Leveraging previous work experience to start a DevRel career

Charles Pretzer: Thanks DevRelCon for having me today. This is pretty exciting. This is my first DevRelCon. I'm certainly a little bit disappointed that I'm not in Tokyo, but that's quite all right. It's such a good opportunity to be able to share the experiences that I've been going through as I've started into this field. So today I just have a quick chat to share some of those experiences, and hopefully you'll leave this with an exercise as well that you might find useful in your own experience wherever you are. So I call this looking back in order to go forward. So I'm a bit of an older guy.

My career has been going on for a while, and so you may have seen that there are, oops, here we go. This is the famous Who Am I slide. And many presentations start off with this, and this talk ends up being all about my work history. And so I put this one in here for fun.

The takeaway from this is to look to past experience and life and work for the skills that can make you successful in developer relations. And as I think about this more and more, as I've spent time practising this talk and developing the content, I realise that it's bigger than just for being successful in developer relations. I think you could pretty easily put in here that you successful, make you successful in life, or make you successful in being a good person. So that is just kind of a side note there and take with it, which you will.

So let's talk about the origin story and why. This even came into my mind, how I ended up in DevRel. I started my career in the late nineties in technical customer facing support for a large software company. And then I moved into engineering project work. And then I spent quite a few years doing consulting and professional services.

Today I work as a field engineer at a company called Buoyant, which is the main sponsor for the Linkerd Service mesh. So I spend a lot of time working with the community of users and our customers. And so you can see how this is a natural transition into developer relations.

And fortunately, there are resources like DevRel. com or DevRel Khan or lots of videos where I can go and I can find what have people done in the past in order to break into the field to be successful at sharing what they know and helping people learn to use software. And as I thought about that, I realised, well, there's this history that I have of being able of career work that I think I might be able to leverage. And so as I looked into that, I thought about what are the things that are part of developer relations that would be successful or would be good skills?

And this certainly isn't a complete list. This is the list of skills that I picked off the top of my head, or that came easily, I guess I should say. I think if we were to have a conversation together and dive deeply into this, we could come up with a really large list of skills that are required. But these are some that came off the top of my head.

And so there's certainly an innate desire to help and mentor individuals who are using software that involves curiosity, compassion, and listening, especially when building relationships. And sometimes people, they know that they want to solve a problem, but they don't know that there are layers, the onion that need to peel back. And so that there's a skill there in helping to peel those layers back. So the question is, why do we want to help mentor individuals who are using the software or help them to be able to use the software?

I mean, for us, we think it's cool. We love our software. Speaking of the Linkerd community, we love our software. We think it's cool.

We want to see people successful implementing the software for their projects where it's appropriate. And if it's not appropriate, that's okay. We, I'll talk about tools in your toolkit. And for our open source project, we want to make sure it's the right tool for the right job as far as curiosity and compassion and listening. It's really important for building real relationships with folks. Spend a lot of time on Slack, which has a layer of not really being able to get that full contact with people that you would get when you're having a conversation in person. And so the skill of being able to understand what the person is saying and to understand where they're coming from and the problem that they're trying to solve and do so in a way that is real almost as if you're taking the problem on yourself.

To me, that's really, really important.

And finally, well, I just mentioned that the skill of being able to understand the question of what problem are you solving? What's the issue that you're looking to solve, and how can we best do that? And so thinking through these things, taking the skills from my career and these skills that I believe are important for relations, I came up with this exercise and I think it's fun. And again, I think you can use it for any aspect of life. I hope this diagram makes sense. But what I've done here is I've gotten those three major career positions that I've had in my past, technical support, engineering and consulting, and I've taken the skills and put them into these little bubbles on the side. And you can see I've colour coded them so that I've identified in each of the career positions that I had in the past where I specifically thought of examples.

And I think that's kind of important to say, well, of course as a consultant I had to know problem solving.

But there's one example, whereas working for an e-commerce company and they have this basic configurator where it's like, if you buy A, then you're eligible to buy B and C or D and e. And so you end up with all these different permutations. And so this actually ended up being, it was a non-trivial problem to solve. And so that's why I put specifically that consulting piece in there. So if you go through this exercise, and this could also be something that takes you five minutes to do, I think it's, and I say this coming from somebody who's new to the field, but I believe that this exercise could be done from anybody who is new like myself or somebody who's got years and years of DevRel experience, and maybe they find themselves wanting to refresh their skillset or their knowledge, or maybe you find yourself in a rut. I believe this exercise can help through some of that.

Yeah, so we see the colour coding here. We've got, and not all skills apply to all jobs.

One of my favourites there is the curiosity. A specific example there with tech support was I was new into my career in life, fresh out of school. And it was like, these people are trying to solve these problems or these people have these issues. I'm really, really curious to find out what it is that that they're working on and what's going wrong and how can we fix it. And so I think that is a personality trait that comes back from, as a kid taking things apart and putting them back together and hoping that there were enough pieces that were there when I began to take things apart. So if you go through this exercise, find the skills that you think that are important to you or skills that you would like to improve on and then dig in your past look for.

It could be something that you did even that you did in high school if you were, maybe you're part of the debate team and that helps you somehow with the listening piece or the understanding piece or whatever it is, the skill that you want to prove that you're looking for. I think it'd be a fun exercise to try.

And so if you do so, please find me. I've got my Twitter handle at the end of this, I think. Or actually, no, it's on the name thing right there. So really curious to know how you all experienced this and what you think about it. With that, I mentioned that you have a toolkit, and this is what I was saying about this experience that you have in the past, both in career and life is a set of tools that you may have to dig deep into that toolkit. I almost wanted to call this a utility belt because the comic book theme going on, but you've been building it for years. It's in there. And so which part of the history is of your history is best going to prepare you for developer relations?

I guess it's a little, well, I'm just going to say it. What is your origin story for being in developer relations and what prepared you for doing that? So that is your toolkit, some of the tools that you might find in your toolkit. Again, listening and understanding the technical skills to be able to read code or understand other code that folks have written. I know that's certainly something that I could improve on. There are engineers that are way better than me, but I have the ability to be able to read and understand code and then go and ask questions if I don't understand something. Problem solving is another good one. The desire to collaborate and really in a meaningful way, in a way that's not just like, oh, you have an error in your logs.

Here's the solution. Here's the GitHub issue, here's the patch fix beyond your merry way.

But more something along the lines of like, oh man, I see that you really have an issue here. Let's dive into it together and see what we can find. And of course, that means that there's time for all that, but to build those, that's where the desire comes from, the desire to spend, the time to collaborate. And finally that sense of curiosity. So those are mine. You may have others.

And so I encourage you to try them out or to seek them out. So with that, if you want to see me in action, come check us out at linkerd dot I or Slack linkerd io. This is our open source project. It's a lot of fun and we have a great community.