Issue 99

Welcome! 👋

Hey DevRel fam. How're you all doing? Apologies for the lack of newsletters lately. I suppose I don't need to offer any sort of explanation along the lines of "things have been chaotic" or "it's been hard to concentrate some days" as I suspect based on conversations that I've had with some of you, we're all feeling some level of stress on a minute-by-minute basis.

I came across a graphic by Liz and Mollie, authors of No Hard Feelings the other day that described this weird juxtaposition of emotions really well. They described a "normal" day of work when the Tetris blocks fall just perfectly and fitting one more task into your day isn't a big deal, but also showed a day when you're impacted by anxiety and somehow all of the Tetris blocks pile up on top of each other, only taking up 1 or 2 slots of the bottom row, yet reaching the very top of the window within 5 or 6 turns. I feel like both of these scenarios apply for me right now, yet I'm never really sure when I wake up which type of day I'm going to have. So some days are incredibly productive and I walk away feeling amazing and other days I take a 2-hour mid-morning nap and wake up feeling even more exhausted than I was.

I guess I'm saying this just to let you know that if you're feeling this way as well, you're not alone. Even in these times of isolation and quarantine, we're all in this together and we'll get through it together, one way or another.

In the meantime, hopefully the resources I've found will help you get through the next time you're feeling like you just don't know how to make sense of the work that you're doing, or prove the value that you're providing, or take care of yourself while also maintaining those important relationships with community members.

I'm not going to promise that this newsletter will be back to a weekly occurrence anytime soon, but I'll do my best to keep up with what's happening and provide you with the best resources possible. Hang in there, and as always, let me know if there's ever anything I can do to help. Hope to see you all sooner rather than later, even if it's just on the interwebs. ❤️

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Top News of the Week 🗞️

State of Developer Relations 2020 Survey

If you're actively working in Developer Relations, don't forget to fill out the 2020 State of Developer Relations survey! It closes April 30, so be sure to take the time to prioritize this in the next week. The information that comes out of it helps drive our entire industry forward.

Tidbits 🕔

Number of Registered Users != Success

This thread is 🔥 Click through to read it in full.

The numbers game 🔢

You will hear a lot of community managers brag about having communities of X number of registered users.

The total number of registered users does not equal the total number of active users.

-Blake Ethridge

Advice Needed: Alignment of Content

Hey #DevRel & community colleagues & followers, question: How do you rate and measure alignment of your content (talks, blog posts, etc) with company goals? Are your colleagues judging your content? Are they even consuming it? How are you approaching this?

-Alexander Reelsen

Community Management Has Never Been More Important

Couldn't agree more with this statement:

"If there's ever been a time for companies to bulk up on community managers and dev rel folks, it should be now! Our jobs are the adaption of community online" by @feynudibranch

DevRel is the key to understanding your community.

-Ahmad Awais

These Parts are the Hard Parts

Conference talks are the most visible part of the advocacy iceberg, but the real job is the rest of it. And the rest of it is still happening.

And the parts that are still happening are the hard parts.

Conference talks are much easier than video. We expect way more polish on a video than we do on a talk.

Blog posts require editing and they live forever so people expect that they're always exactly correct.

Anything that requires collaboration is harder because people are taking care of kids and family members and aren't always reachable. Or they're just going to the store or exercising during the day to reducing crowding.

I'm grateful to still have a job but I'm busy. My team is busy. We aren't just sitting around eating Girl Scout cookies and waiting for in person events to be a thing again.

-Aja Hammerly

Who is Serving Whom?

For those of you who suddenly find yourselves having to work or develop community spaces here is a golden rule: your organisation should serve the community not the other way around (shared value is a thing but you won’t achieve your goals if you just milk the community).

-Dr. Jennifer Beckett

People vs. Tools

A community is not a page or a site or a forum or a meetup. A community is people. The rest are the tools you give the people to gather.

-Jamie Langskov

Tangibles 🤓

How I write: Start with a Series of Sincere Sentences

If you're looking for tips on how to write content as you transition your conference talks to blogposts, look no further than this great piece from Zan Markan. His tips are concise and straightforward, clearly communicating many of the principles I know but can rarely voice this well. Happy writing!

A Better Way To Do Ideation Via Your Community

This short piece from Richard Millington is particularly relevant for me right now, as I was recently talking to Camunda's VP of Product about how to solicit ongoing feedback from community members during this week's user conference. I love the idea of gathering feedback during a timeboxed period, then asking community members to vote on the items that are most important to them. By formalizing this feedback loop, you can get regularly scheduled feedback from the community in addition to the feedback you'll receive through conversations and relationship-building throughout the year.

DevRel-Related COVID-19 Resources

The resources keep coming as more people figure out what it means to survive and/or succeed in the current situation we find ourselves in. Whether you find yourself closer to the survival or successful end of the gamut, I hope you and your families are staying healthy and that you're prioritizing taking care of yourself right now.

If (and only if!) you're able to also prioritize taking care of your community, here are some resources that I found exceptionally helpful:

Why Executives Need To Care About Community

Now more than ever, we need to align our work with company priorities and goals. But how do we sell this idea to executives? Sarah Robinson-Yu gives a few tips in a recent article, from finding the right story to tell to proving engagement and planning for success.

If you do find yourself caught in the crummy situation of needing to defend your community team or finding a way to reduce your budget, Rich Millington gives a few tips on how to walk through a variety of budget-cutting scenarios.

Help make community more valuable by sharing your metrics

More than ever, we need standardized metrics of success for community builders. If you work in communities -- open source or not, software or hardware, startup or enterprise or nonprofit -- I need your help.

I couldn't agree more with Matt Broberg here! He's taken the time to share what he's learned over the years and has also pulled together a Github repo to start gathering information around industry standards.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

30 podcast episodes and counting - whew! There were far too many DevRel-related podcasts to make a bullet-point list this time around, so I've created a collection of them for you instead! Check out new episodes from Community Pulse, Peers over Beers, and Engagement that Scales, in addition to a handful of other new podcasts.

Events 📆

DevRel Events

In an effort to improve how events are shown, and provide better search capabilities, we at DevRel Weekly have moved our events into Raindrop. io. Check out the new functionality, and make sure to update your bookmark! 😊

From webinars to events all over the world, if you're looking for professional development opportunities, you're in luck.

Conf Talks & Recaps

DevRelCon just released the rest of the videos from the London conference -- perfect now that we're all craving professional development opportunities! Check out the full collection of talks from DevRelCon as well as a handful of other conferences from the past few months.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

The DevRel Weekly crew is excited to announce that we have moved all of the jobs that we collect into a Raindrop.io Collection! From here, you can view all the jobs we've collected sort them in multiple ways, and even search for that something special you're looking for.

We've tagged each one with one or more of the following tags for groupings you can search by as well. Just put the hashtag followed by the group in the "🔍Find a bookmark in collection..." search bar to see what shakes out.

#Individual Contributor Roles

#Technical Community Manager Roles

#Senior Individual Contributor Roles

#Manager Roles

#Dev-Rel Adjacent Roles

Check out the new functionality, and make sure to update your bookmark! 😊

Guest Post 👫

DevRel Japan Meetup

4月1日にDevRel Meetup in Tokyo #51を開催しました。DevRel Meetup in Tokyoは日本唯一のDevRelに関するコミュニティとなっています。コロナウイルスの影響もあり、日本ではオンラインミートアップが盛んになっています。私たちのコミュニティも同様に、オンラインでイベントを行いました。今回はDevRelファーストステップというテーマで、最近DevRelをはじめた人たちに経験を語ってもらいました。社内のコミュニケーション活性化、マーケティング目標とトラッキング、DevRel組織作りなど、多様な経験が共有されました。初参加の方も多く、オンラインを通じて日本全国にDevRelの存在が広がっていくのが今後も期待できそうです。

DevRel Meetup in Tokyo held the 51th event on April 1st. "DevRel Meetup in Tokyo" is an only community of developer relations in Japan. Lately we're getting the effect of coronavirus, so most community moved to online meetup. Our community also hold the event on online. The event theme is "First step of DevRel" in this time. 3 people who began the DevRel lately talked their experiences like activation communication in the company, KPI & tracking, how to construc the department of developer relations. In this time, we met a lot of newbees, so we expect the spreading culture of DevRel by online in Japan.