Draw an audience with your non-IT skills

Marc: So my first time here in person at DevRelCon. So it's really great to attend here but also be able to speak here. So thank you very much for inviting me and thank you Floor, for convincing me that I submit this session. So let's see if this clicker works. Yeah, it does. So maybe this phase is completely new to you because I'm mostly known as this pixel art avatar, not related to any NFT stuff. Please. So I'm a senior friendgineer, so thanks to Ben for inspiring me for that title. I really like it as Azure MVP, co organiser of Server Days, Amsterdam, and I really like to draw pixel art, so that's definitely my creative skill. Before I start actual talk though, I want to quickly pitch speaker buddy. Some people already have heard about it, I'm not going to tell a lot about it, there's no time for it.

But if you are organising or co-organizing a conference, definitely have a look at this link because I think we can make the world a bit easier and better for speakers by having it more welcoming for them to submit their session and have them more inclusivity when they speak at a conference. Alright, so I'm going to talk about my own personal experience, how I applied my creative skill in my developer community, which is more like dotnet, Azure Serverless. So it's going to be mostly about me. I'm sorry. I will try to give you some tips on how you can apply maybe your creative skills. I'll conclude with some people I really admire and are really inspiring in their creative outlets.

So yeah, what is your creative skill? For some people it might be super obvious, maybe you're good in painting or maybe you're a great dancer or maybe you're a great singer or maybe you think you are a great singer, but sometimes it's not really so obvious and maybe you're good at gardening, you like gardening, maybe you bake cookies, maybe you like knitting. It can be anything. A lot of different things can resonate with your audience and we'll see it at the end of this session. So for me, it started when I created this retro game and it's about Azure functions, and I created this really specifically for that audience. It was super fun to create this. This was actually the first time that I created a game in general, and you can still play it if it's this link. It was really well received in Handy in the Azure and serverless community, and even some Microsoft folks were playing it.

So Jeff Holland was the Azure functions programme manager at that time. He really enjoyed it. And E, the Azure CTO, Marco Sinnovi was playing it, although he got stuck on level three and there were like seven levels. So I mean that the Azure CTO, but okay, but creating the game was really nice, but it's also a lot of work and there's still coding involved, I think creating a game. So I really like it if I can get a good result in hours instead of weeks. So I changed focus a bit and just started drawing and initially I started drawing in this editor. So this is part of the PICO eight virtual console thing. It's really lovely, but it's also very limiting and you only have eight by eight grids and just a very limited number of colours. But yeah, you get a bit more creative when you have these limitations. So I focused on just the drawing parts and just made some very low resolution things, which I shared online. And this really got me hooks on pixel art.

So well, we are all in developer relations, so I hope you know who your audience is, where they hang out, how you can talk with them, and so on. So I'm not going to give you more a lot of advice on that. My audience, I already told you what my audience is, they're mostly active on Twitter or we're mostly active on Twitter now, mostly also on methadone. And combining picture short in that audience started when I was attending a Microsoft Build 2020. So that was the first virtual event from Microsoft and well, these are images of the hosts. So I drew avatars from all of the hosts and I shared that during the conference and the hosts were picking it up, they really liked it. They even changed their Twitter profiles with these drawings except for the Coca and Scott gu. Scott Gu didn't really play along, I dunno, but they're really liking it. And also the community responded really positively about this. So yeah, this was very nice. First introduction of pixel art in the developer community.

Another thing which followed some weeks later was this vs code extension. So who heard of vs. Code pets? Some hands, some hazard. That's pretty good. So this is really a must have if you use VS code, it's the best extension out there. I mean there are over 200,000 instals of this extension. It's amazing. So when I first saw this, it was only a virtual cat and a doc and I really had to contribute to this open source project. So it's on GitHub and this was a perfect creative outlet for me to provide some more pixel art. So that's what I did over the last two years. So some of them were my ideas like Clippy and another Python snake, Duckie Forge, Ferris is there that was requested and even someone requested a pet rock. So why is there a rock? I dunno. But they had the DO net team requested multiple do net bots recently. So that's why that's there. So yeah, I hope to contribute more of this in the future.

Well, staying authentic is I think really one of the biggest parts in Dev. I think we have to be believable and trustworthy and that can only work if you are authentic. It's also a very personal thing. I mean, my authenticity is different than your authenticity, so I can't really give tips on how you do that. The way I do it is I try to stay modest and humble and I'm not oversharing. I'm not always including pixel art. When I want to share something and when I share some bless you, I think go confess. But when I share something, it's usually with pixel art, but it's not about technology or something related to work. So for instance, I like 80 series a lot or eighties toys. So I really get a lot of inspiration from that. And yeah, these days I really find it more interesting to also share big personal events in the form of pixel art animation. So winning in Microsoft MVP awards, but also responding to events in the community. I have a preference now of sharing this in this way, which feels more genuine and personal to me in instead of just responding with a text message.

So finding balance is really tricky because when you are, let's say more well-known that you have a certain creative skill, people would like to jump on the train and they ask a lot of things from you, which of course is nice. It's nice to be wanted, but it can also be quite overwhelming. So you have to be really careful that you don't take on too much work. You have to learn to say no as well, and you have to be careful for creative burnout. So for me, right after that MS Build 2020 conference, a lot of people approached me for pixel art avatars. So I created literally hundreds of them in the course of several weeks. And first I thought, oh wow, this is amazing. This is so cool. But quickly I realised, oh my god, now I have a second job next to my already regular job. So I was really quite overwhelmed and I actually stopped drawing for a couple of weeks afterwards. It was really too much. And these aren't even all of them.

So these days I have a number of open commission slots. So if people really want something for themselves, so not really for the community, I just ask money for it, right? Because yeah, why not? I give them some of my time and expertise. So I really like to help people out with drawing logos for their open source projects or for their user groups, for instance. And I also help other people with their personal branding as well, but also a nice bonuses I can get use pixart in my own work and my own demos I created. So I created this demo for LY a couple of months ago with some really basic low resolution pixel arts. But yeah, I think it really adds some nice engagement for it.

So we conclude with some people I really admire for their creativity. So I'll go a bit fast, but you probably recognise most of them. Let's start with forest. I mean, he's a great guy, very funny. He's amazing in creating these really silly songs about the cloud and about it in general. He's also a great sketch, by the way. So there's Chloe. So she has a professional background in theatre and she's using that background in a lot of her social messaging, but she's also advocating for a more diverse IT community, which I think is really great. Then there's David. Well, he has an awesome beard, but that's not a skill, but he can draw really well. And I also like his dad jokes. I'm also a big dad joke fan, and he's also monetizing his creative skill because you can now buy his book, which I think is a great idea. There's Leon, so I think she's the queen of karaoke. I mean, so I mean you're also good, but I think Leon is the queen of karaoke refer. Leon goes, there's karaoke around her, but she makes her own clothes. And this is a coat dress that she made and she makes her own skirts with pockets. So I really love to see whatever she creates.

Now it's your turn floor because you really like knitting and cross stitching, and you often incorporate some IT related designs in there. And you use Excel for all these designs, which I find hilarious. This is Jo, she used to be my manager at a e's, also incredibly creative and she has really a skill for combining textiles with ILT. So what you see in the background is a life captioning face mask that she used to communicate with her mother during the pandemic to keep her safe. This's really super cool. Last but not least, Cassidy, I love her humour. She creates all of these videos about CSS, frontend development IT in general, and she's also like a mechanical keyboard designer these days. So yeah, a lot of creative inspiring folks. I hope I've given you some tips and inspiration and I'd love to see your creative expressions in the community soon. Thank you.