Localizing DevRel: How India's unique ecosystem demands distinct strategies

Cherish: Okay, quick, let's just do, I just want to understand the audience first. Whose first time at DevRelCon? First DevRelCon ever. Okay, let's just check who has been at a DevRelCon before? Two out of 3, 4, 6 out of 60. That's great. Okay. How many of us are here and meeting a DevRel professional for the first time or this is completely new to them?

1, 2, 3, AUL. Hands down. Hands down. People are waiting for your posters. Full local celebrity you are. That's okay. Alright, great. So folks, my name is Cherish.

I am very fortunate and actually privileged and honoured to be here. This is my fourth DevRelcon to be a part of first one in India. So a big round of applause for all the organisers who put this into India. Let's just get it. I mean, it took a lot of work to actually get this to India.

It doesn't happen overnight and I'm sure a lot of work went You do it. Okay. A little bit about me. If my clicker works, which it doesn't. Oh, okay. That's it. Like my face wasn't good enough. Here's another.

Okay, so I'm currently a quick introduction about me. I have a decade of experience worked with some of the brands. Is this good for this frame? Okay. So I worked with some of the brands that you might know, Google, Amazon, hacker Oath, and a bunch of startups like Savo Hacker or CUS or whatever, some of them not so startups anymore. I know about 70% of you here, so I'm very happy to see very familiar faces. Currently I serve as a board member at Dev Network where we define strategies for a lot of startups. These startups come to us saying that what should we do to actually take back, and these are all dev force or dev plus companies and for Anso.

And the second job that I have here in Bangalore is called at Anso, where I finally consult publicly listed companies and fortune hundred, 500 companies on how to take the developer strategy, especially in India. So I think last one year has been very monumental for me to actually consider DevRel strategies for India specifically. Okay. Next.

Can I just say next? Okay. Alright. How many of us are currently working for Indian companies? Okay, how many of us are not devils, sir? Okay, so how many of us are working for companies outside of India? Outside of India? Great.

So when dollar rate goes up, do you get happy or sad? Sad. Sad. Okay, so maybe people who are earning in dollars, they're like, yes, I will shot my country. Okay. How many of us, I mean actually I saw Shan talk and because we didn't get a chance to communicate, I think a lot of our points are going to be overlapped, but it's talk of the town now. It's nothing new that we know it is being called India's decade. Any thoughts why I will keep this communicative so that I have your attention and your interaction as well?

Any thoughts on why do you think, what is something that India will do that the rest of the world won't in the next 10 years? Quick shout. Learn from mistakes. Yes, we have many yes.

Adoption of AI at a massive scale. That's great. Yes, that is actually great. That's actually a great point. I think China has done a lot of mistakes, especially with one child policy that we're reaping the benefits of. So we are learning a lot from their mistakes. And you're right, I think we are rightly placed right after these heading curves. So we have a lot of tailwind that takes us.

Okay, cool. So a little more on why I think this is India's jacket compared to, okay, how many of us seen this graph we have? We have. Have. Okay, we have have it. Yeah. So these are basically topped in developer communities on GitHub from 2019 to 24. I want you to look at these and tell me which one of these between 1, 2, 3 is India's one.

Okay, we have one. One is India's one. All three are India's are in nine. Dude, last says France. Oh, maybe we could, yeah, no, no, no. These are all different countries. These are growth of developer communities across 2019 to 2024. So I want you to consider which one of these has been India's who has grown the most fallen or has it been consistent?

One, three. Three, three. Alright, open your hands. Seven, three, C, 3, 3, 3, 9, 1. Okay, let's find out.

Okay, India was actually number three. Now look at this. In last 2019 to 2024, we've gone from, it's actually very, very spectacular because in 2014 we were about 5 million developers on GitHub. When I say GitHub, GitHub counts. There were community as anybody who came to GitHub and even they interacted with a little bit. So they don't necessarily have to be a contributor, but even, I mean considering they may not be active on GitHub, they could still be a developer, right? Because some people don't necessarily use GitHub, they have their internal tools as well. So India has grown from legend, 5 million developer community to a 17 million developer community only on GitHub in 2024.

This is quite monumental because in next two years we will surpass us and become the highest biggest developer community in the gold. Isn't that great? I mean, don't you think that is something that we are doing better than the rest of the world? So of course air adoption is happening. One more thing that I'll talk about more here is that in coming years you'll see a lot of Indian developer communities actually not just we are the second highest country, which when it comes to adopting a lot of this tech and the third highest when it comes to contributions, this is the projection from 2024 to 28. Now look at this, 28 from 24, we'll stay where we are at number two from 27 onwards, we'll take over United States. Now this is quite monumental. The reason for that are twofold.

Whenever there's budget allocated in any kind of developer, first companies from VC Sandpoint, they can look at two things, they can look at one, where can they see the fastest adoption of the product that they're funding. Two, where can they get the quickest and the most quality contributions to the product that their teams are building? Because if the product gets better, the productions, the adoptions come in naturally and if the user basis obviously bigger, the adoptions become easier to, the product becomes easier and to adopt. So we are hoping that 8 27 onwards, we'll see a lot of funding actually gone into a developer first and developer plus companies. So good news for all Des here that you'll be managing real big products. You'll get a lot of budget in Shaah and we are hoping that this goes really well. So this is what we are hoping from GitHub standpoint.

Now this is big right now. Look at from 2024 to 2028, only half a decade we'll see that India is growing right? And this is why we think India is actually well positioned for next coming decade. Now let's look at what happens after that. What are some other contributions that, other reasons that are causing to this? Okay, one more thing that has gone, actually, it has contributed to India's growth, right? Is the internet ubiquity. Ubiquity means something being pervasive and everywhere.

Like now how Androids are right now, how internet is before geo came along, we didn't have a lot of people using internet and if we didn't have a lot of people using internet, how will they develop, right? They can't be developed on developing on local systems. So in last, from 20, sorry, I dunno what happened. Let's go back. Can we do back from there?

Yeah, that's good. I'll just say next. You can do next. That's okay. Right? If you notice the curve that we are following, right? Us had a similar moment in 2000 to 2014 where they had internet actually explode from even go more pervasive in the rural areas and that increased the developer community and of course that happened with China and India as well. That created more developers and further that created more unicorns in general.

This is 2019 metrics, but today the number of unicorns that we have are above any guess how many unicorns do we have in India? One 20 plus. One 20 plus one. 20 plus. That is correct. Any closer number?

Okay. Yes, it is one 20 plus. I think it's 1 41 today. The reason for that is also that a lot of these people who were at tier two, tier three cities, which you rightly pointed out in your presentation said is that a lot of these people actually found grassroots levels problems and then find a way to build for it. The problem here is that India is so wide and so big that we often don't realise that the problems that we have are already being solved for the companies and countries that have crossed this point. Right now, the problems that we really want to solve, we have to face it personally to actually get there. So internet ubiquity or internet pervasiveness, what that happens if I am from let's say belay, I know some people who are from belay or PU or whatever, the problems they face there are very different from the problems that Bangalore faces. I think the problem that Bangalore faces, anything we touch is a problem.

We are only good at software. If you can touch a road, it has holes.

If you can touch a car, it's stuck behind another car. But a lot of these problems that belay or a lot of these tier two, tier three cities are most of the India and that's where I think that people there are waiting to get their problems solved. The people, unfortunately or fortunately, the people who will solve these problems are also living in those areas. For example, I know a lot of people who are currently building for their own cities. I think 2014 or 15 when we were at part of a Google student ambassador thing, we had Google's community actually directed us saying that why don't you solve for your own city's problems? Which is when I went, you remember that? Remember that Deepak? Yes.

Deepak had launched that, right? So we solved those problems and that's where we got a lot of unit options. One of the things that I solve for my own city, chal, which is where I'm from, beautiful city, if anybody's coming, what we had was that JAL has a very simple address, right?

There is no that nugget that crossed that main no scene like that. Rather it's house number sector. So house number seven, sector 14 Q, that's all. That's all you need to know. It's the first plant city. So it had to be that. Now the problem with that was even then for people who were to come to Chenal for the first time, they wanted to know how to guide there because it's a planned city, so every sector looks the same. So we had to create a citywide problem the minute we solved that problem by digitising all the data that government populated, this is what government did.

They were so hungry for a solution for a small city like that. They used that solution as a model for my smart city app. And the minute that got added as a my smart city app, we went from zero adopters to 1 million adopters in 90 days because people were already using that app. So imagine the power, if somebody in she, it did not have the power to actually work with the tools or work with these developer communities, they wouldn't be solving for it. They wouldn't have the exposure to actually build a product for a million developers and obviously not the learnings and the scaling that came with it. This is why I think that internet ity and its pervasiveness in the country is actually going to help India actually get better.

One of the things that when we were in Sal, we had a friend or we had somebody who was actually from, I think mu, anybody from mu, okay, so he had an old uncle who would sell Pan, right? He's like, how do you keep track? It's like because this is such a small business, people take kata or they take borrow lending or they put out, so the simplest app, and this is a guy who was I think 14 who we met, he created a very simple counter app plus minus arrays and a counter on top sub like app like that, and he put that on play store that you count your pan plus minus and simple add counter a minus, and then reset and zero, right? By that time he could just add it and by the time total how many pounds I've solved such small problem you think any of us are solving here we are not.

Right? Will this get a million options? Probably not. But will this instil the confidence that I can solve problems for people within my region that'll take me to a higher user and me give me the confidence of building better products? Absolutely. Absolutely. When you build a product and you give it to a person who's using it every day, that's going to be great. So as developer as dev is, it's our duty to find these people and go into these areas.

Yeah, sorry about that. It's a working day guys. I dunno what to tell you. Okay, next.

Okay, tailwinds. Tailwinds. If anybody who cycles here or does any kind of you cycle, right? So you understand what tailwinds and headwinds are. So if you're running and you get wind from on your head, you are getting slowed, right? If you get wind on your tail while running, you go faster. So tailwinds are things that help you move faster. One of the things that I'm quite excited about here is that, and I think this is the only thing that I think somebody also said adoption of AI is going to be great.

It's being almost a mandate from the government now that from six standard itself people will start coding, especially in AI and this is what we'll see now, it's going to be big. I have nieces and nephews of that age who are now learning AI and asking me questions that I feel very proud of, right?

That's another thing again, so the number of developers that we have all across on GitHub and otherwise are 17 million projected to grow by 24 million 2028. The number of professional developers we have are 5. 4, about six, and we are growing about, I think about 20 to 25% year on year and like I said, 95% increase year on year contributions to generative ai. That's incredible. I think one of the things that India really does is that we may not be the best innovators when it comes to actually Silicon Valley level kind of things, but we perfect things really well and I think the way that we've solved FinTech problems with UP, I don't think US has ever, I remember I was travelling somewhere in Europe and we just got off the plane and they asked everybody to show their COVID certificate. You remember that? Those were the times it boggled me that people from us had to take out a paper which was half tone unfolded and be like, this is my COVID certificate, and all we had was an app or a PDF, I'll forward you, keep it with yourself. The things like that, like digitization that India did us could still not do.

Right? So I think I'm quite excited about what we can do with gene ai. Okay, next please.

Okay. Challenges for endeavours now since it's a developer relations conference, right. I'm quite excited to hear what other challenges we feel. Of course there's more here, but a quick round, we'll take quick questions across the room and see any challenges that you found. For me personally, which is not here, I think build versus buyer has been a problem here in India and we'll come to that a little later, but as a DevRel problem, any problem that you think that you face, especially working in India while Yes, sorry. Yes. Recurring users. That's great.

Yes, because getting users adopted is easier. Yes. Hi Yash. Yash, any problems that you've noticed while managing DevRel problems in India?

Audience member 1:

Tier two, tier three cities, the how do we synchronise the growth in all lacrosse? That is one and second is there is a lot of difference between the audience itself. Either there are absolute beginners or they're pros.

Cherish: Yes.

Audience member 1:

So how do we bridge

Cherish: The gap? Yeah,

Audience member 1:

Perfect.

Cherish: So I had to put you on the spot, but I knew you'd take it and did it perfectly well. Thank

Audience member 1:

You. No worries. Yeah.

Cherish: Any other issues that any devil face while launching something? Yes, please take the mic.

Audience member 1:

First important thing is that how exactly we are trying to plan something.

Cherish: How do we, sorry, get the mic closer please. How

Audience member 2:

Are we trying to plan something? For example, there is a beginner and then there is a pro,

Audience member 1:

So

Audience member 2:

There is no middle ground,

Audience member 1:

But

Audience member 2:

Then how do we track slowly and steadily? It's like a turtle. How are you going to win the race? Another thing is perspectives. We are talking about a lot of things, but we are not sharing our perspective, which is saying, okay, I did this, I'm done.

Cherish: I agree, but

Audience member 2:

How I did it, that's what we want to know.

Cherish: Perfect. Yeah. The skill gap between professionals and people who are just entering the workforce is widening.

If anything, I agree with that. Any other or we can, yes. One more please. Defining success metrics panel, yes or no? Okay. It's going to be there. Okay. Alright, so you're right about the fact, right?

One of the things that I think another thing that we saw in the keynote is that a lot of these developers use English as their medium, right? While I think, okay, one more question. How many of us actually felt that we learned better from our peers than our teachers in college? Right? Okay. 90% of that. Why is that? Because people like us each other, we speak in memes, right?

Our teacher wouldn't explain things in memes. We speak the common language, whether it's English, whether that means it doesn't matter. We get to each other and I think is why the gap is also increasing or not. We have to find a way to get to communicate and understand each other in languages beyond English.

Especially people who are from belay, mufa. These stories that I told, they don't necessarily want to, they feel very cautious to come to these meetups and be like, Hey, I feel out of place because everybody speaks very good English and I don't know if I fit in. The complex gets in the way of learning, which shouldn't be the case at all because you're a developer, you're not somebody who's a Toastmaster. So that's one thing. Now look at this. Why 70 to 75% of US developers use English as their second language is professional settings. Only 40 to 45 are considered proficient. They themselves are by other people, so everybody's saying it, but themselves inherently they don't feel very comfortable or proficient, which means that they're getting in the way, right?

It's getting in the way that the language is getting in the way and what is language, if not only the medium to get through each other, right?

Okay. Next is that another thing that we noticed, and I think maybe I spoke about this briefly, about 1. 5 million engineering graduates enter the job market only 20, 25% secure, right? This is right. The gap between 20% and 80% is so huge that the companies, they are like, we'll, just hired these 20% and the remaining 80% don't find core engineering jobs even though they wanted it. That's something that we've noticed. These are some problems that we noticed that as Indian devs, we have to solve a few more statistic to at least supplement this was that. Of course, leadership and support in Indias eco ecosystem is lesser.

I have a feeling that this average work experience of this room is not going to be more than three years.

Anybody who differs? Yes. What do you think? Little over five. Little over five. Okay. Let's take account, we'll lead your participation mega and we'll lead your participation for this poll. What's the average work experience here?

10 years or plus? No. Okay, great. Between five to seven. Okay, so that's for under five. Average book X, so a little under five, right? So we had a feeling right now because devil came to India a little later, or at least it was called devil later. I think people like us were doing a little much sooner before it got named.

Devil. We don't have a lot of support and leadership here and I couldn't be more grateful for people, for organisers of this conference to actually start a panel in a forum where we could have leaders who come and talk about this. We have a lot of people, right?

Karen's going to be here. I think Kunal is also here. A lot of these people have been doing this for a while, and of course these people will add to the leadership guidance that a lot of young professionals need. While you may have a lot of software engineering professional experience, but definitely professional experience of course counts as well. One more thing that happens is there's something called state of Deville survey, which means that we take off state of developer relations professionals across the globe. Do you know that Indian developer professions only make up to 4% of the global workforce? That can't be it. It cannot be possible because we are so good with our engineering prowess.

We are so good at communicating, we're so good at managing a lot of things. We can't just be at 4% of the global workforce. That's a challenge and more on this, on why that happens as we go along. So that's another challenge. 57 of professionals with two to three of work experience, which is what we just clarified and tested and confirmed by using this poll. That's another thing that's happening, and only one person of the entire dev first companies are in India and average salary is 17,000. Okay, take a guess. What's the average salary of a de professional globally?

Quick hundred K.

Audience member 1:

1 1 20. Which experience group?

Cherish: Huh?

Audience member 1:

Which experience group?

Cherish: Average experience group as in cumulative of about a hundred K average 80 to 90. Okay. It's actually 2 25. I mean now considering this bear market that we have, it's 200, but yeah. And where are we? 17,000. Y'all. We got some catch up to do, right?

This is something, that's another thing that bothers us and which is why conferences like these conversations, like these leaders, these talks, these really matter a lot. Okay, next, please. Sorry to bother you sir. I know you're chilling. Okay, what can devils do, right? One of the things that we can do is incorporating vernacular language. I honestly like using English in my talks because I think it gets to people a little more. One, it builds that sense of comradery and people are able to relate each other.

That's one other thing. That's something that we, one more thing that I would suggest as a strategy for anybody who's just trying to enter IL or do things and as leaders, you will have to push back or make sure that your leaders, you convince your leaders, get people who either talk in Hindi or the regional language of your state.

Even if they use a little bit of mix, it's amazing. You would be, and if you want to want to test this, roll a feedback form. Say which of these talks did you found most relatable? The most encouraging, relatable. You'll see people who use languages a little more of the tier two, tier three cities, which is more vernacular. They were far more understood than others. Test this. Let's just do a test and I've tested this.

That's why it's here on the deck. The second thing, which a lot of people said, Yash said, and a lot of people will say tier two, tier three cities need to be championed more. We saw two stories from Al Mu that why tier two, tier three cities. Anal also I would think is tier two cities, right? Why people of these cities need to be championed more. So if you're a DevRel who's building champion programmes, developer programmes, ambassador programmes, while your 70%, 80% focus could be on tier one, tier two city, you may get a little more better traction from tier two, tier three cities.

Choose one or two. Let's choose in indoor, I dunno, a lot of other cities as well, like indoor for that matter, to get a lot of these adoptions. So tier two, tier three cities would matter a lot in getting a lot of these people signed up. And the last one, which is something that we are currently in the process of doing is building and nurturing deel ecosystem. I really like that we have that DevRel folks group that's on WhatsApp for a lot of people who are there. I have not seen a lot of messages go unanswered. If anybody has any questions, people come in and actually, yes, can you share? We can at the risk of spamming it.

Yeah, you would love to see that spamming. I actually think it's a maybe. Okay, how about we take this up together? What we'll do is dev folks will have a weekly or biweekly call where we can come and share conference docs. That make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Do we have Russian here?

Anybody who's admin of that group?

Audience member 2:

Maybe a juhi

Cherish: A A is not, is he here? Maybe we got derailed a little bad, but sure, why not? Do we have any admins of the Deel folks WhatsApp group in this something? We are just launching something during this talk. Do we have somebody here at the conference or Deel folks in WhatsApp group that we have? We don't have anyone here. Okay. So I think an important part of what we want to do as for devs for upcoming years is actually we want to build and nurture our DevRel ecosystem.

Part of that could be of course using that time as weekly or biweekly calls. So why don't we set that up and we will share that invite, but great suggestion. So that's something that we got to do. I'm very grateful and glad that people are starting to take action while I'm talking. Alright. Okay, next, please, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir. Hello. Next please.

Okay. Okay. Programmes made for India, something that we've already seen. This is the last slide of course. Sorry. This is something that we can do as a developer relations. If you're somebody who's trying to make sure that you're launching a programme or are currently betting or investing in something, we could use localised meetups instead of doing a meetup for global reasons, go to different cities and do it. A lot of people do that already.

Find a speaker that speaks in the common tongue and the local tongue and actually talks about it that way. The second thing is student ambassador programmes. For next 10 years, we have the largest working population of the world. Our current average population of India is 29. Most of us who are either going to be developers, who's going to now code in AI or cloud, all of them are currently students.

Student ambassador programmes already worked for a lot of people. I think that's something that Sid launches a hack this fall and it's a student only hackathon that has seen some great success, great sponsors, great partners. And so student programmes always works. One thing that I think that addresses the third issue that we have is this chasm of between professionals and beginners. The gap is to widening. One thing that really helps, and we've tried this internally and this happens at Google IO often is hands-on labs. We have a lot of professionals in the industry who can come and take people through the entire hands-on lab and make sure that people are able to launch their first app or able to launch their first C-I-D-C-I-C-D pipeline are able to launch their first LLM. A lot of these hands-on labs will help us closing that gap and thus giving you a better quality of developers that you can market your product to, that you can ask better feedback for your own products.

And the last thing is hackathons. I think we have a great hackathon community. We do a thousand plus hackathons on a year in India and that's the highest that we've seen. Most of these hackathon that we have have students as the major participants, which is why I think hackathons work, hackathons could have three objectives, which if you ever have to pitch a hackathon within your company or anywhere else, use these three objectives. The first thing that a hackathon could do is branding. When Gojek came to India, a lot of people didn't know that Gojek is currently hiring in India or when Morgan Chase come to India, people didn't know that Morgan Chase had a technical role that they're hiring for. So hackathons actually is a great way to launch brand yourself as a company that we are currently hiring for tech roles. That's one.

The second thing that you can do is of course crowdsourcing solutions.

Something like Smart India Hackathon. We have very pertinent problems to the country and we are like, why don't you give us solutions on that? That's the crowdsourcing. That's why developers who have been in hackathons for a lot more time, they come with innovative solutions. So crowdsourcing solution. And the third is talent pipeline. A lot of people who actually go to hackathons and end up being at the finale or as the winners, they're highly employable. If you actually put them against one of the people who have just done some problems at lead code, I would bet money on somebody who's done, I dunno, 50 hackathons as opposed to a hundred lead code problems because they build the problem end to end, they solve for it, they solve a new problem every time they went from zero to hundred all the way.

And so hackathons actually do three things.

Branding, crowdsourcing solutions and talent pipeline for the brands that are actually supporting these hackathons. So these are some programmes that are made for India. This is how we can localise Deel for India and solve these problems that are put into India. And we can solve a lot of these problems that we are about to foresee, keeping ensuring that this entire decade is for India. With that, I think that's all that I had. My name is Cherish. I'm here hanging about. I'd love to connect with more on LinkedIn and if there are any questions, I can take those in five, 10 minutes.

But thank you all for listening so much. I.