Steering established ecosystems to new heights

Ricky: What's up everybody? I am Ricky. So stoked to be here. It still has John. So I'm going to do the introduction I gave John, which is please welcome Ricky Robinett, who told me he's going to talk about leading DevRel programmes to new heights, but I worry is just going to talk about magic. So John did much better than I gave him. As John said, I've been doing DevRel for a while. Right now I'm at a company called CloudFlare. Can you just put your hands together if you've heard of CloudFlare, right? Yeah, yeah. Alright, great. Great. Before that I was at Twilio. Can you put your hands together if you've heard of Twilio? Alright. Alright. And then before that, order ordering, put your hands together if you've heard of ordering three very excited people. They can't all be zingers folks. So I live in Brooklyn with my wife and daughter, a very easy commute.

I am an amateur magician. I say that just to set expectations for the happy hour tonight, emphasis on amateur. And someone at dinner the other night asked me, why do so many DevRel people like magic? Which I was like, oh, I guess it's a thing now. DevRel people like magic. I can't answer for anyone else, but I can say for me, the thing that drew me to magic is the same thing that drew me to developer relations. This is me doing magic a few months ago. Ignore the other guy. Nobody cares about the other guy. But I like doing magic. I like doing DevRel because of this moment where somebody is like, wait, what just happened? That's possible. And you show someone something they've never seen before, something that they didn't know could happen. But this is actually my second favourite moment. My first favourite is afterwards when they say, how did you do that? And you get to show them. And there's this myth about magicians of a magician will reveal their secrets. Like magicians love revealing their secrets.

DevRel and magicians have the same thing in common of like DevRel. People love talking about DevRel and magicians love talking about magic. And so there's this big overlap here. And I was thinking about this talk that John asked me to give and I was like, what could I tell someone about DevRel leadership? What would I tie my career to? And it's really trying to create these moments of wonder for developers where they say, what just happened? And how can I do that? And the best way I've found to do that is through telling stories. Darren Brown said, we are each of us a product of the stories we tell ourselves. I think we've all seen this happen throughout our careers. The power of the stories we tell ourselves. But I want to try and experiment with you all. So let's try and experiment. Greg's going to help here. He is going to grab a pad and what I need is 10 nouns. So a person, a place, or a thing, just shout it out. Give me laptop. Laptop. What was that one? Dragon? Laptop. Dragon potato. Tomato. Potato. Potato. Okay, potato. Okay, we got laptop. Dragon potato. We need seven more. Rainbow. Rainbow. Okay, what was that tomato? Okay, good. Good. That's great. Okay, keep 'em coming. We're happy. Mountain. What mountain? Mountain. Mountain. Okay.

Sunscreen. Sunscreen. I heard sunscreen. Emilio es Amelia. Estevez. Just a throwback if you know, you know. Alright, what are we at, Greg? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Two more. Two more. A frog, frog, frog. Yeah, a frog. Okay. Bagel. Bagel. Okay, so we got 10 words here and I need a volunteer. Oh wow. Hands. I didn't even say Here you here, come up. So here John, can we get a handheld? Sorry, I should have prepped you for what was about to happen Here. Let me kill the slides. I was going to ask your name, but I'm going to try something here. Alright, well please give Colleen a round of applause. All. Alright, so how is your memory? Okay, that's the answer I wanted, Greg. Turn that. Look at it real quick. Read through 'em. Okay, turn it around. What did we have on there?

Magic participant 1: Laptop, dragon potato, tomato, rainbow, Emilio, esteban bagel. And I think I'm missing three.

Ricky: This experiment has already gone poorly because you've done so well. I dunno what you're talking about. That was amazing. But you missed some. I think you got 'em out of order. I did. I'm going to teach you all a technique to memorise things. So Greg, turn it back around. Let's picture, actually, you're on stage, right? And I say thank you and you walk and you see my laptop, right? So just visualise this and as you're walking, you actually trip my laptop smashes on the floor, right? So think of that as it smashes on the floor, a dragon comes through and just lights it on fire. You've got this in your head.

Magic participant 1: I've got this in my head.

Ricky: Okay, I'll tell you. So it's laptop smashes dragon lights it on fire. You think I'd be upset, but I'm standing there out of my pocket, I pull a potato and foil and I'm like, I skipped breakfast. I would love a baked potato. So as that happens over my head, just you out the window, there's a beautiful rainbow, right?

Magic participant 1: Okay,

Ricky: From that rainbow, you say, Hey, I heard there's a treasure at the end of the rainbow, we run. Somehow it's close, we get there very quickly. And it's a tomato. No it's It's a pot of tomatoes. Of tomatoes. A pot of tomatoes at the base of a beautiful mountain.

Magic participant 1: Oh, I hope we're wearing sunscreen.

Ricky: Yes, yes. You're not just wearing sunscreen. There's the biggest bottle of sunscreen you've ever seen. It's like a Roman fountain spewing out. Oh wait, is it being manned

Magic participant 1: By the one and only Emilio? Esteban, you need a sunscreen fountain attendant? Of course it is in his career, he will take this role.

Ricky: It's been a rough go for him. Let's be honest. In his pocket there's just a little frog and it's saying, Hey, you hungry, you hungry shoots its tongue out. There's the tiniest bagel you've ever seen on its tongue. That sounds adorable. So let's do laptop smashes dragon lights it on fire. I bake a potato. You see this beautiful rainbow rainbow. We get the pot of tomatoes. There's this mountain. We need sunscreen because it's a beautiful mountain in the sun. It's a giant Roman fountain of sunscreen. Emilio Estevez is there. He is the attendant for the sunscreen fountain in his pocket, a tiny little frog, his tongue comes out. There's the tiny S bagel. Okay, turn around Greg. Okay, let's see if you can do the words. Alright,

Magic participant 1: So laptop, dragon potato. The potato had a rainbow. The rainbow led to the sunscreen at the base of a mountain where Amelia,

Ricky: What's at the end of the,

Magic participant 1: Oh sorry, tomatoes. The pot of tomatoes. I can't forget the pot of tomatoes at the base of rainbow. Of course. How silly me. Then we've got that mountain Emilio Estevez is there and in his pocket there's two bad pockets, not one, but there's a very adorable frog who of course is offering a very unsanitary bagel.

Ricky: Amazing. Big round of applause. For Pauline and Greg. Thank you. I will. John, you want to grab this back or I can just set it here. That's fine. So we talk about the power of stories. The power of stories is real. This whole thing is based on a study that happened in 1969. They did this with a group of people. They found that people who memorised with a narrative remembered 93% of the words on a list of 10 words. The people who tried to kind of brute force it just go over and over and over that list, they remembered 13%. And so there is nothing I've found in my career that's more powerful than anchoring our work to stories. And there's been so much talk at this conference about all these really, really important things. I don't know if I'm good at any of them, but I think I'm good at telling stories.

And I think that the way that my teams have found success is through telling those stories. I think to be a good deral leader, there are three stories you need to have equipped in your pocket. The first is a developer story. And it's funny, I was asking people, what would you want to hear about DevRel Khan? And it's funny, someone said, I feel like we don't talk about developers enough. We talk about the craft, we talk about the data, but we don't talk about the people as much. And talking about the people is so powerful. I want to show you all a little clip. It's a magic clip. Sorry, I'm sprinkling in a bunch of my favourite magicians in this. This is a magician who also is a maker or a developer, so he's one of us. His name is Mario, the maker magician. And he's talking a little bit about how the stories he heard has influenced him. So fingers crossed,

Mario: A big part of my show is a teacher that I had in high school and her name was Ms. Ronaldo and she changed my life. She taught me about Jackson Pollock. She taught me about artists that actually followed their heart when they made things and they were able to make a career out of it. And so in my show we talk about Andy Warhol doing What You Love for a living. We talk about Alexander Calder building things out of broken toys. Jean-Michel Basquiat wearing fancy suits but not being uncomfortable painting with them. So this is my robot that I built out of broken toys, 3D printed elements. If I turn the switch on, the robot comes to life and it has a sensor to follow this red ball. So if I snap, sound sensor activates. Isn't that cool? And then it comes wherever the ball goes and wherever it hears the sound, it will follow. And it's weird. I can put it even up, up there you go. My God, don't move. Okay, I got to talk to Brett. Oh sorry. It could do magic too. So if you look here, everyone say go down, go down there, it goes down and watch the ball. I go 1, 2, 3 disappears from my hands and look underneath the lamp there's the ball.

Ricky: How many of us have tried to do something like that at a hackathon, right? It's the same. Just like I found a bunch of random Arduinos and I want to do something weird. I love Mario. If you can ever see Mario, I just sob when I see him. His show is so incredible. What I love about this is he's talking about all these people that inspired him to do what he's done. In the same way I found, especially when I'm talking to executives, this is funny. This is how to lead teams that we think executives want to hear a bunch of numbers. What they actually want to hear is about the impact that developers are having from the work you do. I want to share, I guess I'd think of some of my Mount Rushmore of developers. So I'm not going to show more of this video. Here we go. This one, I think everybody knows this guy Swift. I dunno if Swift's even in the room, but you can tell him I said nice things about him. But we talk so much about the impact that our work being developer relations professionals can have on an individual's life. But swift is the best story I've ever heard and I'm going to butcher it. But my understanding is he was building an igloo.

This is true, I think. So he's building an igloo. He's in college, he's going to be a lawyer. I don't know how it happened. Someone pokes their head in the igloo. In my mind it's like a comically fully built igloo. And they say, Hey, I'm going to this hackathon thing. You should come. And that one single moment, it impacts Swift's life. But millions of developers around the world have been impacted by that one single moment. The ripples of that single moment have impacted my life. They've impacted everyone in this room's life. And so we could say, Hey and DevRel, it's really important to focus on individuals because the impact can spread out and people kind of gloss over. But if you say, let me tell you about this guy in his igloo, right? Immediately people want to hear about it. So that's swift. I think it's such a great story of the ripples that we can have by just helping one person.

Another one of my Mount rushmores of developers is Doug McKenzie. Doug McKenzie is one of the most creative and innovative developers I've ever met. And he taught himself to code by reading API documentation. He's a magician if you haven't figured that out. And he had this idea for a trick that involved technology and he didn't know how to do it. He stumbled around some docs around this. I think he just started switching to JavaScript, but he used PHP because that was like the default language in the API documentation. He's like, I guess I use PHP. And he's now gone around the world showing people this wonder because of that API documentation, and I dunno about you all. Sometimes I've struggled to get people to understand how important it is to get the docs right. But when I tell people about Doug and I say, you never know who's going to be on your docs.

You never know where it's going to take them. Suddenly it shifts. Suddenly they're like, oh well we want Doug McKinsey to be successful with our docs. And then you want everyone, right? So Doug is on there on my Mount Rushmore is my daughter. Faye. Faye. If I dunno why you would know her. I was going to say, if you haven't heard of Faye, of course you've heard of Faye. She has been learning to code with ai. And something I've thought a lot about is how developers are going to learn and code different in the future. And I've told so many stories about that idea. There's going to be 900 million new developers over the next five years and everyone's eyes glaze over. Faye made a video coding with cursor and 3 million people watch it. And it's like the thing that crystallises when I have these conversations of not like developers are going to look different, they're going to be starting at different times, learning in different ways.

Hey, if an 8-year-old can grab cursor and build, we are entering this renaissance of building this renaissance of software development. And so these are my stories. They don't have to be your stories, but you should have stories that you can tell the people around you. You should have stories that you can tell your team that can inspire your team. I can't tell you how much so many DevNet from Twilio people are here, how much we were motivated seeing Doug do his magic. And your team needs that. Your executives need that. That's the first kind of story. The second is a story with code. And I think we could do a whole keynote talking about demos and live demos. I know people have opinions on live coding. I want to show you another clip from one of my favourite magicians, Asi Wind and then talk about what this means for us Telling stories with code

Asi: Deal. Every person here would say, oh baby, they're all the same. You are here to verify that they're different. Can you?

TV host: They are different.

Asi: Yes. So grab mix 'em up a bit if you want.

TV host: Yeah, those are different.

Asi: And then pick about five or so this much, not too many. Go ahead. Like about five, six pieces. Yeah, put 'em here. Put 'em right in the centre here and turn 'em all facing up. Oh, up. Okay, so we can see them. And here are the eyes of the honest. Also we will zoom on it. But you'll see even these that are very close, they're different. Even that different, even the shape. Every one of those. Can you divide 'em into two groups? Three and three. Any way you want any three. Okay, which three? Either three. Doesn't matter. Three these. Can I take these?

TV host: Sure.

Asi: Alright, so every choice you make is your own. I'm not trying to influence your choice. I know from these three, look one, two, and three. Can you pick any two? Any two of them? It's up to you. Any two And put 'em, right? Yeah, put 'em. That's perfect. So nervous. Okay, why is it fair from a thousand? You chose six then three. You said get rid of the other three. Then I asked you to remove two.

TV host: Yeah,

Asi: We're down to one. I know you're going to choose this one. Why? I'll expect I have the exact same puzzle at home all night. It was a lot of, I put all the pieces together and I didn't have time to finish it. I was missing one piece. No, it's right here. You are BSing me right now. It's an image and it's missing one piece. How

TV host: Howi n the world would you know for me randomly grabbing, this is not a part of the show. I'm not a part of this. You are totally, I want to remove it. It's up

Asi: To you.

TV host: Can I look at it?

Asi: Let's do it together. Ready?

TV host: Okay. Just

Asi: Take it off. There's one image here.

TV host: Okay. No. Oh my gosh,

That's my dog. I just got it

Ricky: So I love that trick. If you didn't catch it, that's her dog. Right? And the thing I love about this, and I think great magic and great demos do this is it's not about Ossie being the coolest magician in the world, right? It's not about him doing all these moves. I think for Kelly Clarkson, I know her, for Kelly Clarkson, I think everything melted away and it felt like it was for her individually. And not only did it feel that the punchline was for her individually, and I think as we think about telling stories with code, the most important thing I can stress to all of you is the story is not about yourself. The story is not about your technology and how awesome it is. The story is about the person you're showing and what it unlocks for them and who they can be with that technology.

At Twilio, we have this thing called the five minute demo. We love the five minute demo. I still love it. I think it's amazing. It is not my favourite Twilio demo. My favourite Twilio demo is something we called the Kenny Demo. And I'm going to tell you the story of the Kenny demo. So when Twilio went public, we did a hackathon on the floor of the New York Sock Exchange. And as we're setting up for this hackathon, this guy, he's in the middle, Kenny, he's just floating around and you can tell he's kind of like, what's going on here? And I think we are stressed. It's a big moment for us. But at some point somebody says, Hey man, what's going on? He's like, oh, I'm a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and you tell me what's going on. I've never seen anything like this where, oh, we're about to do a hackathon or we had to call it a cohon. I think we're about to do a cohon and it's going to be live. We're going to stream it on the internet. And he's like, oh, that's cool. And we start, and then he's floating around again. And I don't know Rob, if you, Rob Spectre is here, he's also there two places that wants magic.

I dunno if you planned this, but at some point we said, Hey, hey Kenny, do you want to come on the stream and we're going to show you how to code? And he is like, okay. And Kenny built his first application live on the stream in front of thousands of people and he was elated. We were elated and it made us realise this powerful moment that we can step away from the keyboard completely and put the user on the keyboard and teach them. So we took this demo around the world. One of my favourite stories, I went to Capitol Hill. You feel kind of cool at decon. Everyone is doing the same thing. They respect you going on Capitol Hill as a tech executive is the opposite feeling of that. And so we meet with congressional staffers and they deal with these meetings all the time.

But we started, instead of pitching them on Twilio, we said, Hey, have you ever written code before? Do you know what Twilio does? And one of my favourite moments is there's this congressional staffer. She said, I have no idea what Twilio does. I've never written code. I opened my laptop, I handed it to her. I said, let's try something. I did the Kenny demo for Clarity. It's six lines of code. This is the most simple demo you could do. She builds it. At the end of it, she texts it, she gets a response, and then she just starts playing on her phone and ignoring me. And I'm like, whatever. Maybe it didn't resonate right? And I'm just sit there awkwardly about four minutes passed of awkward silence her just text maybe like, should I check Twitter or something? What was there emergency? Finally she puts her head up.

She goes, I'm so sorry. My brother is a developer and I've been texting him and showing him this and he's asking me questions. I just wrote code. And that is our job, right? Our job is to create those moments for people. I just did a thing and I'm going to try it here. Maybe we'll see. I'm definitely pushing the limits of things working. So at CloudFlare a couple months ago, I did a session called Vibe Coding for VPs. So we have about a hundred VPs at CloudFlare. Most of them aren't technical. Most of them have never used our developer platform. All of them had heard of Vibe coding and we're like, what is this? So we took all a hundred of them and we ran them through a session that was essentially the Kenny demo with ai. And I want to try, is there anyone here who has never written code?

Just, okay. And is there anyone here who's never written code and is good at a Mac? Can I use you? I know you're, but are you up for coming up here? Amazing. And let me try, it doesn't have a name tag. Shit, what's your name? Rem. Remington. Awesome, awesome. You don't need to name tag. I was just going to read it and pretend like I knew your name and hey, thank you. First of all, your shots have looked incredible. So what I'm going to do? Yeah, give a big round of applause. Yeah. Here come stand here.

Magic participant 2: Oh God.

Ricky: I know, right? Here we go. So here, here's what we're at. We're at the CloudFlare dashboard. A couple things. This is our code. This is the output of our code. So far you can see our code says hello world, right? If you were to edit this code to make it say something different, do you have a guess of what you do?

Magic participant 2: I like to think I'm pretty smart, but I don't see hello world in here. Oh, there it is. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, you would change that.

Ricky: You want to change the world to something.

Magic participant 2: Yeah. Hello Remington.

Ricky: Hello Remington. And then just hit this refresh right there. Oh, hero. No. Okay, good, good, good. Okay. I was prepared for the fix it chant. So great. You already debugged too. So great. So here is what I want you to do. I want you to copy all of this code. So just click and highlight it, the whole thing. Line 16 to line one. And then you can command, see, go to this tab here with Google Gemini, and then just in here say, Hey, Google Gemini. Oh yeah, good. I'm going to have you say it. You don't have to type, but let me tell you what to say first so it doesn't pick me up. Then you don't get to feel like you did it, just say like, Hey, hey Gemini, can you update this code to be a simple blog?

Magic participant 2: Hey Gemini, can you update? Wait,

Ricky: Here we go. I never do that.

Magic participant 2: Hey Gemini, can you update this? Hey Gemini, can you update this code? I forgot the rest

Ricky: To be a simple blog. Do you have a blog already? No,

Magic participant 2: Just like Instagram.

Ricky: Okay. Here you just typed to be a simple blog there. And then before you send it, go to the end. Add the code. Yeah, you already know it. You don't even need me anymore. Command V. Awesome. So let's see. Now if I had planned to head more, I'd have the Jeopardy music we were talking about the, oh, this is pretty good. So scroll down, let's see what it's doing. You could sing though. I could sing. So here, go up a little bit and copy this code here. You can click that, copy it and go back to that tab where our code was. Yep. And just paste what you just copied over everything. Yeah.

Cool. And then hit refresh moment. Oh, so welcome to Remington's Simple blog. So you can scroll through that. So you just built a blog. I, yeah. Hey, thank you Remington. And this seems so basic. I can't stress how much you can win the hearts and minds of the people you work with who haven't yet experienced this tools by doing something as basic as that. And so if nothing else from this talk, go and show people that experience and our inclination is going to be like Claude Code and Cursor and all these other things. No, they know that chat experience. They used it. Keep it in their space and you'll be amazed by how people react. Okay, last thing and probably the most important thing I can leave you all with is you have to know your story, right? Why are you here? Why are you doing DevRel? One last magician clip. I say this after everyone, one of my favourite magicians, a gentleman who goes by the name of Piff, the magic dragon. We've got some Piff fans in the house.

Piff: I was invited to a costume party and I said, I need a costume to wear. My sister had a dragon outfit under her bed, so I just borrowed this dragon outfit, went to the party. No one else was in any sort of costume. It was just me. And I was like, what the hell is going on? And my friend was like, oh yeah, we changed it. I said, you're kidding me. I've just walked across London and the dragon outfit on my own. So I was drinking red wine in the corner and my friend said to me, you should do this in your act. You could be puffed and made a dragon. I said, wait, I could be puffed and made a dragon. You might've heard of my older brother Steve. And I was like, oh, that's so funny. That's a funny joke. I should try that. And it took like six months to do it, but as soon as I did it, I was like, wow, this really makes up for this face.

Ricky: So love piff. And how much better is that than if he was John the magic guy? No one would care. And so I don't know how to tell you your story. That is so individual. I want to leave you with my story and my real story, right? People ask me a lot, why do you do DevRel? And I say like, oh, I discovered computers when I was little. I like building stuff. That's not the actual story of why I do this. The actual story is this. I went to college my freshman year. I finished finals. I flew to Chicago for the weekend to celebrate. I get a phone call while I'm there. It's my dad. He says, Hey son, you coming home tonight, right? And I said, yeah. He said, okay, your mom's a little sick, just wanted to make sure you'd be there. I'm like, whatever.

I'm, I'm 19. I'm like, okay, cool. I can do that. A couple hours later my sister calls and she says, Hey, dad doesn't want you to know, but mom's really sick. And I'm like, okay. Again, I'm 19. I was like, I'm going to be home. Get off my case, right? I'm trying to enjoy Chicago. I land home. Kansas City is home for me and my grandparents pick me up. My grandparents didn't live in Kansas City. So that was the moment when I was like, oh shit, something real's going on. They drive me directly to the hospital. My mom is in a coma. I spend that summer living in the ICU. My dad has to keep working, so I kind of try to go to school and take care of her The summer after my sophomore year, she gets her leg amputated, spend that summer taking care of her.

I start junior year and again, the version of the story I would tell not to this room to normal people. I'd say I dropped out of college or I'd say I failed out of college. If I'm trying to be a little, I really faded out of college. I faded out because I was never a happy kid. Finding happiness was hard for me. And when you are a caregiver as a teenager, finding that happiness is tougher. And so my junior year, I kind of stopped eating. I stopped drinking. My parents show up at my apartment. They hadn't heard from me. They didn't know if I'm alive. It's what you would call rock bottom. I go to the doctor, all this stuff messed up with me. And I have this moment of do I want to fall into this pit of despair or do I want to try life differently?

And lots of antidepressants and therapy and all that. But I said I want to try life differently. And then doing that is finding what makes life worth it for me. And for me, what makes life worth it is serving others, is putting others above myself. What makes life worth it for me is bringing wonder, right? To show people possibilities they didn't believe they could grab hold of. And that's why I do DevRel because I can't think of a profession that gives me more opportunities to serve others and deliver wonder than this profession. I don't tell this story often. I've never told it to a room this big. Often I forget when I tell this story to mention the conclusion of the story and people are like, oh, I'm so sorry about your mom. My good news, this is my mom from a few months ago. She is still alive.

It's fine. She didn't do anything. The doctors did it. 20 some years later, she's still here. So great. So I don't want you all to leave that. My dad did pass about six years. So you win some, you lose some. I told Andrew and Greg, I was going to do that one and just see how it went over. So let me leave. This is a quote from an author I love. He says, I adapted this a little bit, but he says, the world is bursting with wonder. And yet it's rare to have consiDevReld the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. I have kind of two, maybe three takeaways. I got two minutes so I can squeeze in three first. There's a lot of folks here who have been doing this DevRel thing for a long time.

I would encourage you to not lose that wonder of this work and to not lose what a gift it is. I know things are hard. I know we talk about layoffs, I know we talk about budgets, but the fact that so many of us wake up every day and get to do this is a miracle. I know there's a lot of folks in this room who are thinking about getting into DevRel who are exploring this. My invitation to you would be to do this from a place of service to do this work. Not to show how cool you are or how much code you can sling or how much of an elite hacker you are, but to show people around the world that they can do this to. I hope over the past 40 ish minutes I've been able to show a little wonder to you all and let you into that space. I can truly say when I look around this room over the past 15 years, so many of you have given me back that wonder in spades. I can never thank you all enough for that. And thank you for listening.

Jon (MC): Thank you, Ricky. Yeah, I think that deserves a standing ovation. Thank you folks. Okay, I'm a little emotional after that. We have time for a couple of questions for Ricky, and I know he'll be hanging out later if you want to talk to him one-on-one too. So raise your hand and we will run over to you. I see one right in back there. I think that's maybe Jessica. I can't really see from here.

Ricky: Hey Jessica, good to see you.

Audience member 1: A question. Hello, how's it going? So I have a question. So I loved your talk first and foremost, but I've actually received some pushback when I've built simple inspirational applications that they're lacking technical depth or they're too simple or our audience is all very serious developers and they could read through that. That's a simple hello world app and that's not what they want to see. So how do you balance that?

Ricky: Yeah, that's a great question. First, I think so much of our job, and I tried work this in, but there was just so much I wanted to tell you. So much of our job is educating people to who developers are. And I think there are these myths, like developers are these serious people? I dunno. I basically have been running around for the past three years trying to get people to go to magic shows. And very rarely have I met a developer that's like magic. That's for kids. Everybody's like, oh my gosh, magic. That sounds incredible, right? I think there's a persona, it's tough to find a persona for me that isn't more encouraged by capturing that wonder. So first I would say the people who say developers are these serious people who want serious stuff. Maybe just you have to show them that's not entirely true. And the difference between authentic wonder versus marketing Bs. And maybe they've had an experience where you put marketing BS in front of them and they called it out. But I think if it's authentic, I've very rarely seen pushback. I also think you need a blend. I love these vibe coding VP sessions. I also love getting on calls with developers that want to go deep. I think the answer is not it's one or the other. The answer is why not both?

Jon (MC): Cool. I see another hand right there.

Audience member 2: Hi. Thank you so much. Especially the inspiration about fun demo ideas. Something that I really struggle with is the platform that I work with is again great from an enterprise perspective and it's really hard to make. How can we teach a VP to process an exabyte of data? Ooh, yeah. It's not fun. I mean, it's fun to me because I'm a nerd, but they don't really care. So in terms of inspiration of how to get ideas or where do you get ideas from? I know it's difficult to say where does inspiration come from? But in terms of just picking up bits and pieces and opening your mind to fresh ideas, do you have any recommendations? If anyone has any recommendations, please find me.

Ricky: Yes. Hey, Holly, good to see. I'm so glad we met yesterday. Thank you for answering a question or asking a question. I feel like there should be an unconference talk on cool demos for enterprise companies. So I would just say that would be a great conversation. I'll give you my take, and this is probably the worst career advice I could give, but it worked for me. So whatever is like, I've never been particularly ambitious or cared particularly about what the company needs. I've cared about what developers need and how that helps the company. And so look, I use CloudFlare and the vibe coding thing. I work at CloudFlare, but it's such a minimal part of CloudFlare. In fact, the story isn't at all about CloudFlare. And so if you think you are around people who need to be inspired by what's possible in this moment, it's okay to say, yeah, we're Databricks and this is what we do, and you can get there. But I want to start by showing you a hello world. I want to start by showing you, you can build a blog and that people are so good at extrapolating out from there. So just like don't be afraid to break out of your product, to get people inspired and then bring them back in at the right moment.

Jon (MC): Yeah, PJ, right up front here.

Audience member 2: Thank you. I have a question about how you balance the wonder you talked about and there's an inherent joy in the way that you talk about things. How do you come back to that after say something difficult, devastating, you're laid off and it's like, okay, I'm going to be sad for a bit, but then how do you come back to the wonder and the joy afterwards?

Ricky: Yeah, such a great question, especially right now. So a couple things. First is we have to cry together first when those things happen. And I don't mean sometimes, I mean literally cry, but I've been through companies where I've watched half the company get laid off and no one wants a magic show. After half the company's gone learn that lesson the hard way. So yeah, yeah, it's a severance package. Oh wait, it disappeared too soon, too soon. But yeah, you have to meet the moment, right? But also, I'll tell you, I lived in this ICU waiting room for three months when my mom was sick, and my favourite moments were when my friends showed up and they erased all of that, right? I have a good friend and the same mike. He'll never watch this, but I give him a shout out. Thanks, Mike. He showed up and he had brought a CD from Pie Balled like a band I really liked at the time. He brought me some comic books. And even though things suck, I think we actually need those things that remind us what life is about more in those moments. It's so perilous and you're going to get it wrong. I've certainly gotten it wrong, but I think meet people in the moment, cry with them, and then try to figure out how to contextualise it all.

Jon (MC): I think we only have time for one more, but Ricky will be hanging out later too. Yeah, Chuck right front.

Audience member 3: Hey, it's great talk. So this is my first sort of multicultural, multinational company that I've worked for, and I've been very comfortable as the American idiot. And Americans are very good at just being like, oh, I'm a buffoon. Let's do something silly. And I'm discovering that culturally, other places maybe they do take themselves a little bit more seriously. And obviously YouTube and stuff, people are kind of ingrained. It's like, okay, cool, you're going to be a little silly. But I've discovered that within my team sometimes I need to be a little bit more serious, or I need to treat people a little bit more seriously for it to go well. I'm kind of curious to see, is that been your experience as well? Or there's some tricks for knowing where you're going and reading the room.

Ricky: Yeah. Yeah. Such an important question. Thank you, Chuck, and loved your talk too. Yeah. So first, your story point. I love the Piff story. I love Piff, and it's so dumb and it's so ridiculous. It's so absurd. It's like my thing, if I came up here in a dragon costume and did this whole talk as like Ricky, the DevRel dragon, it would be mimicking someone else, right? And so I think the first and most important thing is find who you are. I think I am a person who loves wonder. I love joy. I love magic. I love Broadway. I love basketball. I try to bring all of that. If you are a more serious person, don't try to be me. Be the version of yourself that you are. So just first and foremost, I think that's the most important thing. Second is there's so much reading the room.

There's a lot of folks who have worked with me and for me in this room, and I think there are moments when you can't tell a joke, when you can't craft an inspirational story in that moment. You just have to grieve together, or you just have to address the behaviour together. And so all I can say is being really intentional about that. In my best moments, I will look at the meeting agenda and look at the people on that meeting agenda, and I'll think about every person and what I know about where they're at and say, okay, I know Greg's in this, I know Andrew's in this. I know Lizzie's in meeting, and I know where all of them are, and how do I need to show up based on where they all are? But there's no playbook for that. It's just taking the time and being intentional.

Jon (MC): Fantastic note to end on. Let's give Ricky another huge round of applause. Yeah, thank you.