simple understanding of it, but when you get deeper into it, that's where the rubber hits the road.

Julia Biro: I love what you just pointed out. I feel like a couple of years ago there was only a handful of people doing several, at least in a very visible way. And then we double down on emphasising how accessible this job is and how approachable it is to a wide variety of people and then try supporting them to come into the role and presenting it as something that's attractive and actually quite useful for people's careers. And I think we did a very good job at that to the point where people now would opt for a DevRel career because they feel they don't have the experience to get an engineering job and feel like DevRel might be an easier way of getting into tech. So yes, at the end of the day, you do need to be honest with yourself, and that's not on the gatekeeping side because I am so excited to see folks from different backgrounds come in and I am always amazed by just the vast amount of knowledge and skills they bring that aren't from a traditional engineering background.

And if they are honest with themselves and make up for the, as you mentioned, if you are coming in with zero TE knowledge working for a company that is primarily a database provider, there is a certain gap that needs to be filled up. But once you do have that, then all these skills that they've bailed up in different industries come on top and just take them so so far and make the job easier. And definitely communication and breaking complex concepts down into small concise pieces of information. I think that is at the core of what we do. And that could make life a lot easier for everyone involved. I

Wesley Faulkner: Think that those are both great examples of learning and learning how to learn and being able to be around the people who know maybe more than you do, which goes to what tip is to start doing now in 2023 is if you want to develop or you want to expand a skill that you can bring from something else. I would say networking. So connecting with people who are in the industry, connecting with people that you admire, connecting with companies even that you want to emulate. And also, I'll go one step further. I think you should do that connection on Mastodon. It's an environment where people are learning, everyone's learning how to use this new area of social connection. And if you are experienced in that space as you go out through the year when people are thinking about, yeah, it actually is becoming a thing.

Being there first or earlier ish, which is where we are right now, will give you an advantage in the future to be able to explain how things work there. Also, because of the lack of chatter or how less congested it is, having access to people who are in your orbit or even outside of people you would talk to at all. Alex Winter is on Mastodon. I was able to chat with him and connect with him. There's several artists and journalists and people who are there that in other formats, they wouldn't give me a time of day. But because of the type of interaction or the kind of high quality people that are just there and experimenting, that'll give you the best chance of being able to make some of these lasting connections that will help you not just from, do you know who I know, but more of being able to practise, connecting, talking, explaining and listening and interacting and discussing and debating all of that stuff is going to be useful for your career.

Matthew Revell: There's always the question of which skills are easier to teach. You bring a set of skills with you, perhaps you're a great developer, but is it then easy for you to learn all of the dev stuff or you come as someone who's really good at content perhaps, but you're not so technical. Is it easy for you to learn the technical stuff? And I think it depends on the individuals, but it's an interesting thing. We should move on to the next topic because we are rapidly running out of time. I'd like to know what should we reflect on in 2022? We have touched on this a little bit, so we can probably not spend too much time here, but what lessons should we draw from 2022? Julia,

Julia Biro: Prepare for the unexpected. Sorry, that was just a knee-jerk reaction, but I think a lot of things started moving in 2022, some in a good direction, things opening up, and then there was economic side of things. Thinking back on 2022 was actually quite a roller coaster, although I'm quite happy with the end results personally, but my main takeaways are to have structure and to know exactly what you're doing and why you're doing it because, well, that is my way of safeguarding my team and our initiatives in the current economic situation. And the other one actually came at the end of the year when I got the opportunity to go back. And I keep on saying for the past hour, I think I've been saying in person and getting back to connecting with people in person. I have not realised during the past two years how isolated I have become because it was becoming the norm. And going back and now having the opportunity to be in person in the same room with people and having those genuine connections and bouncing ideas in contrast, that is just so valuable. And I would like to be doing more of that.

I think those are the two off the top of my head.

Matthew Revell: I really feel that about the isolation side of things as many of these, and I love doing this kind of thing, but the few times that I got to meet with people in probably the latter half of last year in a work context was just, it was like having, it's a cliche, but it was having a lovely cold glass of water after walking through the desert. It was just so refreshing and it brought back all the memories of why it was good things that I'd kind of forgotten.

Julia Biro: We are a remote first team over at Infobit and that's how it's been built and we are set to work that way. But even then, having the opportunity to see my team and being in the same room as you said, it's just a world of difference.

PJ Hagerty: No, and that's where I'd like to jump off to. I think one of the things that I've learned or drawn from 2022 and even that little bit of time between Delta and Omicron in 2021 when there were four conferences that people got to go to is just appreciating the ability to have that real world interaction with your communities. I can honestly say that when I did my first in-person talk, after everything was said and done, I cried a little bit. People showed up. It was like eight o'clock in the morning in Kansas City and I turned around, there were people there to see me do this talk about open source and tears came to mind. I was just like, I just want to thank you all for being here. And I think that that's of the things that I really learned over the period of 2022 is appreciating the fact that we are lucky enough to do this job.

We're lucky enough to be good at it and we must be good at it because Matthew invited us all to be here. But it's something that we need to appreciate the people who put us here. And that's always the people out there in the crowd. And I think that's one of the things that I draw on. We're very lucky, very privileged, very fortunate to do this thing that we're doing and I think that we need to keep that appreciation as we move forward in 2023 there's a lot of people that aren't, either because they don't want to do it or they're not skilled enough to do it, or they just can't find their way in the door that don't get to do this, and they might be great at it and we should try to get them in if we can. But just appreciating the people around us and the community of DevRel practitioners, but also the communities that we work with is just super important. And also highlight of 2022, I finally got to meet Matthew Revel in person, so that was pretty cool. Still haven't met Wesley.

We've been doing a podcast for two years.

So then Wesley,

Wesley Faulkner: I would say the thing that I'm learning, or the thing that I'm taking away from 2022 is that the importance of mental health. I think it was tied into talking to people, meeting people in person now, but I think that's in contrast to previous hustle culture, kind of evangelism that happened. And then if you remember in 2022, that's when we got the great resignation. That's when we got the quiet quitting. That's where we got the things where people are making a choice of how they would like to present or if they want to be working from home or back to the office. People. Were now given a choice when we're forced before to go to an office or forced before to stay home and not interact. Now that we have a choice, people are understanding what their own needs are, what their own desires and wants to keep themselves not just healthy from a physical standpoint, but from a mental standpoint of saying, I'm going to make the choice to do the thing that is going to be better for me in the long run or the short run.

And so that's what I'm taking from 2022 is that the importance of mental health and not just decision makings of what events to go to, but even what jobs to keep or what types of relationships to even foster.

Rebecca Marshburn: That is a humbling and reflective answer. So thank you for sharing that. All three of you, it is that special time of the morning, afternoon, or evening depending on where you are, where we do a quick wrap up. And so I think as a wrap up, instead of asking a long fourth question that Matthew and I had bolded out, maybe the best way to wrap this up is for each of you to sign off, introduce yourselves one more time, tell us where we can connect with you and maybe share one word that you're looking forward to in 2023 that might define where you want your community to go or your community programme to go, or your community, your Devra team to go as an example, since I am just bringing this on you all, I think our word at Common room and for the uncommon community would be alignment. And it's really our goal that community leaders, DevRel leaders find that alignment and that synergy with their stakeholders and with their communities. So both can grow even in a time that might look like a difficult year ahead in terms of business economics. So alignment would be our word. And I would love to ask you all to give us yours and tell us where we can find you.

So just as we started, I think we'll start with you, Julia.

Julia Biro: Right. Hi, I was Julia. I lead the developer relations team at Info BP and trying to come up with the words. I'm going to have to go with connection because we are looking to get connected with our community. We are a new programme and we are looking forward to meeting as much of them as possible and foster those in-person and online connections. That's beautiful. And you Wesley?

Wesley Faulkner: I'm Wesley Faulkner, senior community manager at AWS. You can find [email protected]. All of my socials and work, I would say the word that I'm trying to foster or to manifest is cooperation. So internally, but also bringing in people that I haven't worked with before or groups or different types of nonprofits or movements. I'm just trying to work with other groups that are distinct from my own to see how we can cooperate.

Rebecca Marshburn: I love that I called you a passionate collaborator in your intro, and I think, yeah, cooperation is such a fitting word for how you work with others and how you bring people together. pg, I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself, your word and where people can find you, but then toss it back to Julia because I forgot to ask her where people can find her.

PJ Hagerty: Oh, okay, sure. So I'm PJ Haggerty. Super easy to find splenic on just about every social media, A-S-P-L-E-N-I-C because I lost my spleen when I was 19. It's a whole long story, but I think that my word, oh, and I dev advocate for Spotify, founder of dev relate. io, creator of call of conduct. com. If you need a word. I think the one word that I want to focus on, and I've been tossing this up while the other two were thinking, I want my word to be innovation.

I think that we need to innovate, we need to move forward. And I think that through cooperation, through collaboration, we can do these things. But I think that for the past few years, we've kind of been iterative instead of innovative. So my word is innovation. Let's innovate. Let's build new communities, build new technology, and build new fun things.

Rebecca Marshburn: I love it. And Julia, where might people find you?

Julia Biro: I can be found on Twitter as Julia does that, and I also do answer to the info dev Twitter account, and you can also find the [email protected].

Rebecca Marshburn: Amazing. Matthew, will you reintroduce yourself and then wrap us up. You are our immaculate host bringing us all together, and so I pass it back to you.

Matthew Revell: Well, thank you. And thank you for being a wonderful co-host, and thank you to our guests as well for your insights and your warmth and your willingness to share with us. So thank you. So yeah, I'm Matthew Revelle. I do DevRel consulting type things at hoopy io and I'd like to share a couple of things that we've got coming up. So we mentioned mental health in DevRel there, PJ shared osm I help. org. So open source mental health do look there.

We're also planning a DevRel round table for May on mental health in DevRel because as far as I can tell, may is Mental health month. But sooner than that, in a couple of weeks time, Rebecca and I will be back for a round table on how do you reinvigorate a community after a break. So that might be the end of year break we've just had, or a summer break. So I would say thank you very much everyone.

Rebecca Marshburn: Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. Bye.