Wtf is DevRel?

Developer Relations, an umbrella of responsibilities and roles, focused on creating and fostering communities around tech, to drive adoption and growth.

Is that it? Or is there much more to uncover? Is it marketing or engineering? Is there a clear definition or it changes based on the company and the product one advocates for? Do they advocate for a product or something bigger than that? 🤔

A cute cat always works, right?

Lots of questions with no easy answer.

Why this blog post?

I'm gonna be honest with you. I tried to find alternative titles and angles for this blog, the first I thought about was:

"From CTO to DevRel, a dive in a new startup." (whoops, spoiler ahead!)

It felt too personal and that was definitely not the intention.

"How did I become a DevRel"

A bit lame, literally every blogger ever could come up with a similar title. Boring. Not my style.

Eureka: "WTF is DevRel?" — yes I got inspired by the WTF is SRE? conference.

I needed to put on paper what was going on in my mind and why not sharing it with my 1200+ readers? Btw thanks for reading, you are amazing!

Is this what DevRel is? A bunch of people sharing memes? Well, I wish!

Advocating vs Evangelism

This is the beginning of my DevRel story, it goes back to late 2019 and early 2020.

What the f- is Developer Relations?

That's what I thought the first time I heard about this movement, back in 2020.

I did my superficial and dummy research based on the first 2/3 links on Google.

At the time I was still working as DevOps for an enterprise in Italy and I was so confused by my findings. I certainly bumped into some "Tech Evangelists" on LinkedIn, mainly working in big tech companies and their role seemed to be more of a Community representative at conferences than something concrete.

How far I was? Weeell, quite a lot.

At some point, my train of thoughts went in a slightly different direction, especially after reading a couple of well written blog posts but don't ask me which ones because my long term memory is not the best.

I recall that my idea shifted more towards the "Developer Advocate" definition, because I thought, that evangelism can be seen as too tied to religion and that can be somewhat bad in a professional environment.

Advocating, on the other hand, entails that you love something and you are willing to pursue your mission to achieve something big.

I read more about the role but I could never connect with people working in the field, asking questions and probing, which is one of my favorite things ever. Coming from Italy, which is not as advanced as other European countries in IT, I had no chance of meeting a DevRel person, not even online. I think there are less than 10 people in DevRel in Italy at the moment. Crazy!

Fun fact: since I moved abroad I met quite a few people working in the field and a number of them are actually Italians, living abroad. 🇮🇹

From Engineer to CTO and then Marketing?!

At this point of the story, I had a bit less confusion in my head but nothing seemed to be coherent and cohesive. Is a DevRel still an engineer? Is it more like marketing/sales? How much time are you travelling with such a job? What are the metrics to measure success of a DevRel program?

Apparently we are also mentioned as Developer Avocados which is pretty cool. I like avocado a lot.

I have a builder background: software engineering, infrastructure management, DevOps, SRE, CTO, and anything around product.

All of these roles when it comes to responsibility and outputs, they feel pretty much measurable; with all the nuances of the case, true, but still. There was something I loved doing that was not measured in the same way, revolving around knowledge building, maintenance and transferring. Or in one world: documentation.

Not everyone knows I always loved to build and share knowledge. I have been known as the "documentation guy" for quite a while, especially in companies I contributed as an employee but also later when I started to be a freelancer. I get so much satisfaction when someone in the company reads my docs and get things done faster because of it. Welp, I also get less people asking for my intervention so I would say it is always a win-win situation.

Is this something you can measure in value? Yes, but it's way more difficult than measuring the value added by a new shiny feature, so, more often than not, documentation and knowledge in general, is forgone by most companies and that makes difficult to onboard people, to figure out changes… Less docs means: more mess.

Collaboration, on the other hand, is taken seriously even by these companies, because it is more tangible. When I used to be an employee working in enterprise I learnt to love the cross-functional team collaboration, especially between different engineering teams, integrating their products, serving APIs, creating a common middleware, interacting and managing an event-driven architecture and so on.

Later in my career, as freelancer, I found a creative way to give value through knowledge for companies: coaching and training.

I don't really know why but I find it interesting that if an employee wants to deliver an internal course about a technology, companies are quite reluctant while, at the same time, if someone from the outside proposes an upskilling training it's way easier to sell it, at a high price too. Weird.

Companies throwing money at me and not at their own employees. Thanks, I guess!

On the serious side, leveraging this discovery, I started to deliver DevOps and Cloud Native training in a lot of different settings and industries. I do love learning, teaching and educating about tech.

Ok but how did you reach all of these companies to train?

Some years before, while I was still working as employee, I decided it was time to start a personal branding journey and the first step was to create and post content about my profession. I started on LinkedIn by posting material, news, and memes in Italian, interacting with the IT community, ranting about what didn't work in the Italian industry and got quite a lot of traction back then, hence starting to blog.

After moving abroad, as freelancer, I started taking blogging seriously, switched to English too and somehow a couple of posts went viral, allowing me to touch lots of people from all over the world. I had people contacting me from every continent and it felt so amazing!

A piece of advice: if you are in doubt about creating content just do it.

Be out there, share what you do, chat with like-minded people, create and foster your network, be less shy or don't be shy at all, if you can.

Anyway, back to the story: Time passed, I grew older (sigh) and, as some of you know, I paused my freelancing career to venture into the startup world as CTO of a newly founded company, building yet-another-platform-engineering-tool, of course wrapping Kubernetes in a fancier GUI/CLI interface, which is still a cool thing to do, I think.

Was I forgetting about DevRel at this point?

Well, not really. As former CTO of a startup, you find yourself doing a lot of people work as well as engineering. On top of that, you are actually taking care of DevRel tasks too, including (but not limited to) public speaking at meetups and conferences. A bit of sales as well, finding people interested in trying out your product, approach and onboard early customers, growing a network of potential investors and so on.

Boom. That was it. The more I was CTOing, the more I understood that my current passion has been more about DevRel than C-level management.

Few of the things I loved about this CTO journey and hopefully I will get to do for a long time:

Building and trying stuff (products, communities, talks, demos, workshops)
Learn and teach about development — and DevTools
Engage with developers and tech communities
Having flexible tasks and not a boring daily routine

Developer Advocate feels like the perfect mix at this time of my career and if you look back in this post, you will find out that I highlighted some of the elements entailed by the job.

I have tons to learn, in any field and in life, but especially about DevRel and marketing, so feel free to reach out if you have any hint or suggestion. I'm all ears!

Oh and yeah, DevRel it's definitely not "just conferences", as I used to think seeing it from the outside. Silly me.

By the way, speaking of conferences, this is a small announcement break to talk about something I deeply care about.

It's time for kubetrain, road to KubeCon EU 2024. 🚂

Departing from Amsterdam and travelling to the wonderful city of Paris, we have reserved train tickets for people departing the 18th of March 2024, in time for co-located events.

We stop at Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Brussels as well, check our website out for more info.

Reminder that we are also looking for sponsors to help us bring sustainable and fun travel for KubeCon attendees! Spread the green love 💚

Now back to the main topic.

I asked some questions to DevRels I met during 2023 and sneaked my opinions in, mixing their extensive expertise with my curiosity about the role.

Is DevRel marketing, engineering or sales?

Most DevRels are ex senior engineers with a strong background. Indeed marketing is part of the job, sometimes you play with ads, campaigns, partnerships and tools that marketing people are very well versed with, but it's still a very engineer-y role. Code is something the majority still enjoys, especially open-source, but contributing to the product is something they end up doing quite often.

I find coding to be very useful, since DevRels have to keep in touch with the daily life of developers they are advocating for. Makes sense, right?

Most companies have DevRels under the broader marketing umbrella in the organizational structure, mostly for budget reasons but that doesn't stop them to feel a sense of belonging to the engineering community. So great!

In any case, marketing or engineering, I think that a DevRel's mission is to connect with people, resonate with their needs, gather feedback and turn it into product promises, convey the company mission and vision into content creation, foster a community around their product and create value for users through demos, workshops, videos and presentations.

Only at the very bottom of the funnel, they drive sales and can be great allies for that department, but DevRel works with a way different approach, I would definite is as more personal, engaging and why not, fun!

How does this role change based on the company?

I think this is something I discussed when I was speaking about my CTO role last year.

I was told, confirming my initial idea, that being a DevRel in a startup or a smaller team, is not the same as being one in a big corporation with hundreds of people in the Developer Relations umbrella. Duh.

In bigger corps you might see DevRels exclusively producing videos and demos, some others focusing on blogs and documentation or handling open-source but in a startup? Everything shifts and changes super fast!

This, of course, has pros and cons but I think that a balance between all the different angles is the best way to approach a similar role.

What are you advocating for?

What are these DevRel people advocating for? A product? A technology?

I was surprised to know the answer to this: neither of those.

Developer Relations Engineers, DevRels, Developer Advocates and Tech Evangelists are usually more focused on advocating for the community than their company product, more on promises than specific features. Of course there is a partial soft-sales process in place, but that should be a byproduct of good content, empathy and communication skills.

Last, but not least, another announcement! Yep, the one I was talking about at the very beginning of the post.

I'm glad to share that I started a new adventure to be the first Developer Relations Engineer at a shitty YC23 company that tried to lay me off 6 months later — but guess what, EU has labor laws, get fucked! 🟩

You will probably see me wear some more green, in addition to my famous full-black attires, from now on. I will be at more conferences too, so we can chat about Platform Engineering, Kubernetes, how's being a DevRel, and more!

Hey but wait a minute, how did they hired you? Interesting question. They read one of my blog posts, I had a call to chat about it with the CEO, we clicked, I was asked to apply for the role and after a couple of interviews I landed it.

This was a bit of an unconventional way, to get a job. First time I get one from a blog post, for sure! I would say it worked pretty well.

Edit: after 1 year, this is the result. Not so well.

So, here goes another piece of advice: in case you are looking for a job, don't limit yourself to just apply blindly to countless companies. I mean, don't get me wrong, that helps but it's not enough.

Instead, open your calendar, reach out to your network and see what happens! After 40+ calls in 3 months, I got many referrals, interviewed quite a few times and in the end found something that will change my professional life, forever.

I'm so thrilled to start this journey and I can't wait to show you what I can do as DevRel. 😎

p.s. I might be moving (again) soon, but in the meantime you can still find me hanging around in Europe at Kubernetes and Cloud Native meetups, as well as Platform Engineering and DevOps ones.☸️❤️

So, in the end, what's DevRel?

Hah. I don't really know, yet.

I don't really agree with the subtext of this hot take, even if I deeply respect the author.

Isn't it true for every single job? A Software Engineer is whatever who is paying you wants it to be. See? It works. I do think that a good DevRel needs to stay true to their values in order not to jeopardize their future in the field.

Can we call it honest marketing? Yeah, kind of!

Up until now, after my first month of experience and speaking with some brilliant and experienced representatives of the role, DevRel feels like a wonderful journey in which you connect with people, learn and teach about tech.

I'll keep you posted about this vision, wether it changes in time, grows or stays the exact same.

I wish to mention some of the people that inspired, mentored and supported me in this job hunt and DevRel discovery journey -not all of them are DevRels, but still helped me out 💙- In particular my deepest gratitude goes to:

Alessandro, Andrea, William, Sevi, Pablo and all the KCD Netherlands team! Jason, Francesco, Nele, Edoardo, Steve, Abdallah, Philipp, Tim, Daven… and many more but I would have a whole page of names.

(Some of the) sources used and a mix of useful links:

That's all for now, from your new favorite Developer Avocado🥑 Find all my links 👉 here.

See you around, ciao!

Originally published on blog.mb-consulting.dev