image credit this awesome cheerful dev advocado sticker
I recently rejoined AWS as a developer advocate for analytics on the EMR team and in the past 6 months I’ve learned a lot of things about DevRel…and a lot about what I didn’t know. So here’s a top 5 list.
1. There are multiple roles in DevRel
Some people focus on community. Others focus on proof-of-concepts. Others still focus on demos, tutorials, or docs.
And some have the lucky job of doing all of the above.
It’s a dynamic role and varies with each organization. You will get pulled in multiple directions and you will need to be hyper-organized as well as validate the priority of all the inbound interest with your peers and managers.
2. These are not the metrics you are looking for
A topic that often comes up is “how do you measure your success”.
- “Well…it’s kind of tough to tie YouTube views to marketing leads to customers…”
- “Reach and impressions are great, but what’s the actual impact?”
- “What would you say you do here?”
These are all challengers with the developer relations role. It’s a little bit marketing…a little bit engineering…and nobody really knows how to quantify all that.
I’ve built my own personal data lake to gather a lot of the metrics I need across GitHub and YouTube, but metrics aren’t the only story.
3. You will have more tripods than you know what to do with
After starting work as a dev advocate, the number of tripods I owned has increased 5-fold.
— Damon Cortesi (@dacort) June 18, 2021
ALL THE LIGHTS! 👨💻🤳🔦
I now have tripods for light rings, green screens, white screens, and other fancy lights I don’t even know about.
Whenever I travel, I bring no less than 3 tripods with me.
4. You will become a video editing expert
Camtasia? After Effects? Loom? OBS? Descript? Twitch or YouTube Live? Or LinkedIn Live?
There are so many video and live-streaming platforms. And I now spend a significant portion of my day producing videos.
You want remove alt-tab overlays from your video? I’m your guy.
5. Schedules are key
You can’t produce content “every now and then”.
You can’t have a live stream at a moment’s notice.
Folks like to know when something is coming. No, folks need to know when something is coming. 😄