DevXCon SF 2017: Faces to Names
“Hey, Val!” “Nice to meet you in person, Andy/Brandon/Roach!” “Here’s your badge, ____.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I loved your blog post on Kubernetes.”
I had a blast volunteering at DevXCon SF, the conference about developer relations, and conversations like those above were routine not just myself, but for everyone. It’s wonderful to know so many people, and to follow their progress online in the form of social media, blog posts, GitHub repos, and tutorials, but it’s even more so to see that communication and interaction translate to real-life.
The day started off early at 7 am for setup. Hey, volunteers have to earn their free tickets!
It was so neat to finally meet Phil Leggetter, one of the organizers, in person after hearing so many great things about him from Tomomi and Stephen. He was busy (as to be expected) making sure things ran smoothly, I only wish I could have picked his brain more regarding all things developer relations (in the meantime, check out his devrelometer.)
Checking people in involved many conversations like the ones mentioned above, and involved many reunions — hey, the dev rel community is still pretty small!
I missed most of the morning talks, but made it in time to hear Anil Dash, CEO of Fog Creek, ask if there were any Twilio evangelists in the room. I wasn’t sure if I counted, but laughed and blushed when some who knew I would start as an intern there looked at me and smiled.
Fellow Fog Creek-er Jenn Schiffer also hit us with some key ideas:
“Listening is the hardest problem in computer science.”
The next talk I attended was Notice me, Senpai! Get Discovered with Creative Technical Content by Slack’s Tomomi Imura.
Tomomi went over where to get discovered (meet the developers where they are, like Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, newsletters, etc), how to target different communities and interests with hacks and projects (Pokémon Go, anyone?), and more.
“Partnering with other companies for building use cases helps gain exposure to your dev content.” — Tomomi Imura
Next, Stripe’s Romain Huet shared tips for designing a great API and supporting developers
“SDKs are critical for good DX.” — Romain Huet
Erin McKean of Wordnik, an API I used to make a Twitter bot three years ago when I was just starting CS110, went over how to cater to new developers. She also taught us a fun word that really resonates with a lot of developers: zemblanity.
“Developers suffer from a lot of zemblanity — the chance encounter of bad experiences.”
Slack’s Bear Douglas discussed building positive support experiences for developers. I appreciated this topic, especially after last summer, when I had the privilege of learning Android from her and using Fabric docs she’d worked on!
Bear pointed out how Slack and Twitter’s transparent product roadmaps help disclose their priorities, leading to transparent conversation with their respective developer communities.
Algolia’s Josh Dzielak explained,
“Community is a great way to scale developer conversations…API support is not just about programming.”
One talk of the day really stuck with everyone. Okta’s Alex Salazar dived in to DevX and DevRel ROI from a CEO’s perspective, highlighting three strategies: to sell the product (Twilio, Stripe, Okta), to extend the core product (Box, Salesforce), or to build an ecosystem (Slack, Apple, and Google). Pick one — but don’t whittle down your DevRel program to these three — and do not copy Twilio.
The final talk of the day, by AWS’s Adam Fitzgerald, delved into which metrics matter in developer relations? What is valued and weighted more heavily? In short, they all are important and all contribute, and it is difficult to compare different metrics.
All in all, DevXCon SF was one of the most well-organized one-day conferences I’ve been to. The atmosphere was so welcoming, collaborative, and supportive, and it was easy to forget that many attendees worked for rival companies. I’m excited for the next one taking place in Tokyo! Until then, we’re all on Twitter (and GitHub, Slack, StackOverflow, Reddit…)
