A DevRel team that doesn’t sell anything

Alex Scammon: We are going to talk about a DevRel team that doesn't sell anything. We're kind of weird and we'll explain who we are and what we're doing here and our journey, essentially learning what DevRel is all about and what it means to us. As I mentioned, we are G Research and we're kind of weird. We are what's called a quantitative research firm, which means that we use machine learning and data science tools to essentially trade on markets and we take our money and we make more money out of it. The weird thing about this is that we don't actually sell anything to any person. There's no product, there's no customers, there are no clients for the context of developer relations as we'll talk about. It's a strange thing.

Caterina Rindi: And our role also is part of the open source programme office, which is slightly separate from G Research and drives our mandate being slightly separate from G Research. So do you want to introduce

Alex Scammon: Yourself? Totally. Alex Gamon. I am the head of the open source programme office here, and we've got a team of intrepid, open source adventurers, about 20 of us who contribute upstream to all sorts of open source software. Everything in data science, machine learning stuff around 10 flow and spark and hova and pandas and all sorts of things there to lots of things in the Kubernetes and OpenStack and infrastructure spaces, and then a whole bunch of other things around security. And so a smattering of all sorts of pieces of open source software. So that's what the team does as a whole.

Caterina Rindi: And my title is Director of Community and Developer Relations, director of Open Source Community and Developer Relations.

Alex Scammon: There's a lot there.

Caterina Rindi: And the developer relations portion is quite recent. It's a nascent team, newish a few months now. And even the open source programme office itself is about three years old. So all of what we're doing is new and we're learning along the way, but we've come to learn more about developer relations and are thinking about what does DevRel mean to us,

Alex Scammon: Which is essentially exactly what we're going to talk about here. At some point, maybe earlier this year, somebody said we should do dre. And to be honest, we didn't know what it was. And so

Caterina Rindi: We did some reading.

Alex Scammon: Yeah, started talking to people. Tamma was somebody that we reached out to tell us, help us explain to us what this is and this journey as it unfolded. The first step of it was trying to figure out what this whole thing was,

Caterina Rindi: What the L is DevRel.

Alex Scammon: Yeah.

Caterina Rindi: So based on the reading and the research that we did, some sources told us it was marketing. It was a part of marketing. Some said it was a part of sales, it was selling a product, trying to draw in more customers. Some said it's support, we're offering support for these projects. Others said, no, no, it's recruiting. We're using this for recruiting. We are working with a high level strategy consultant who's talking a lot about developer programme developer experience, and my background being community and education. I'm thinking it's community.

We're growing community, especially as an open source programme office. So it sounds like developer relations can be a little bit of all of those things. And so again, we come back to what is it for us? What is it for the G Research open source office?

Alex Scammon: And so for us, we to

Caterina Rindi: Answer that,

Alex Scammon: To answer that, we had to figure out why we should do DRE at all and what it comes down to for us, two things really. We're doing this open source initiative and we were doing all sorts of products, all sorts of projects that were really great, but the word about them wasn't getting out, and the communities around them were floundering. In some cases, people were feeling martyred by the amount of work that they were having to do and only receiving inbound issues and never building anything. Yeah, it's terrible, terrible. And we realised that although the team itself was really good at doing the engineering, we weren't actually good at reaching out to the community and creating community building on that. So very largely the first and foremost piece for us was to take these projects and really help build the communities around them. And sometimes those are our projects that we have opened sourced from within, but for the most part, we join other open source projects. We actually just want to help build those communities because we believe in those projects

Caterina Rindi: And they're tools that J Research uses as well. But supporting the larger open source ecosystem has been our mandate in a lot of ways.

Alex Scammon: The other piece of it for us is we hope that by doing this work, one aspect of our business will become easier, the ability to recruit people. One thing about G Research is that the history of G Research has been to be very secretive. We didn't want anybody to know who we were or where we were or what we were doing.

Caterina Rindi: Very security focused.

Alex Scammon: That was just a choice that we made for the first 10, 15 years of G research's. And that's changing. And as part of that, the open source team is out there on the front lines actually doing things in the public and trying to build a positive reputation for the kind of work that we do in open source land that in turn, we hope will impact our ability to recruit. When we speak to people, they might actually know who we are and that we're a London-based quantitative research firm and that

Caterina Rindi: We're hiring, by the way.

Alex Scammon: Oh yeah. And we do cool things in machine learning and data science stuff. So these two aspects are what we

Caterina Rindi: Aim to do. That's why we do DevRel. And then coming back around to what does DevRel then look like for

Alex Scammon: Us? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of pieces to this. Wish we had our notes for this.

Caterina Rindi: I can pull up some of the nitty gritty

Alex Scammon: Stuff.

Caterina Rindi: So as Alex mentioned, we have multiple projects somewhere between 25 and 30, maybe probably more open source projects that we support in some capacity. Several of those have come out of G Research. They were built inside, and then we've opened source them. And so our goals with those are to draw in more users, to get other people contributing, to make this tool be useful to other enterprises, other individuals, whomever. Then some of our other tools, we've taken over maintenance of them because they lost some of their maintainers. And so again, we want the tools to become robust and useful and healthy. There's a few smaller ones that we just want to have a few more contributors to. And thank you. We were a little ahead of our slides

Alex Scammon: There. Yeah, just ahead contributors to, I'll take over and talk about the other things that we've started doing that at the beginning of this whole journey. After talking with all the people that we spoke to in the beginning, actually through Hoopy and De Khan connections, I've been working with a person help set a high level strategy of this vision of ours, what we are doing to build community and to improve outreach of G researcher's, name setting a high level strategy and actually building a plan for what we want to do and the actual strategy

Caterina Rindi: And how it looks a little different for all of these different projects.

Alex Scammon: Second, we actually, we have hired and are hiring other DevRel engineers to actually go out and talk about our projects and do work improving all of what we do. Third, we have had to spend a bunch of time explaining what we have learned about DevRel to all of our upper management. If we didn't know what any of this was, we were very, very certain that nobody else at our company knew anything about this. So a whole bunch of this has been internal education, training people to understand that this is actually a really good thing, that we really need this. And lastly, we've been talking with as many people as we can. Continuing that part of our journey, trying to continue to educate ourselves and to invite feedback and get better at what we're doing at every step of the way.

Caterina Rindi: And some of the nitty gritty of what each of the DevRel people on our team is doing or is going to be doing involves speaking at conferences, writing blog posts about our projects, improving the documentation, quick start guides, making little demos of the projects, just a lot of outreach and improvement of them so far. Communicating more with the developers, contributing code where possible. That's sort of the smaller picture, but it really varies based on the needs of each of the different software projects.

Alex Scammon: And with that, the end of our little journey of our road through Dev Re so far is an invitation to reach out and give us feedback on what we're thinking about, whether we're missing anything. We would love to talk about your journeys.

Caterina Rindi: Who else is doing open source out there and using developer relations.

Alex Scammon: Yeah, our emails are here, Alex, at gr oss.io. Katerina the same domain,

Caterina Rindi: And we're hiring both for DevRel and GE research, so we'd love to have more people contribute and join

Alex Scammon: Us with that. That is our very brief blast through our world. Thank you very much. Thank you.