What we learned from the pandemic

Carla: It is been a new experience this past few years, and I think we've all seen some unexpected things. And we'll go a little bit over what we've learned, some things that work, some things that don't work, and did things stay the same or not? We have an incredible panel and we've organised this with Hoopy. Thank you so much for the support. And now I'll ask for all the speakers for a quick introduction. Jonan, go ahead.

Jonan: Oh, thank you for choosing me. I work in developer relations for some times now and the pandemic was very interesting and I live in Berlin and I work for a company called Parody Technologies and they build Polka thought. So I'm getting to learn how to build a developer relations team in a whole new world. It was a very interesting time.

Carla: Wow. Sounds cool. Luca, you want to go next?

Luca: Sure. Hey everyone, my name is Luca. I am the global community lead at Kaunda. We are a software company focusing on process orchestration, and yeah, we changed quite a lot since Covid hit, I think, as all of us, and I'm really excited to be in this round table discussion and talk to you about it. Thank

Carla: You,

Luca: Richard.

Richard: Hi, I'm Richard. I am responsible for the developer relations and experience team at Vonage. We offer communications, APIs. I actually switched jobs during the pandemic into this job, so it was a very interesting time for me all around and I'm really looking forward to today's discussion.

Carla: Cool. And Alessandro?

Alessandro: Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm the Alessandro programme manager in the developer ecosystem team, Google. So I manage a programme called Google Developer Groups, so a community of developers passionate about Google technologies, and similarly to Richard. Actually I started in this new role during the pandemic April, 2020. So good fun.

Carla: Yes. We'll have a lot of different experiences. This will be awesome. All right, are we all ready then?

Luca: Sure, absolutely.

Carla: So let's start a little bit with just some initial thoughts and overall insights. If I would ask you, what was the top learning that you took from this time specifically during pandemic? What would it be? Richard, let's start with you.

Richard: Okay. The silly answer is, which is hard, but I think the more serious answer is that I think I learned a lot about taking care of each other as a team in difficult times. And I think that's actually been, I started at another company into the pandemic and it was this big unknown and it was kind of scary and we didn't know what was going on. A lot of the things we were doing, we suddenly couldn't do anymore, and we didn't know how long it would last. And it was really great how we in that team kind of supported each other through that crisis. And that's been a really big learning experience for me. And I think something that's also been very helpful as I've now, after changing jobs, now being responsible for a way bigger team, I think that actually has been something that's made me a lot better at my current job, whether it's happening in a pandemic or not,

Carla: A little bit of a growth path as well.

Alessandro: Definitely.

Carla: What about you, Alessandro? Anything you'd want to add?

Alessandro: Yeah, I think Google Developer Groups is a in-person, developer, community and programme. So March, 2020 events are not possible anymore. So I think in these times, this was a very challenging times for people on different levels, but I think make the most out of challenging times like this to try to innovate and be creative, experiment and reassess also what you were doing before the status quo is a big learning. Just don't desperate, just see the positive and try to experiment something and invent something that you were not doing before. I think this was my learning.

Carla: Cool. So now Jonan, and to you, this question was with a little bit of a twist. What's the most surprising discovery that you made? Something you weren't

Jonan: Expecting? I get the hard one, huh? Everybody else just

Carla: Gets well, even local wheel, so you're not alone.

Jonan: Yeah, I was a little bit surprised in the shift to online content and the success we found there. I think that the pandemic hit and DevRel at the time was particularly small, quite a bit smaller as an industry or segment in the industry than it is today. And we all looked up and we're like, well, I guess we'll just go back to engineering. We're probably out of jobs without conferences. Surely this cannot be done successfully. And it's not that we hadn't been producing content online, it was just a question of whether or not that was as effective as in-person events. That's how you create social bonds in those cases. And so building that and replacing that online was really difficult.

I was surprised with the success that we found as an industry and with the speed at which we levelled up our ability to measure developer relations over the period of the pandemic, I think maybe five new companies started just to measure developer relations specifically. And that was both really nice to see and very surprising to me because I was not feeling particularly hopeful in staring down a global pandemic, if you can imagine. It was kind of a depressing time for me and the world.

Carla: Yeah, that's cool. And I think you will have a bit more of an opportunity to also dwell into some of those later on the questions. Thank you. Luca, what about you? Surprising discovery?

Luca: Yeah, I can only agree with you, Jon. And for us, I think it was surprising to see at the beginning of the pandemic, everyone was really desperate to go back to in-person events. So our company, we adapted quite quickly. We actually had a really big conference planned at the beginning of the pandemic. It should take place in New York, and then it was all cancelled and we had to turn it around in basically a month. And also our community, our meetup organisers, they adapted super quickly, which was really great to see. But always when we met with them, they said, oh, we really want to go back to in-person events. We really miss it.

And now I think the normal has changed a little and people are like, yeah, we really want to see you in person, but not always. So people like to stick to online formats. And for me, that was actually really surprising to see because we were really desperately waiting for going back to in-person events. And I think that is also a big advantage because especially with our global community, it's really nice to see that we're able to connect to all of them and that we are also able to listen to them, which I think is super important.

Carla: Cool. Thanks for sharing. And that bridges a little bit maybe into the next question that we have here. So specifically on outreach and looking at events, how did the event strategy change compared to before the pandemic? Maybe Luca, you can build on what you were saying a little bit.

Luca: Sure. Yeah. So for us, it actually changed a lot because prior to covid we had mostly in-person events. And obviously when Covid hit we had to move everything to online events. And I think it's always about finding out what works online and what doesn't work online. You cannot just translate everything that you do in person to an online event. So we tried out a lot of different things and for us it was really great to see that we were able to really reach our global community because I think before we were missing a lot of opportunities, for example, to reach people in India or Brazil. And then at some point we were actually able to attend the events and to also engage and listen to their feedback.

So now we have I think more events because it's easier to set them up and less resources are needed and we make them more specific for each specific target group. But also we moved some of our events to a hybrid event. So for example, our annual user conference, we moved that to a hybrid setup and this work really well, it just took place actually now in October. So just recently.

Carla: Nice. Anyone else wants to answer to this question?

Alessandro: Maybe I'll jump in. I think I relate to what Luca said. I think what I've seen at least in our communities is that there was an evolution in the past three years. So before the pandemic, we had in-person only events in our community and they were mainly local. While during the pandemic of course, some people got very excited about experimenting with digital events. So of course we had online events only, but people came together in a region to host regional event or national events. Some of them had big focus like worldwide focus and were quite successful while now in this phase, I think we see a mix of in-person and online events. I think people are keen more and more keen to go back to in-person events, but they have more of a local focus.

So I'm really happy that we can retain the online dimension. But I think what I see is that we're coming back to a local focus.

Jonan: I think the hybrid of, oh, I'm sorry,

Carla: Go for it.

Jonan: I think the hybrid approach levelled up significantly because we were forced to suddenly there were a whole lot of DevRel people on earth and many community members who were real super lonely for their friends. We missed all of our friends from these conference hallways and we tried to replicate those things online and that was real hard in the beginning. I'm sure that many of you remember Deserted Island DevOps, the conference that they ran online where they ran it in animal crossing, they had people presenting and running around the island at the time, animal Crossing was just becoming this very popular game and it was a smashing success. And I remember thinking when I saw that conference that maybe this could work out, maybe we could do this thing only online, but building engagement strategies for virtual environments, it's just a thing that had never been a priority for developer relations because we had the low hanging fruit of in-person events.

We were already hitting it out of the park as compared to a lot of companies that didn't really know what they were doing in the space. They would run these events and they're like, now what you're going to do is sign up for 10 hours of me talking at you about our product. Are you ready for the infomercial? And we're like, how about we have a board game night where developers could actually talk to each other or whatever else we did in person. And that was a big win and then that was all gone. And so we had to find a way to do that online and using platforms that kind of combine spatial audio and virtual spaces and experimenting with things like Twitch, which is brilliant by the way. And now everyone's doing Twitch. That brought us to a place now where we don't have streaming as an option for a conference.

If you're putting on a physical event and you're really only running that in person, you're like, let's just go ahead and treat this as disposable. And that doesn't seem as wise a choice anymore because of what we experienced in the pandemic.

Carla: So a little bit also on being able to reuse content and making it reach more people. So how do you feel about the hybrid models? Is it a must do drawbacks from

Jonan: It? Yeah, I mean the drawbacks are, it's tremendously difficult to achieve and it can be very expensive if you're hiring third party party vendors to do it right? If you, it's a really good gig to get into right now if you're into video production and you want to make $50,000 a day go offer to live stream some conferences, it's very expensive. And community organised events have a hard time making it real, and that's frustrating to me because that means that the corporations, again, have an advantage in this field and really we should be about the people. That's what DevRel is for. We fight for the users. So I think, yeah, streaming is no longer as optional as people considered it to be and certainly not the recording, at least at a bare minimum of the talks.

Luca: Yeah, I can only agree and I think I personally think a hybrid setup works really well for us. It worked really, really well, but also you have to be really intentional about it and you really have to realise that it's basically two separate events. So I think if you have an in-person setting, then usually, or sometimes it can happen that you treat it like, okay, you have the in-person experience, and then yeah, the other one is just an add-on, but then I think people will feel left out who are attending virtually. So I really think that you have to treat it as two separate events to create a high class experience. So for example, at our conference we had moderation during the breaks and then they did behind the scenes insights and things like that. So that worked really well and then people felt really included. But I think yeah, as you said Jonan, I think it's really about realising that there's more work and that you have to separate experiences if you really want to do it well.

Carla: That's a cool example, the behind the scenes to bring the people that are remote. That's actually pretty cool. What about you Richard? It's brilliant.

Jonan: You're finding ways to add value instead of to treat this as a lesser experience, this is exactly what they should be and it allows us to include a whole sphere of people who couldn't go to physical conferences in the first place otherwise and we're entirely left behind and now they get a whole new and better experience. In some ways make this not like an afterthought and an add on and like, oh, I guess we'll stream also, but this is a whole unique event in addition to this one conference plus plus.

Carla: And I think what I find really nice about, it's that it's not a fluffed up type of content, but actually sharing something about what's going on in the background, and I think we all know with developers fluff doesn't work, so that's a pretty nice idea. Richard, any thoughts on hybrid? What's been your experience so far?

Richard: Yeah, I think there was some pretty good thoughts here. I think in the beginning of the pandemic we went like, okay, we've done conferences in person. How do we take this exact thing and do it online? And I think many of us had the experience of sitting at an online booth all day with absolutely nobody showing up. I remember doing, I don't know, I think it might have been reinvent even, not exactly a small event where you'd think there would be some people there and me sitting an entire day at our virtual booth staring at an empty browser window desperately hoping for someone, anyone to show up and say hi. And it just didn't happen. It was like a five hour booth shift where I just did nothing. And so I think we really had to learn to figure out what are the things we just can't replicate online.

For me, going to a physical event like the hallway track and just the people sometimes look at the travel aspect where you have to go to a different place, maybe even get on a plane, going to events as a downside or a defect. But for me it's always been a feature, right? Because it allows you to get out of your day to day, you're not in the office anymore, be it a real or a home office, and you can clear your head and you're in a different environment and it makes you much more receptive to those new ideas that you're going to be presented with. Whereas if you're doing a virtual event, an online event, you spend half your day staring at people talking to you through a screen anyway these days, how is that different? How is that special? And I think those are some of the things Luca talked about.

It's really great that we can expand the reach of events that we're doing if we're doing them hybrid and get some of the content and make it accessible to more people. But we also got to understand it's not the same thing as being there in person and then figuring out how do you provide value to people who come to it? Because in many ways what's the difference, me showing up to that event and seeing it live versus checking out the content three weeks later on YouTube and if there's little to no difference, you're probably not doing it right.

Carla: That's a very good point.

Jonan: This is the same reason why the hallway track has always been our preferred method of engagement. We all go to these conferences and we're like, wow, the videos are all recorded so I can watch 'em later. And then you mostly don't, but you end building engagement and relationships in the hallway that do more value, present more value to you and your team in the end anyway, building these new things online and as Luke was saying, building this additive value I think has trained us all to think very deeply about how to make these things fluff free, intensely engaging events. Nobody wants to sit there and just watch lectures at home. It's strictly speaking a worse than worst conference to go and sit there and just watch the pre presented slides go. You want to be part of the conversation, I want to participate. I want that choose your own adventure style television relationship that platforms like Twitch can give me. What's so amazing about that?

Carla: So we shared some ideas on what to do from an organising and event point of view that you can do online. What about if you come in as a sponsor and you get, like Richard was saying, for example, you get to be at a virtual booth. What are some ideas of what can be done? How do you have a fixed time, you're not fully in control. Any experiences or things that were

Jonan: Don't pretty much I have not been. Yeah, I was thinking of reinvent as an example. I was going to say, oh, it's great that they gave us such a massive discount. They really didn't. They gave you the same closet rental prices for half of your company's budget and no value. I think we saw eight people that day and seven of them were like, where do I get the free? And that was it. It's really not worth it because if you don't have control over the platform, then you don't have control over the attendee experience and that's the real value in having a booth.

You can control the attendee experience. You can set up your booth to be like, we're handing out pens and here is a bad USB charger, that's 1. 2 amps. Or you can actually create a welcoming space where people can come and hang out.

You can just be the hangout zone. I'm not going to give you all my boost secrets right now, but you can craft that experience and online you don't have the ability to craft that experience at all. So in most cases, I would be really hesitant to sponsor an online only event unless it's your people. You want to show up for your community and support them in their efforts. If someone from our community, one of our ambassadors comes to us is like, Hey, we're going to run this polka dot event. We'd love it if we could get a little bit of funding. I'm like, absolutely you do. We will do our best to help you make that successful.

But beyond that, I have yet to see a really valuable sponsorship except for honestly deserted Island DevOps. They killed it and all you got to do is just copy them perfectly. Good luck.

Carla: That's a fair point and things don't always need to work out. We also need to know when things don't work and wants to say no. Then a question on, we're talking about outreach events, what about budgets? We don't to mention any actual numbers, but have you noticed a change in, for example, the budgets that the was able to get before versus now? Alessandro, maybe we can start with you.

Alessandro: Yeah, I think during the pandemic, the budget definitely was cut, but at the same time, since we were heavily focused on in-person events and we couldn't do in-person events anymore, of course the cost that we had were also much less. So I would say now probably the budget is not yet at the same level as it was pre pandemic but is getting closer. That's from our point of view.

Luca: Maybe something to add. I think the pandemic really showed the value of community and also developer relations. So I feel in the industry, obviously it really depends on the company, but also companies really start seeing the value. There are a lot of deral teams actually that were built during the pandemic or community teams. So I think a lot of companies start seeing the value and also invest in it and put budget into it. At our company we at Kao, we didn't really have issues in getting the budget for de, but obviously the spend is different. It's spend not on in person events anymore on travelling. So obviously it's spent differently, but I also think in general regarding the industry that companies start seeing the value more.

Richard: I think just to some degree the challenge wasn't so much getting the budget, but figuring out how do you spend it now and how do you spend it in a way that if you spend the money, you can still justify that you did it because you asked for the money, you had a plan. Will you say we're doing these events and this is the ROI and this is the thing we're getting, and you do your first one or two online events and you realise, oh yeah, a lot of this was predicated on the booth and there is no booth. We paid for a booth, but there is no booth. What do we do now and how do we get value for the money that we do spend? And I think as with everything, you are kind of looking for creative, innovative ways to do things, yes, but also how to spend the money that you had.

Jonan: I think from my perspective, I absolutely agree with you. I think this is an excellent point, but I think that the money has come post pandemic. I feel like it's a lot easier for us and I mostly work with small companies or smallish companies as compared to you that Vage and Google are a much bigger budget machine than I'm usually working with. I'm helping smaller companies, 500 people build the DevRel team and get started in that space. And the power of a network effect in both this hybrid world and post pandemic, I think it is unlocked this ability to one like hire and to get the budget provided that you're using that money intelligently and I'm not going to be signing us up to go to reinvent, sorry, Amazon friends. That is a colossal waste of money in my not very humble opinion. You have an opportunity for that to sponsor every single meetup for every single group of community members who is even vaguely interested in your technology globally for the entire year.

And you will instead choose to stand in a closet and hand out pencils. That's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. If you're showing up for your community and you're spending the money wisely and you can demonstrate the value and you're measuring it carefully, I think that the budget is there. I've watched developer relations as a practise quintuple in popularity easily since the pandemic hit, which was not at all what I was expecting. I was like, we're done game over. Maybe I'll go be a beet farmer. And suddenly this industry has exploded and you see a lot of people going through a lot of the things that DevRel already argued about over the years again in public.

And it is just this explosion of interest coming from people who suddenly realise the value that they can get from these programmes and that has unlocked a lot of the money.

I think it also shifted a lot of the budget from traditional marketing events. They're like, well, we've got to cancel our conference that we were going to put on for our four and a half million dollars. How are you going to find ways to spend that money? And DevRel is not always the first choice in that case, those budgets are typically controlled by marketing teams and they think we're just kind of wacko sometimes, but if you can get a little piece, you can do a lot with a little. So I've been pretty impressed actually with what people have been able to achieve given what they've had to work with and with companies. Finally, really smart companies coming to realise what they can get out of that money instead of putting it into these almost software rituals that we were just in this habit of doing every year. Just go back to the thing, spend the money. That's what it costs for the big party over and over and over.

It shook things up and that's a good thing for the industry.

Carla: So focus on where you actually get a return for what you're spending and not necessarily big name events, but the events where the people that you care about are.

Jonan: Yeah, I feel like we're bullying, reinvent. Reinvent your grave. We love you, man. Just you do you

Carla: No harm meant One last question on events. So we've been talking from our point of view DevRel, but what about from the developers, from the attendees point of have you felt any impact or any change that we saw during Pandemic and then after? Are people eager to go back to events or they're more used to the online and want to keep that? What kind of split is it? Sorry, A lot of questions into one

Alessandro: My start. So I think during this time, attendees got more used to consuming content online. So when they attend an event an in-person event, they expect completely new higher quality content. But on top of that is also more interaction, more engagement, better networking opportunities. Otherwise, as we already mentioned before, they can just watch the video later on Twitch or YouTube. So I think the expectations now on the experience that people can get at the event is much, much higher. If I travelled to an event of course before pizza was enough, but now people want to have a better quality, better use of their time, and this comes to I think the content and it comes to the connection that they can make.

Richard: I think people have kind of realised why they went to in-person events in the first place. I think if you ask people pre pandemic, why do you go a conference? They would've sent, well, because of the interesting talks and now they've been getting all the interesting talks online through a screen, they've realised maybe that wasn't the cool thing. Maybe that wasn't really the reason I was excited about it. It was part of it, but there were a lot of other things there too. And I think this is, you're absolutely right that expectations have risen both in terms of the other parts of the conference but also of the content because people have started consuming more content online. They might have a stronger opinion. What accounts to a good talk amounts to a good talk or not.

And I've definitely had people at our booths being much more opinionated on whether this conference had good talks or not and also be much more excited about actually interacting with, which is great for us interacting with us at booths too because they realise that's a big part of it. In the past, I might've walked past the booth and maybe picked up a T-shirt and be a little bit jaded and move on, but I find it's now actually easier to talk to people and to have in-depth discussions because that's a part they're excited about now too.

Carla: Thank you for sharing. Yeah, I think there is a trend of the content and that people now realise, and we've also mentioned earlier, there's people that used to go for the conversations and then later on consume the content. And I think that's becoming more noticeable.

Jonan: I think you're going to see a lot more events that almost don't have talks, and I know that that sounds like kind of a bonkers idea, but the point is to get the people together, just let the people get together and be together. What if you go and design your event such that you're enabling community and not engagement the entire time? I also wanted to mention that we are kind of skipping over some other massive spheres of developer relations work generally and the code and the content. I talk about the three Cs very often of code content and community is just general categories of defining these things. We're real heavy into the community sphere, but it's definitely changed the attendee experience or the participant experience for content and code as well. In online content, I'm seeing a lot more resources being developed but not a lot of sorting function where you have very clearly defined content journeys that follow along developer journeys.

We've got someone who started out as ANet person and then they ended up over here hacking on Jon and script and wasn't that great. Yay, Jon and script for the wind, right? We don't actually know how they came along that journey. We aren't measuring very effectively what brought them place to place. Like some of these journey tracking metrics platforms for developer relations are really useful in sewing those two things together. And I think in an effort to go wide, we kind of lost our focus a little bit in the content sphere and I think people are coming back around and becoming aware of that now and that's going to end up with a better experience for our communities. But in the meantime, I hear more people from the community being like, well, there is kind of a lot of stuff out there, but I just dunno what we're going to find thing I'm looking for.

The internet is really pretty polluted these days. Anyone who's gone to a search engine recently recognises first 15, sorry Google, but those first 15, 15 pages are like, oh, you've clearly hacked the algorithm to get your garbage to the top and I can't find the answers to my actual questions. When you end up kind of competing against all of the content resources in your community and the stuff that people are generating, and in some cases that's pretty low quality as compared to what you could offer. So organising things carefully and measuring it effectively and making sure that you're building up alongside those developer journeys to bring people along I think is even more important now. And I hope to be hearing better things from community members in the near future that it's easier to learn instead of harder. I would like that world better.

Carla: I think it's also a field part that we can continuously improve on and it's also in our interest to do that. That's a good point on content and learning and enablement. We will get to it soon. One question still before, just more on, we're talking about big events and more conferences. What about smaller community nurture events? How has it evolved? Are the same activities still working?

Luca: So for us, we definitely did more community engagement events I would say, or community nurturing events when the pandemic hit, of course first because it's easier to set up these kind of events online. But I think more importantly it's really about psychological safety when a crisis hits. And for us it was really important to nurture our community members to really listen to what they have to say, to be really transparent with them, to kind of over-communicate things that are happening because we knew there are so many things going on and so many people are really worried that we just offered more for our community members, especially with our highly engaged community members. So we met with them more often and communicated just more and I think this is definitely something that we started doing and that we will continue doing because it works well and people like it and of course maybe at some point that will change, but I think being really transparent about what is going on within the company is super important.

Carla: That's interesting. So something new that you started and that you will keep on doing. Any other experience on this?

Jonan: I got distracted by some really good points that were just made and I want to hear your original question again. I definitely had thoughts, but that was really well said. I agree with you a hundred percent.

Carla: So the original question was for community nurture events, what has changed? What did we do? Are we still doing the same activities?

Jonan: I think that I actually, I don't know that I have identified a trend here, but I'm certainly thinking about it a little bit differently, but I'm building these things out. But I guess there's a simple thing that I've had to explain to people less what a champions programme is or an ambassador's programme. I think people get that often. It's like this is the programme and they're like over here, but they're shooting for it and that's good. They understand that this is a thing that's important and finding your champions in your community and turning them into ambassadors for your work, that's an important thing. But then in how you build that out, I think I've been thinking a lot more about RO, I guess maybe, which is a gross way to think about community from my perspective. How do we squeeze the quarters out of these machines instead of genuinely adding value to the community in the first place, which is what we should be doing in DevRel, but I think more just bang for the buck, how do I get the most value for my community out of this budget and these type of events?

And I think that very often we are discovering that the people are clamouring at the gates to help you. They're waiting to run the meia, they're looking for the $300 for pizza and beer. It's just a complicated process to give them $300. It's far easier to go to a massive conference and spend a hundred thousand dollars sponsoring a booth than it is to send $300 to Argentina for someone to buy some beer and pizza for their meetup. Why is that? That should be a thing that we can just do. I've been thinking about how to smooth that process out because I think there's a lot of value being lost in that whole process.

Carla: That's true. Any thoughts to add to this one before we move Alessandro? Richard? Yeah,

Alessandro: Maybe just sharing our experience. So we go back to in person, we wanted to meet our community leads on the ground. So we are hosting a few summits all around Europe, the region that I am managing to meet our community organisers. And before we were hosting these summits with a lot of talks, a lot of content and learning opportunity let's say to share best practises across organisers, but they were most of the time before we were a one way direction like talks with some question and answer at the end. Now we are focusing 90% of our content on discussion and engagement. So when our community organisers come together, we want them just to talk and to connect and to share their best practises but not in a one way direction, but they can cross pollinate, contaminate with their best practises. So this is what we change a lot. So no more one-way content, but let's just have a discussion.

Let's meet, let's make people meet and connect.

Carla: That's a fair point. Let's then move on to content that we've started to go for it.

Jonan: We had a question I think from the Discord. That is a really good question and I really want to answer and if you're not trying to pause right now then I'm just going to ignore it, but I'm excited to talk about it.

Richard: Maybe we can do questions at the end.

Jonan: Oh, we're waiting for the end. I'm sorry, I forgot

Richard: That

Carla: Was the plan.

Jonan: I'm a little bit flighty. Alright, keep going.

Carla: Okay though, if you already have the answer for it and you want to go for it.

Jonan: Well no because it relates to content. Exactly this thing, let me get away with just one quick one. So someone from the chat asks, how do I choose between making individual contributions and how do I choose between levelling myself up and focusing on helping the community? Those are the same thing. Those are the same thing. Do it at the same time. Learn in public, this is the really hard part of starting out in developer relations, but you got to let go of the idea that you should have already known the answers to everything. I work really hard with my children who come to be sobbing when they're three years old and can draw a perfect 3D model of a horse and I'm like, look, nobody was born with the ability to do that.

What is wrong with you? You have very high expectations for yourself and I appreciate that, but let it go.

Get out there in public and be wrong a lot. Start a twitch stream, turn it on and then go and study Go link and be like, wow, this is really interesting. This part is hard. This part is easy. And you're not only generating content that is informing the people who create those tools, they get a live AB test, just hours and hours of it and that's awesome. But you are also helping other people feel that welcome of knowing that they're not alone in their struggle, that this is hard. Software is hard and there are some people who pretend that it's easy and those are not people I tend to trust very much. So get out there and fail publicly and learn publicly and you could build the content as you're learning your whole journey and otherwise you trap yourself in this place where you're like, well, I got to make sure that this resource is perfect before I put it out there for the community to add value.

My favourite blogs ever, if you read back, they're terrible In the beginning I'm like, wow, that was a really bad idea. But I remember when software collectively had that really bad idea all at the same time and now we move progress forward. I think creating content as you learn is the best way to get started in developer relations. Be really loud a lot.

Carla: Think that's really good advice and I think one thing within the DevRel industry is that we're all not afraid to fail and just happy to try and support each other through it and very aware that we're all humans. Probably the reason why we like to interact with fellow humans, but I think that's really good advice gentlemen. So with that Bridges, what about content and more on the topic of developer enablement and learning so we have more time also to focus on the online journeys. Do you changed your approach to developer enablement strategies?

Richard: I mean one of the

Carla: Go for it.

Richard: Thank you. I think one of the important lessons from the pandemic too was that foundational work often matters more than some of the glitzier parts of our job. I went from doing a hundred thousand airline miles a year and being in Mumbai one week and in Seattle the next in SA next two, not doing that anymore and kind of having to look at, okay, how do I invest my time now? And building a great developer experience, focusing on your developer experience as a product and spending your time there and then putting really good content on top that is really helpful to people is ultimately something you need to do. Even if you have the glitzy event strategy, the events are very valuable. I love doing events, I'm super happy we get back to it again, they're an important part of our strategy, but ultimately the purpose of those is to drive people towards your developer experience, towards the foundational things that you are offering.

And if they're not good, you're almost, why are you doing the other stuff? And so I think that kind of at the time helped me refocus a little bit on fundamentals and say, okay, what are the maybe less glamorous things but that are really, really helpful to anyone who comes to us now and tries to use us and tries to build with us. How do I enable them to succeed by themselves even if maybe I can't go out to them anymore and talk to them directly and help them directly, how do I build the tools? How do I give them the ability to help themselves succeed with the technology that I'm representing?

Carla: I think an interesting question on that is how do you decide how to build that journey or how that journey should look like?

Richard: I mean that's now a really deep question about developer experience. Maybe that's a whole nother round table discussion. But I think the core thing is to look at it always through the eyes of your developer with that developer empathy. There's always that inertia that drive to start shipping your org chart. There's one team and another team and that team builds that website and that team builds that website and they don't work together. And then you have two websites and a developer comes in and is like, which one do I use? Where do I start? And I think that is a constant struggle.

It's very easy to say, oh, we have empathy for developers. We love that word and developer relations, but is a constant struggle to take that step back and ask yourself, okay, why are we doing this? Are we doing this for us?

Is our goal in building this thing because we are looking for an outcome for us or are we building it for an outcome for our developers, which then generates the outcome for us? And I think it can sometimes be easy for us in DevRel with some of the glitzier parts of our job to kind of forget about that and we need to constantly remind ourselves that that is something we need to do and focus on. And I think to some degree the pandemic had been certainly for me has been helpful in that because it kind of forced me to do that, which was I think good and healthy.

Jonan: I think you've made some excellent points. This is actually before we go, I have some thoughts about the developer experience piece, but I'm looking for a glitzy DevRel job. If anyone has a DevRel job where the travel is actually glamorous and fun instead of just soul sucking and gruelling and horrible, I would like to sign up for that. But the part about developer experience that you just shifted thinking for me is I use this boat metaphor a lot boats that you're trying to build the boat and you want to make sure that the boat is nice when people get on there, you build the boat first, you got to get together your content channels and your stage and then you start putting people from your community on that stage. But if you're getting all these community members onto the stage and it's a terrible boat to be on and it's leaky and filled with rats, then no one's going to want to hang out on the boat.

You've kind of shifted my thinking in what you was just saying there and that if you focus first on making a really solid developer experience with the resources that you have available, then you set your future programmes that you build on top of that up for success. So maybe it is worth front loading some of the investment and redesigning that docs page that is really confusing or getting rid of the five or 10 different entry points. I always tell people to find someone who really doesn't know your product at all and make them try and figure out how to do a thing with your website. Like old school AB testing where we used to watch the videos of people trying to use our stuff and be like, just click the button. It's right there. It's the only button. It's the only button on the page, just click it. Doing that with yourselves and your community can be really valuable in understanding how rough those edges are because we all come to know our products and our spheres really well.

We know our ecosystem really well, and so you just become blind to that automatically. And it's really unfortunate how quickly we move past that and come up with all these intricate strategies.

Richard: There is sort of a pandemic downside to this too, which is that I used to do a lot of hackathons in the before times, which by the way is one of those things that doesn't seem to have come back quite as much as it existed before. I mean you can kind of see maybe why it's almost the ideal pandemic breeding ground situation. So I'm maybe not all that unhappy that there's been some hesitancy around it. But it used to be, of course part of the reason we're doing it is to get the brand out there and to get people signed up and to get people use the APIs and meet people. But it was also for me, always super interesting to be kind of sneak up on developers and look over their shoulders as they went through that first journey. And it was that, right, aren't you clicking the button, click the button and you realise, okay, I better get out the notebook and make some notes here.

I'm going to go back and improve that. And when people come to you at two o'clock in the night bleary eye and slightly mad that it doesn't work, you'll get very direct feedback that you can work back into your developer experience. And that was something that during the pandemic was cut off a little bit and that was something I definitely noticed is that I wanted to invest time in those other things, but it's hard for yourself when you're so familiar with your own technology and your own portal and your own documentations to see where those rough edges are.

Jonan: The hackathons are interesting. They're still super popular in our space. I operate in a Web3 world where that is the thing that people do is hackathons. And I saw a lot of pushback in developer communicate before against hackathons as kind of exploitative like, oh cool, Salesforce is going to trade me some pizza for several hundred thousand dollars worth of free engineering work over the weekend. And then we came to a place where companies, it sounds like the people you were working with had the right idea, understood that this was a give a take, that we're adding value to their lives first and then the value will come back around. The give a penny take of any jar doesn't work if you're just always eating the pennies. You got to share the pennies with everybody. It's very interesting to watch over here there's this explosion of activity around hackathons, but in the end they tend to be kind of freeform and I feel like there's a lot of waste not in the sense of we're wasting the money, but a lot of wasted value.

There's all of these artefacts like these live ab tests and these notes in the notebook that are just being tossed away to the side. It's kind a messy process of building these programmes out.

Carla: And I think hackathons is an interesting example, but a little bit more on the developer enablement and if something has changed, just wanted to know if Alessandro or Luca have something to add to it.

Alessandro: So in terms of developer enablement strategies, I would say so we work on a one to few too many models. So we work with community leads or ambassadors and what we are trying to provide them with at the moment is type of content. We changed our approach and we don't give them anymore content that they can just use in person, but we are also providing them with content that can be used both in person and online. So if they want to host an event, an event like a normal meetup with bits and beer, they can do it. If they want to do it hybrid, they can also do it and if they want to do it also online it wouldn't be out of the world. So in our case, that's what we change and we also switch a bit to content that is a bit more hands-on so that you go from zero to one, let's say at least, or any way that can make progress. People I think coming back to just quickly to hackathons probably with mature technologies, hackathons are not working anymore. That's why maybe we Web3 where maybe we don't have content online that people can use to learn.

Hackathons are probably a thing, but in other sectors where there are already repositories on GitHub, there is lots of videos online, people don't see the value to go to a hackathon is better if I read online rather than using a couple of days to go to an hackathon. So that's a bit my experience in this.

Luca: Yeah, I can only agree with a lot of things that have been said. I thought it's really interesting what Richard said that we don't really get the instant feedback from people. So I think it's even more important that we make community members independent of us and really as Richard said, doing this foundational work. Yeah, so I think developer enablement is more important than ever. Yeah,

Carla: Thank you. I think on this topic we've managed to go through a bit of different spaces and those are some really cool insights. So to wrap up, let's look a little bit at the go back to looking at the dev role teams and how pandemic affected and I mean there were, like we've been saying people used to fly all the time, be on one plate, go to one place to an event, and then all of a sudden that's gone. My question is how did this impact the teams and how is the getting back to normal now looking?

Luca: I think it's actually really closely related to what we just talked about at the beginning, especially our developer advocacy team. They were already sad that they weren't able to travel anymore because obviously these are the kind of things they enjoy most. But then also we realised, okay, how much time there is for doing this foundational work, what we just talked about. So I think that was actually a real advantage of not being able to travel anymore. And now it's nice to see that we are going back to in-person events and to travelling, but we are way more intentional about it and I think this back to normal. I think we will never really get back to the normal renew prior to pandemic, but I think that's actually a really good thing because I think a lot of things have changed in a really good way. So I wouldn't like us to get back to this normal prior to the pandemic, but that we really take the learnings and continue with what works well.

Richard: I think to some degree maybe we even had an advantage in DevRel going into the pandemic because most of our teams were already remote or remote ish and very well distributed. My old team went from Bangalore to Seattle and then I joined a company with a team from Singapore to Seattle and ultimately a lot of the things that many people struggled with and had to learn and working from home and working with other people, not being able to just go into an in-person meeting immediately and all those things we were already used to a little bit. And so I think some of the changes we had to go through like, oh, we can no longer travel. And those things were probably actually smaller changes for us then for other people that we used to going into the office, sitting across from their colleagues and now had to adapt to this world where they were working from home, working remotely. And so I think it can be easy to forget that we to some degree actually might've had it easier than many other people, at least in terms of the way we worked with our teams and interacted with our teams.

Jonan: You stole my point a little bit. I was going to talk about that. The number of arguments I've had with people at conferences about how remote would never work. There's just no way you can build an in office culture or a culture for a company without in-office maybe 15%. And if I'm optimistic of the companies in the valley were willing to be fully remote or majority remote I think maybe back in the day and now it's just kind of silly to suggest we make fun of those people on Twitter who are like, well, you got to come to the office. Well you got to come to the office and then we go off and join other software companies because I think you're right. Absolutely right. We had a huge advantage.

I was actually beginning to talk about the metrics part. I think what I've seen most come out of the pandemic is a focus on measurement and that was the thing that was really hard for people for a really long time.

There were a couple of DevRel cons in a row that were just all metrics presentations and rightly so for a long time we got away with demonstrating the value because when companies dropped their DevRel team, you watch their product growth flat line and then they would rehire those same six people and then it would spike back up again. You'd be like, okay, we finally have the evidence. Can you shush already and let us go do our stuff? And now we had to focus on those developer journeys, the content tracking platforms that I was talking to shout out to Crunch, I have shout out crunch for building this thing that is exactly what I wanted. Which was like they went from this blog post and then they went to this GitHub repo and then they went to this thing and then they were at this conference and you were able to map the whole thing.

And talking a little bit about the Web3 world when people interacting with public blockchains and the kind of community data you can get from people in what they're interested in from that sort of information and a very healthy and anonymous way, it's really refreshing to work in that space. But being able to see the measurement and the content strategy really level up. I think we had to shift our game up a little bit. We did have some advantages, but I'm pleased to be having fewer conversations about what even is developer relations and why do you need to talk about developer journeys? They'll figure it out. Why do we need a champions programme or an ambassador programme now? I think people suddenly realise that this is an important thing for their company and it is a unique sphere of expertise. It's not like engineers who like blogging engineers with communication skills anymore.

We're not having that conversation as much. And I'm really happy to be moving past that as an industry and kind of pushing ourselves to the next level.

Alessandro: Maybe just to close. I think the normal is not there anymore. Normal is not going to come back. So definitely what we need to do is just getting all the learning that we had in the past couple of years, emerging them with our previous knowledge. And I think as everyone said in this group, there's a lot of improvements compared to pre pandemic. If you see the acceleration of this improvement. Some of these changes will have taken probably decades to go in action from attendees being more, or community members being more keen to get to online events or online, online content to remote teams. I think the acceleration that we had in this couple of years in our sector is incredible and we should just get the most out of it. Bit less travel maybe it's also good for our mental health,

Jonan: You'all are real smart. Thanks for coming along. I like hanging out with you. We should do this in person someday.

Carla: That sounds good. And that's pretty much the questions we had. I guess my last question is, is there anything else you'd like to add to the audience? What to do? What some words of encouragement for everyone that's trying to figure out how to reach all the developers?

Luca: I think that something that is most important to me, I think always when it comes to community building to develop our relations is really listening to your community because they know best what they need. And I think every community is so different. So really reaching out to your community members, connecting to them one-on-one and really finding out what their needs are and then adjusting to them I think is super important.

Alessandro: Maybe to add on that, focus on giving value to your community community members. So if you provide values, people will come, people will use your technology.

Richard: I think a super interesting thing that came out of this whole discussion for me is that sense of the pandemic accelerating the maturation of DevRel as a practise. We've talked about things like focusing on foundations and measuring the return on investment that you do and refocusing on. Like you two just said, how do I add value versus me going on stage and talking at people? And I think I'm really excited to see that across our whole industry and I think that's a really good attitude to have if you want to succeed in DevRel now, is to not look at the glamorous picture of what a developer advocate was pre pandemic, but take a broader approach to how can we help our developers succeed with what we're offering.

Jonan: Again, with the glamour, I've never felt so like I was missing out. I need more glamour in my life. I think the point that you all are making about pushing ourselves forward is really important, I think to encourage people who are coming after us. If I had advice starting out would be to just kind of be fearless in the things that you try. Developer relations as a practise got to the place it is with experimentation, with people, sharing their learnings as they came along. Listen very closely to your community. Experiment with your implementation of your potential programmes. Be fearless with those experiments and ideally build them in ways that they can be conducted inexpensively.

Conduct a finite number of discrete experiments and iterate quickly and you'll find your way to your community. A lot of people ask me, what should I talk about when they're getting started?

And I'm like, you've talk about the stuff that you're into because you're naturally going to draw the audience towards you that is interested in the things that you are interested in. If you're just starting out in developer relations, you're trying to become a content creator online, get out there and just talk about the things that you personally find interesting. Odds are very, very good. They're a huge number of developers in the world who also find those things interesting and you're going to find your people, you're going to make it here and it's a very daunting task to take on early on in your career, but experiment often and make it easy on yourself. Don't overthink it. Just get started and do a thing and make sure that you're measuring that thing carefully so that whether or not it's being successful and you can optimise, get out there and make some content, go to a couple of events, try and hold a meetup of your own. I think you will find that it is much less scary once you've done it a couple of times.

Carla: I like that though. Be fearless. Just go for it.

Jonan: Yeah,

Carla: And on that note, thank you to the four of you. I think this has been a very interesting session. Thank you for sharing your insights and your openness to contribute. Thank you

Jonan: You for having us. Thank you. It was a great time. Thank great to meet you everyone.

Carla: It was nice to meet you all. And so this is again sometime soon. Maybe

Jonan: We have a perfect sunset in the background over there. I guess we finished the sun down time for

Carla: Us. I planned it. I planned it on purpose. Yeah. Alright. Thank you. Thank you again, and bye everyone that's been watching. Thank you for staying with us.

Alessandro: Bye-Bye.