So I became a Developer Evangelist…
A few weeks ago I moved from being a product engineer into a DevRel role at Pusher. In a nutshell, some things have changed, and others stayed the same. Different floor, different team, same Pusher, and same Zan.
Here’s what happened.
My new title is Developer Evangelist. The obvious parts of that new job is promoting our products in various ways, and raising awareness of Pusher among developers (and getting them excited about us).
The main objective is providing value by means of education
I’ve been flirting with the idea of doing developer relations work for a while now — since even before I joined Pusher, when I had a series of interviews with a company that didn’t go through. That was in late 2015 / early 2016.
I have always felt at home at the crossroads of Development, Product, and the “Talking to People About Things” kinds of work, so this seemed quite a natural progression for me.
Well, it turns out there’s more to the job, however.
The main objective is provide value — for both the external (non Pusher) developers, as well as the company — by means of education.
We can provide developers out there — our potential customers — with high quality content to improve their skills across the board, as well as show them how Pusher can make their jobs easier.
On the other hand, I can educate my colleagues at Pusher of what’s going on in the “real world” of development — from the industry-wide trends all the way to how (and whether) a particular narrative works in a particular developer community. That’s a lot of people to educate, and that’s why we need to be clever.
What am I really doing? DevRel at Pusher
Developer Relations, and more specifically Developer Evangelism at Pusher falls under Marketing. Where DevRel fits in the organisation varies from place to place. In some companies it’s part of Engineering, or Product, or even in its own department, depending on the company DNA, its strategy, and its size.
Research, mostly. So far at least. One of my first tasks has been finding topics and areas to focus on, and to create content for. We are trying to come up with activities that will raise general awareness of Pusher. Hundreds of thousands of developers already ❤️ us (a lot), and the goal is to get more people excited about us.
I’ve also spent some time identifying communities and influencers we could partner with to create awesome content for us.
Besides that I’ve been advising some of my colleagues in the marketing team with my experience as a developer and knowledge of our products.
So far I’ve picked two things to focus on:
State of Kotlin
The first one is creating a “State of Kotlin” survey. Kotlin is a programming language created by JetBrains, that is exploding in popularity at the moment, especially among Android Developers.
I’m curious to see what people think about Kotlin, and how they are using it. With this survey I hope to discover what the favourite learning resources, features, tools, libraries, frameworks are, as well as what developers find lacking about the wider Kotlin ecosystem.
By gathering all that insight I will be able to give that information back to the community as an infographic, and hopefully get more people excited about Kotlin and adopting it as a result. I hope it becomes something we can repeat on a regular basis, perhaps every year.
Push Notifications Best Practices
Another idea I have is building a microsite on Push Notifications etiquette and best practices.
I feel that we are being bombarded by notifications from most of the apps we install, and most of the notifications aren’t useful at all. I want it to improve the UX of apps everywhere and across all sectors, by educating developers and product managers alike on the best practices, from how to select the right cohorts of users, to the content we send them, to the way we present the notifications. The endgame is to create an evergreen piece of educational content, useful to developers and product people alike.
Finally, as I was helping with the Push Notifications SDK with my colleague Luis, we discovered a nasty crash in Android Oreo — it’s bad enough it can require your phone to be factory reset, after receiving just a single push notification. We wrote a blogpost describing the bug, and the steps to avoid it. If imaginary internet points are worth anything these days, it was well accepted. One person even gave me a shout out on Medium for it, as it solved their problem, and that’s ALWAYS awesome to see. #moresmallvictories 💯
So what’s really new?
I mentioned that I moved one floor down floor and changed the team I am on. I was part of the Product team before, and now I’m part of Marketing.
The objectives are slightly different, and so are the tasks and activities, as well as how we measure success. I’ll write more about this in a future blogpost.
As a bonus, we’re as close to the coffee machine as one can get in the office. #lifegoals #smallvictories.
Secondly, the world of marketing is super new to me, and I like new. I believe change is good. For me, this is learning at the job at its best. My team members are super helpful with my silly questions. (So far??)
How do analytics really work? Where do these numbers come from? We HAVE this data? OMG, there is a tool to track where things come from?! Such tools. Much wow.
I also still help out with general Androidery and some limited SDK work, so it’s not ALL new. I’d worked with our Push Notifications and Chatkit teams recently, helping out with the Android SDKs.
Hello, DevRel.life!
This is the first post in this publication. I intend to use it to record my learnings as I familiarise more with developer evangelism work.
I’ll write about things we do, ones that work, as well as the ones that don’t. Maybe I’ll also throw in some useful tools I might come across.
Until next time.
