Engaging India's developer ecosystem

Siddhant: Thank you so much. Great. My name is Siddhant Agarwal. I lead developer relations for Asia Pacific at Neo4j. That's what I do for my bread and butter to feed myself and my family as well. That's my passion. That's what I've been doing for over a decade now. DevRel and Communities.

I spent almost the entire of my career working specifically with the Indian developer ecosystem. So today I'm going to talk about what are some of the best strategies for the global DevRel team to take from this Indian developer ecosystem. What are things that worked well? There are some assumptions, some misconceptions and some challenges that they foresee, and then how can mitigate those challenges? And moreover, I see them as an opportunity to do more things in India. So that's what going to be this entire talk about. Before I move on, a quick show of hand. How many of you are dev professionals here?

Awesome. Great. How many of you want to be a dev professional or aspiring to be a dev professional? Anyone? Okay. Couple of you. What are the other categories? Software engineers.

Okay. Awesome. Great. You're a good crowd. That's awesome. It's good to know that software engineers are also taking interest in DevRel as a domain. I was checking out one of the videos for the past videos from another DevRelCon. Interestingly, and from my career as well, DevRel as an industry as a domain, it's not that newest compared to software engineering world, probably 15, 16 years old, or roughly 20 years, not more than 20 years is what I can definitely say.

But this craft is, this particular domain is definitely emerging out to be one of the most exciting and most interesting domain for either the software engineers, aspiring entrepreneurs, even graduates as well. Everyone. Everyone wants to get into the shoes of a dev person, of a community person and then take a leap of faith, be passionate about community, put on that community mindset, community hat, and then work with the growth of the developer ecosystem. Okay. With this, I want to congratulate and give applause to the organisers of DevRelCon, Bangalore, for bringing this DevRelCon to India. Trust me, it takes tremendous amount of efforts and energy to bring a conference like this to India, to you, to everyone.

Shubham, Haimantika, please take a huge round of applause from everyone, from myself as well for bringing DevRelCon to India. It's the first decon happening in India. I'm sure it's definitely not the last one. We want to see more editions coming in Bangalore and across India as well. Kudos. Moving on. What do you think is the India's biggest strength in tech? Any guesses?

Developers? Yes. How many developers? Yes, developers. But how many developers? A hundred million is still an overwhelming number, but no, a hundred million is not the right number. Somewhere around, I mean, it's way too higher. Again, 17 million is way too higher.

We're talking about roughly around 10 million, roughly around 10 million with a 1. 4 billion population. We are the data developer capital of the world. We are talking about the fifth largest economy of the world, and soon going to be the third largest economy. In 2030, we're talking about 6 million plus developers, and I said it's roughly 10 million. This is a little older start. So 6 million plus software developers being an average out from everyone, and it's a home to 1 million plus startups and 2 million engineering graduates graduate out annually. But foremost important thing is it's the largest open source contributor to a global roadmap.

We Indians contribute.

We make huge amount of contributions to the open source world. The numbers are testament to itself to the entire messaging. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you through my journey of what I did and then take you through my challenges, my learnings, and then move on to the actual part where I want to talk about the strategies for the global DE team. So Bornan brought up in Delhi, the capital city of India. Studied there in my school days, then went on to study my bachelor's in computer science engineering from University of Petroleum and Energy Studies. For the references. I've taken the older logos just to relate back to the past when this was the logo of my university. And then the bunch of logos that you see coming forward is also the older ones as well.

So I went on to study at UPS, computer Science Engineering in radon.

Now, the interesting part was in radon, there were no opportunities. There were no communities out there. I went there as a computer science enthusiast, but then how do I upscale myself? How do I grow further? And there was nothing out there. I mean, today there are communities, but back then I'm talking about 2011, nothing was there. So what I used to do is I used to come back almost every quarter to Delhi just to attend meets by GDG New Delhi. So thanks to GDG New Delhi back then, I was able to learn more about Android.

I was able to learn more about Google ads back then, how these things work. And GDG newly gave me a good learning opportunity learning platform. But the journey didn't stop over there. I wanted to get the experience to be on the other side of the table as well.

I wanted to organise these events, these workshops. So I tried bringing GDG to their other, but failed. I mean, back then they were not focusing on their other as a city. They didn't want to bring it to their room. So the application got rejected multiple times, and then eventually I got to know about this amazing programme called Google Phone Ambassador. Had you even heard of this programme? I'm guessing one person has gone out. Now.

Are you A GSA as well? Okay, sorry, my bad. I don't remember too many people from my batch as well. A couple of you. I remember which batch? 20 21, 20 17. Okay. I think that was the last batch of GSA, if I'm not wrong.

So this programme came into my attention student ambassador programme, and I thought, let's apply. Let's see what happens. I was not afraid of the results. I applied eventually became a Google student ambassador back in 2014, and then started acting as a liaison between my university and Google, educating developers.

I used to learn myself about Android, Google ads, Google Cloud, and then want to give back to the community as well. So that's where the journey actually started off giving back to the ecosystem, giving back to the developer community, moving things forward. A year later, I went on to work with IBM as a Java technology engineer. I was developing IBM's own Java back then, taking care of the GPU multi-head programming environment of IBM's Java. Things were going fine. Almost a year later, I realised that this is not what I was meant for this. This is not my calling. I want to do something which I am really meant to do.

I mean, I was not born to programme. I mean, no hard feelings for software engineer just saying this as a message out here. So yes, definitely you do an awesome job, but I don't want to code and said in front of a laptop the entire day.

So I went on to work with IBM. A year later, I realised I want to find an alternate career shift. The paths shift cares and take control of my life. So that's when I moved out of IBM. It was an instant decision. I moved out of IBM. So what to do next? That's when I was contemplating on multiple opportunities.

I had thought of even giving UX design as a thought UX researcher, UX design, or to go back to my software engineering world or to maybe diverse into marketing or maybe something which always I wanted to do is community DevRel. Luckily, at that same point of time, I got to know about this company called Be Ahead. It's a small startup, a very small startup. They're based out of Bangalore, but they work with various clients like Intel, Google, Microsoft, and I got the luxury to work with these companies, help them with their consultancy project.

So this was a company which gave me my first stepping stone into the professional world of DevRel, professional world of programme management, community management. Now moving forward, fast forward to two years later, two and a half, three years later, I got the opportunity to work with Google. Now the interesting story about Google is when I applied, I was not being hired for the role, which I applied for six months. It took me for the entire interview process to get over. And six months later I was told that you're not being hired for the same role. You're being hired for a different role. I was applying for a role and then they hired me for the dev role, the dev team in India, where I manage multiple programmes, which I'm going to cover in a while. Google has been the highlight of my career so far where I spent the most amount of time.

And then I thought, okay, now I want to again switch gears. I want to further do something better, take a leap of faith, and I went out to work with a FinTech startup. Money is always exciting to everyone. Yes, I want to understand how the money moves, the entire money movement, where the money is coming from, where the money is going, how these companies are making money out of credit cards, how the banks are making money, how the FinTech companies are making money. Back in those days, FinTech was a boom. So I thought, I'll take a leap of faith again and try to come up with something in the FinTech plus developer community domain launch, India's first FinTech slash embedded finance developer community called Switch didn't fly out well, to be honest, a year later I realised that FinTech is not meant for open source world.

It is super close, it's very restrictive. And then I eventually thought, okay, let's move on further from here. I can't grow from here. So I went on to work with Neo four J. This is my current company. It's a graph database company, one of the leaders in graph database where I lead developer relations for Asia Pacific. So I take care of India, Singapore, and Australia as a major countries, and then there are a bunch of smaller countries in Southeast Asia that I take care of. So while all of this professional work was happening, you must be wondering, you're still on the other side of the table.

Why do you care? I do care because I've been always contributing to communities throughout the entire profession journey in whatever capacity I could as a volunteer, as an event organiser, as an organiser, as well as managing these communities or giving talks.

The latest is the Google Developer Experts programme. So I was managing this programme back in Google, and now I'm part of this programme where I'm contributing to the developer ecosystem by giving my talks in machine learning and generative ai. Alright? Now, as I mentioned, Google has been the higher of my career. I'm going to just putting it as a disclaimer to everyone. Whatever I share, it's not related to Google or to Neo 4G or to whatever companies that I have worked with while I'm taking references from there. But whatever the thoughts have been shared are personally mine. These are my own learnings, my own observations.

While they do have some references from my previous organisation, from my previous companies, but these are purely my own learnings. So I was taking care of Google developer groups, Google developer experts programme, 10 flow user group, third party developer communities.

There was a developer student class programme as well. I guess a couple of developers, student leads as well were part of the programme as well out here. But the highlight was, and what I felt was a real success for me in the entire journey at Google was built for Digital India. A very classic example, which I felt of local to global kind of initiative. So what was built for Digital India? This was started way back in October, 2019. It started off as a concept note, I discussed it. I wanted to do something for the student developer ecosystem.

Sketch the concept note, I want to run maybe a month long or a three month long solution challenge, a hackathon of sorts.

It kind of got attention from the public policy team. It got attention from Ministry of IT and information technology, government of India. And then we saw 7,000 plus students participating in this entire programme, which was massive. Back then Google and India had never seen this kind of the metrics back in those days. There were 300, sorry, 3000 plus projects, 15 finalists and three winners. Now, another interesting thing in this entire slide in this entire journey with built for Digital India was this last one, three winners. Any guess anything? Why the winners were interesting?

No. Okay, so this finale was executed in March, 2020. Does it ring any bells? March, 2020 covid? Exactly. Just a week before when we were about to execute a finale, pandemic hit us hard and we had to move everything from the in-person to an online world. Within one week we pushed the deadline, we pushed the finale date, although, but within two weeks we moved everything from an in-person to an online world.

We saw 5,000 plus live attendees, which we were initially capping it to just 400, 500 people. But then we moved it to online and then we saw 5,000 plus attendees. No, why? I say this is a great success story for me, it's primarily because Wilford Digital India took as a case study and then we came up with this DSC solution challenge in 2020 to encourage all the developer student clubs across the globe. So this built for Digital India was specifically for Indian developer ecosystem, Indian student developer ecosystem. But then we wanted to take it to the global level, and that's when DSC solution challenge was kind of conceptualised and a lot of learnings from built for digital. India went into the DSC solution challenge and it's taking a different form now, but the journey didn't end over here. I saw a lot of startups, a lot of finalists projects, which are submitted as a finale.

They got selected or they want recognitions. They moved to different heights. They started launching as a startups as well. This is one of the finalists as well. Pravin. He started this company called Mouse Wear. You can even search for him, Dexter Wear devices. He started this company and then last year he won this prize from James Tyson.

So he's a regional winner for the James Tyson Award. You've heard of the Dyson vacuum cleaners, right? So James Tyson was the manufacturer, was the founder of Tyson Company, and he won this price from James Tyson. And then there was another interesting use case by Nuka Solutions, the one on the extreme right. So this company build the traffic management solution, which you're seeing also in Bangalore these days, that detects the traffic congestion on a real time basis and then changes such as the lights accordingly. So these are two success stories that I could capture from built for Digital India.

Now, what do you think makes India unique is of course the diversity and innovation. We are talking about 20 plus official languages that makes it much more diverse than any other country in the world. And with these official languages, we see a lot of innovation happening, not just in the world of building vernacular content, but also building vernacular applications. So there are companies like Share Chart Server, project bini, et cetera. They're working very specifically to build vernacular applications or building tools to build vernacular applications. The innovation entire two entire three cities is phenomenal. I was just having a discussion with a couple of folks before the start of the conference. Over 50% of the developer population lives in entire two entire three cities, which makes it much more interesting opportunity for the global develop teams to invest further in India.

Our Indian developers excel in frugal innovation and then their instinct of problem solving for grassroots problems. It's tremendous. The example is very classic example is U-P-I-U-P-I was started to solve a lot of grassroots level problems. I was reading about UPI just a couple of days back when RBI thought of coming up with UPI, they realised they did some fact finding. It was the time around 2009 when NPCI was formed and they discovered a start that over one 45 million families do not have any transaction instrument. They can't transact, they don't have any form of banking. And that's when they came up with the limited resources, a small team, and then formed UPI, which is now expanded to over 30 countries. And as I said, there's a passion for open source development, be it your Octoberfest or Fox, United, Python, India, open source, India, Indian developers love open source ecosystem, and it's the third largest startup ecosystem in the world as well.

And soon to become probably the biggest ecosystem startup ecosystem in the world. We see thousand plus hackathons happening annually as well. So these are some of the reasons why I feel what makes India super unique. But then as I said, with these challenges, there are a lot of challenges as well. There are a lot of assumptions as well, mistakes as well, which global devil team usually make, which I'm not saying that they're always right or they're always wrong, but there are ways you can mitigate those challenges. I put that in a deral success framework. I call this as a three step three E framework, educate, engage, and empower. Now education is something where we say that knowledge is the first step to engagement.

Oops, the image is not loading. I don't know. Okay, so global teams have a assumption that English is the official language.

Well, yes, English is the official language. I was talking to one of the attendee how Japanese people are struggling with English. I totally respect that, that English is definitely a global language, but you can build content if not in a vernacular content. If you can't build content like your workshops and everything in vernacular languages, you can still build content which are focused on the Indian use cases. So there's a need for building these Indian use case context, which is often been overlooked. The second one is the workshops are mostly hosted in metro cities. So all the teams, and this is a message to all the devil teams, whoever is managing within India as well, that most of these workshops are centralised, hosted in metro or there's a need to host them in tier 23 cities as well. And then collaborate with regional influencers to spread knowledge.

So if you can't build RNAC content, then it's better to collaborate with regional influencers so that they can further spread the knowledge and then provide them with the online learning, online resources to further upskill themselves. Okay.

Alright. The next one is engage. Now once you have educated these people, you want to further engage them. That's where the collaboration comes in because it builds trust and fosters innovation. So you partner with local community leaders like GDG, organisers, startup founders, et cetera. Ignoring the startup open source potential is definitely a mistake that has to be avoided. So you miss out of the opportunity to engage through collaborative projects. So D teams should start looking at broader open source collaborations with multiple companies as well who are in this kind of in a similar domain or on a complimentary domain.

You don't hackathons on Indian specific themes like agriculture, finance, FinTech, or healthcare. There's a huge potential in this entire area alone. And then hope for hybrid events. So if you can't host your events in tier two, tier three cities, then start offering them as a hybrid event.

Start having a combination of an in-person and a virtual concept and then offer pathways for these participants to further grow by offering them opportunities as speakers, as mentors or as programme directors, programme managers. The third thing is empower. I dunno, something with the slides that got messed up. So then once you educate and then engage, then it needs to empower them as well. So you recognise these contributions by nurturing local advocates. You start picking in people from the local grassroots level and then start giving them the opportunities. Oftentimes the global level teams focus on a short-term goals, short-term success, and they run off with one-off programmes and then there's no follow-up after that. That is a mistake that has to be avoided.

They often limit the mentorship to the people out there. So you had to build a long-term relationship. You had to start offering them mentorships to let's say not all, but selected projects as well. Selected local projects as well. Highlight and reward Indian contributions to the global projects. It's happening, but it can happen more. So global level team should start recognising these projects on a global level and then establish local advocacy programmes as well. So these are the three broader buckets that I can talk about, educate, engage, and empower that the devil team should focus on.

And what's your role in the India tech story? You have a greater responsibility. So start thinking locally, but then always think about how I can scale this global to a global initiative. So it's totally fine that you're thinking on a local level, but then how do I expand it to a global level? That's something that you need to focus on feedback. So one thing that I see kind of as a happening as a trend, and I'll not quote anyone, and specifically the feedback cycle is missing. So you do events, you do activities as a DevRel organiser, but then you fail to capture the feedback. Or even if you capture the feedback, you fail to give it to the product or the teams.

So that's where the gap is. So you as a DevRel person have a bigger responsibility in hand to fill that gap, take the feedback from the community, from the developer ecosystem and then give it to the product or the ENG teams to further improvise on the product.

And they value this a lot. Trust me, back in Google, we used to do this a lot. We used to do kind of sit downs with the developers, a smaller group of developers, a cohort of developers, and then we connect them directly with the product teams as well. So there was a good learning and there were good feedback sharing that used to happen. Third thing is the community first approach. So focus on the developer community, while it's always put to put business intent or company's intent first, but then you always have to think that you are in DevRel position. You always have to put a DevRel, sorry, a developer or a community at the forefront. Think from their mindset while aligning with the business vision as well.

And then diversity and inclusion. So diversity and inclusion is a very interesting topic, which I don't want to go into the depth of it, but just to scratch the surface, it's not about having a mentor to female ratio in the room.

It's amazing, it's great. But what I mean to say is that have inclusion and people from diverse backgrounds as well, people from software engineering to within software engineering, let's say from front end to backend to multiple full stack and then multiple other technologies as well. It could even mean people from different cities. So you should make it a pathway that I can have if it's possible, that I should have people coming in from across the country and how I can make it more inclusive as well. The language of communication, the code of conduct and everything. It's a very interesting topic, diversity and inclusion. So think about diversity and inclusion also while you're designing these devil strategies. And last but not the least, is collaboration and mentorship.

So while you're collaborating, it's not just a collaborating with other developer communities, it's also collaboration with the other DE folks as well.

We see this happening a lot in India. So I definitely don want to discourage that. It's a great thing that happens within de industry in India, but that has to happen on more frequent basis. And then once you learn, grow, mentor others as well. Okay, and last but not the least is the open source contribution. I've been focusing on the open source part of about it a lot. So that's it from my side. I will just leave this with you.

Food for thought. India is not just building for itself, but it's building for the world. So let's every developer make sure that every developer has the right tool, right resources, and right community to thrive. So thank you so much and have a rest of the great devil con. I'll see you soon. Thank.