Josh Dzielak
Burner, Dev Relations Lead at Algolia
On this episode of the podcast, I sat down on the floor — Japanese style — with Josh Dzielak, a Burner and Dev Relations lead at Algolia.
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As we do, we start off by getting into Josh’s career history (Accenture, Togetherville, VP of Eng Keen IO) followed by a conversation about Burning Man.
Josh has been through 6 burns. This has given him some perspective on how the Counter Culture and Burning Man have influenced culture at technology companies like Google, Apple, and Keen IO. We discuss this and more:
- What is Burning Man and why would you want to go
- The importance of principles for Burning Man
- Decompression (integration back into the default culture after the burn)
- Minimalism (why Josh has reduced his physical footprint)
- Synchronicity and unlearning Causality
- An epic sunrise with glow frisbee and grilled cheese sandwiches (this is how Josh bonded with founders of Keen IO where he was later hired as VP of Eng)
- How the gifting economy maps to open source software
Links:
- Evolving Work — A presentation about the book Reinventing Organizations (St. Jean de Passy, Nov 2015)
- From Counterculture to Cyberculture — Fred Turner
- Burning Man at Google, New Media & Society — Fred Turner
- Whole Earth Catalog — Stewart Brand
In the second part of the show, we drop into a discussion on Developer Relations (PR for geeks). Josh leads the developer relations team at Algolia. You’ll learn:
- The importance of the geek-to-geek protocol
- If becoming a developer advocate is the right role for you
- The importance of “the vibe” for your developer events
- The value in creating a speaker training program
- Tips for becoming a great speaker (breathing, grounding, storytelling)
- How to bootstrap and build a developer community
- The orbit model for thinking about the layers in your community
Links:
- Video: How to scale community support for APIs [devrel.net] — Josh Dzielak, DevXCon, May 2017
- Video: Scaling community by webhooking the things — Josh Dzielak, Open Source Show & Tell, June 2017
- How I got into developer advocacy
- The Developer Advocate’s Guide to Github Universe
- Core Competencies of Developer Relations — Reto Meier, Google
Algolia is the best way to build search into your mobile app or website.
- Building for developers — a tour of new features and resources in 2017 (Algolia blog, June 2017)
- Why we’re backing Open Collective and webpack (Medium, Nov 2016)
The Essential Cast explores how outside hobbies and interests of engineering leaders influence leadership philosophies, processes, and tactics.
