Abstract

Developer Advocacy, Technical Evangelism, Developer Relations (DevRel) - developers and techies have heard these terms being used for the last ten or more years now, but what do they mean?

In this talk, Trisha will talk about the history of these roles, why a company might need one or more people to do them, and good and bad practices. During the presentation, you'll see why understanding this work is so important.

Slides

More Information

(Note: contains affiliate links)

What

• Wikipedia definition of Developer Relations
• State of DevRel Report 2021
• Developer, Advocate! (book) - lots of stories from different developer advocates about how they got into the role and what they do (I'm in there!)
• What is Developer Relations? - I'd not come across this site before, but (as it stands at the end of 2024) the descriptions given make sense and are helpful.
• State of DevRel Report 2023

Why

• How developers influence purchasing decisions in today’s IT organizations (article)
• The New Kingmakers (book) - "The book about how developers took over the world"

How

• Badass: Making Users Awesome (book) - if you only do one thing after seeing my talk, read this book!
• The Lean Startup (book) - I learnt about vanity metrics from this book, and why they're misleading
• Maker's schedule vs Manager's schedule
• Organizational Physics: The Science of Growing a Business (book) - there's lots of good stuff in here, but the thing I found super helpful was the personality profiling.
• Work smarter, not harder - my own experience of being smarter about how I work (as a developer advocate)
• Blogs: tips for speakers - I have a bunch of blog posts with tips for giving conference talks.
• Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA (book) - yes I know it's a gratuitous plug for my book. But we wrote it with Kathy Sierra's "Badass" in mind, and try to focus on how users can be awesome with IntelliJ IDEA, rather than just discussing the features of the IDE.

Credits

Slide deck graphics by Iñaki Salas at Brands Wok.