The most social and loneliest job: being a solo developer advocate

Juha-Matti Santala: Awesome. Hello, everybody. Super nice to be here at DevRelCon today.

Speaker 2: I wanted to talk about something that

Juha-Matti Santala: I noticed kind of accidentally, and something that I think a lot of developer advocates might be experiencing without realizing. And that's

Speaker 2: how at the same time you can have

Juha-Matti Santala: the most social and the loneliest job at the same time. So to give a little bit context on who I am and what I do, My name is Jyus.

Speaker 2: I work as a developer advocate

Juha-Matti Santala: at at Futurist. We are a software consultancy. So we do projects with clients instead of having our own product. So I'm more focused on the hiring side

Speaker 2: of the the developer advocacy.

Juha-Matti Santala: In addition to my job, I run a bunch of communities locally, globally, online, offline. I'm really passionate about bringing developers together

Speaker 2: to have a good time,

Juha-Matti Santala: to learn something new, and to get better at what they do. And I've mentioned joining from Helsinki, Finland.

Speaker 2: And I'm also joined by my developer, Avocado, on my my sofa at the

Juha-Matti Santala: back of me, giving me the support that that you need as a developer advocate. So there's two sides to this talk. The first one is about this job being one of the most social jobs out there.

Speaker 2: I want to kind of talk about what it

Juha-Matti Santala: means in the context of me and in the context of my work.

Speaker 2: So quite a lot of

Juha-Matti Santala: developer advocacy, you're in the middle of the company and the community. You represent the company and the product to the community, and you represent the community to the company. So at the center in this graph, there's me. And if we first look at the internal,

Speaker 2: who do I work with

Juha-Matti Santala: day to day inside the company?

Speaker 2: So first of all, I work with our developers. I organize internal meetups, hackathons. I help them

Juha-Matti Santala: experiment kind of experiment with creating content, public speaking. And I'm always looking for the developers to get more opportunities to learn, to become better at what they do, and to share to others, both internally and externally, about what they know.

Speaker 2: I work really closely with the marketing team.

Juha-Matti Santala: Now I'm not a marketing person myself, but I work day to day with the great colleagues

Speaker 2: on kind of providing

Juha-Matti Santala: the developer focus and what resonates with developers. What are the other ends? What are developers interested in? And then the marketing does their magic to make it available to people.

Speaker 2: I work really closely with the recruitment. Once again, I'm not

Juha-Matti Santala: a recruiter. I don't do headhunting. I don't do interviews,

Speaker 2: but I help our recruitment team to understand

Juha-Matti Santala: what's happening in the industry, what are developers interested in, and kind of generating warm leads

Speaker 2: for the recruitment team by

Juha-Matti Santala: doing interesting stuff in the developer community. I also work really closely with the human care, which is our way of

Speaker 2: saying HR. I do a lot of kind of internal functions. I participate in onboarding to make sure that developers are feeling that, like, they belong. And one of the key

Juha-Matti Santala: things in our company is that we are such a kind of network organization. It matters a lot who you know and who knows you. So I try to help people get to know each other based on common interests. And lastly, I work with our salespeople

Speaker 2: to help them know who are the

Juha-Matti Santala: best developers for certain positions, certain projects, and what kind of projects are interesting, what kind of technologies are things that that resonate with people. And, occasionally, I work with our designers, with our data scientists, especially when it comes to organizing events.

Speaker 2: But then if we look

Juha-Matti Santala: at the external side, the community

Speaker 2: side, obviously, there's the developers, the biggest group. I interact with a lot

Juha-Matti Santala: of developers day to day in events, in online and offline communities. I get to eat a lot of lunches with amazing people,

Speaker 2: and there's a lot of

Juha-Matti Santala: things that we want to offer to these people. Meetups, hackathons,

Speaker 2: opportunities to to learn, opportunities to meet

Juha-Matti Santala: each other, and opportunities to have fun. Another group is the community organizers. We help a

Speaker 2: lot of local organizers to

Juha-Matti Santala: run their events, run their communities. We help them by hosting events, sponsoring events, helping them find speakers from the large community, but also from our company. And kind of last but least, one thing that's really interesting in my job is that I get to interact with a lot of students and universities. So we get

Speaker 2: to offer them kind of complementary activities that help

Juha-Matti Santala: the students both through the student organizations, but also university degrees and courses to learn skills that

Speaker 2: the school programs might not teach and to give them an opportunity to network

Juha-Matti Santala: with developers already in the industry.

Speaker 2: So now if we look

Juha-Matti Santala: at this picture, this is a lot of people. And this is a lot of people I interact with kind of individually, mostly face to face, sometimes online. In addition to that, there's the kind of indirect impact as well through newsletters,

Speaker 2: content. But this is

Juha-Matti Santala: what makes this job so social,

Speaker 2: and this is why I

Juha-Matti Santala: love my job. It is so great that I get to interact with all these people, hundreds of people face to face every month. So what do I mean when I say that this can be quite a lonely job?

Speaker 2: So if we look at all these groups and we think about what do I talk with

Juha-Matti Santala: them, what kind of activities we do, Let's first look at the developers on both sides. We talk about technology. We get excited about the individual details of some languages or tools, or we talk about the bigger impact in the society and the business. But we don't talk about

Speaker 2: developer advocacy. With the marketing and recruitment,

Juha-Matti Santala: we talk about reaching developers, and we

Speaker 2: talk about content, and we talk about how can we make

Juha-Matti Santala: the company a great place to work

Speaker 2: at for those developers. But we don't talk about developer advocacy.

Juha-Matti Santala: With human care and sales, we talk about how to make the company the best place for developers to work, how to get them the best support, the best projects, the best opportunities to learn.

Speaker 2: But we don't talk about developer advocacy.

Juha-Matti Santala: With community organizers, we talk about the events and enabling their organizations.

Speaker 2: When we little bit talk about developer advocacy,

Juha-Matti Santala: but not really that much, it's mostly the practical stuff. And with students and universities, we offer them opportunities to learn, opportunities to meet people, and opportunities to get into the industry. But we don't talk about developer advocacy.

Speaker 2: So that leaves me

Juha-Matti Santala: all alone in the center

Speaker 2: with kind of nobody to talk about developer advocacy with, nobody to get

Juha-Matti Santala: super excited about the things that I'm passionate about.

Speaker 2: It feels quite often that

Juha-Matti Santala: the things that I talk about with people is like we heard earlier in the talks by by the the previous speakers. We talk about the impact. We talk about how the developer advocacy can enable those functions and what those people want to do.

Speaker 2: But we don't get excited about the things that

Juha-Matti Santala: I'm excited about. And it's not because people don't care.

Speaker 2: It's mostly because it's not their role to care. They have their

Juha-Matti Santala: own goals, their own needs, and their own things they need to achieve. And they are not developer advocates, so they don't get excited about it on the same level as I do. I realized this couple of years ago when I had couple of friends from overseas visiting Helsinki. We had long lunches and long dinners, and we just keep out about our cool developer advocacy is. We talked about how exciting it is to organize events.

We talked about how exciting it is to craft a newsletter that people love.

Speaker 2: And that's when I got kind of an answer to my question,

Juha-Matti Santala: how can I feel lonely in a social job?

Speaker 2: And then I started looking for other people

Juha-Matti Santala: and finding these peer group community groups, which are really important. Having people who understand what you do and get excited about the same things is really valuable. Sorry. So I wanna name couple of really good ones in addition to this conference and the great Discord discussions that we're having. One that I found quite recently was called DevRel Collective.

You can find it on Google. It's a great community

Speaker 2: of couple of thousand developer advocates

Juha-Matti Santala: or or developer relations people, not necessarily advocates,

Speaker 2: who share the the good and the bad of

Juha-Matti Santala: the job, the best practices, the great ideas, but also opportunities to share when things are not going so hard. And if you work in in documentation or writing things, I found really great community in the writer docs people. They organize meetups, conferences, but they also have a brilliant Slack community

Speaker 2: where you get to get to geek out about documentation. You get to learn about the great things. And when I

Juha-Matti Santala: was today listening to all these talks today and looking at the schedule for the upcoming days, I got super excited that I have found this kind of support group from outside the company. And if you are a solo developer, relations person, or solo dev advocate, I highly recommend seeking out these groups.

Speaker 2: And I hope that sharing my story helped some of you maybe give a name

Juha-Matti Santala: to this weird feeling and kind of a justification for how you can feel lonely in the really social job.

Speaker 2: I'm gonna be hanging

Juha-Matti Santala: out in the Discord. Super happy to answer any questions. Would love to hear your experiences. Am I the only one who's feeling lonely? And then ideas for how to tackle this in the day

Speaker 2: to day job. You can find

Juha-Matti Santala: me online on Twitter and on my website. Thanks to DevRelCon for having me as a speaker and thanks for for all of you coming in and listen. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Thank you. That was wonderful. And I saw a couple of comments over in our speaker questions channel saying this totally hits home. And we have what I think is a really fantastic question to kick off our q and a for you, which is as a single person DevRel, do you set your own KPIs and OKRs? Does the management create those for you or is it something else?

Speaker 2: Yes. It's it's the combination of, yes. I do,

Juha-Matti Santala: and it's something else.

Speaker 2: So the way I got

Juha-Matti Santala: this role was basically, I worked as a developer at the company, and then I pitched this idea that we need somebody to run the DevRel operations. So it means that I I told the company that we need this And I should be doing this, which means that I kind of I manage myself in a lot

Speaker 2: of ways together, of course,

Juha-Matti Santala: with these sub teams that I mentioned.

Speaker 2: Right. But on the other hand, I don't have a lot of kind of hard metrics. I'm not a big believer in It kind

Juha-Matti Santala: of metrifying in, like, human relationships.

Speaker 2: I think. It's something that, of course, we follow the trends. We we look at the numbers. But I don't want to set really hard kind of like, metrics in a way because then it can get into the way of being a human

Juha-Matti Santala: to another human being. And I think that's something

Speaker 2: that I really value in developercom like, developer communities. And like you guys talked about in the previous set, it's about building relationships,

Juha-Matti Santala: not just one way kind of communicating the content, but it's all about back and forth.

Speaker 2: And I think A key thing there is

Juha-Matti Santala: that it's not just between the company and the members of the community, but it the key piece in community is the connections between people inside the community. So I I love bringing developers together

Speaker 2: within the community as well. Awesome.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I that's a wonderful approach and thank you for diving so deep into it. And a natural follow on from that, which you touched on a little bit in your talk, I think this gets more towards the the the practical hard and fast of just time management is with so many activities on your plate, how do you manage your time? And do you have any tips particularly for context switching? And context switching, think is like the bane of every developer relations person, particularly, you know, like trying to write a blog post waiting for a plane kind of situation.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Speaker 2: Unfortunately, I don't have good advice.

Juha-Matti Santala: For me, I'm just a really stubborn guy. So it's it's just kind of like I I could have refused to fail that.

Speaker 2: But, yeah, it's it's really tough.

Juha-Matti Santala: And sometimes it's you know, days get long sometimes. I'm dead. Especially when it comes to events. Like I I feel like I have two, three month sections a year In the spring. And in the fall when there's a lot of stuff happening.

And then the summer and the winter are kind of more relaxed.

Speaker 2: I can take a little bit longer holiday.

Juha-Matti Santala: I can focus a little bit more on kind

Speaker 2: of the the planning and the

Juha-Matti Santala: the content kind of side. But especially right now, when the the live events are coming back, it's it's really hectic. And then you try to squeeze in some of the things that that you need to get done in between hanging out with people and and having a good time. But I I I'm not the best one when it comes to managing my time. So

Speaker 3: I I I think that's a useful experience. You know, sometimes knowing that there isn't a magical trick to make it work is just as useful as knowing the magical trick. Right? And I think one of the

Speaker 2: one of the important

Juha-Matti Santala: things there is that you you need to communicate that with the people you ever quit.

Speaker 2: And that's why. Where I'm really lucky that I have a

Juha-Matti Santala: I have a, like, teams of colleagues outside the dev

Speaker 2: Oh, that. That are really

Juha-Matti Santala: kind of cool and supportive. So They understand that sometimes if I'm at the office until midnight hosting an event, I might not be the most kind of responsive in that the next day.