Another Newsletter
On the Lindy Effect & Developer Relations
Hello Everyone,
Long time no see, I know, I need to work on my commitments, but these last couple of weeks have been really hectic at work.
It’s funny because what I do is very hard to explain to non-startup people, as it’s an amalgam of many different things, called Developer Relations. It’s a relatively new domain that encompasses 3 distinct roles, namely “Technical Community Manager”, “Developer Advocate” and “Developer Evangelist”. Sometimes they are used interchangeably, but that’s wrong as they are quite distinct.
Developer Relations
As a developer relations teams, we are simply responsible for managing the relation that exists between the company and the users. As the users are developers and they probably use the product in their work, this kind of relationship starts having all sorts of different characteristics. Even the definition changes.
According to Mary Thenvgall, one of the thought leaders in the space:
COMMUNITY IS A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO NOT ONLY SHARE COMMON PRINCIPLES, BUT ALSO DEVELOP AND SHARE PRACTICES THAT HELP INDIVIDUALS IN THE GROUP THRIVE.
This is an important distinction to the “other” communities because the community doesn’t have a certain goal to work towards, but rather exists as a support group which leverages the best practices & time investment of everyone involved to transfer knowledge from one member to another. Members care to help each other and make each member successful in using the product around which the community has formed.
Developer Advocate
So, given than community, a developer advocate is the most techie of the 3 roles. He/She is responsible for coding tools and sample applications, examples that the community can use in order to speed up their adoption of the product. Moreover, she/he is responsible for relaying the feedback back to the product team of the company and making sure that the community’s voice is heard in the product decisions. In order to achieve this, he/she spends considerable time with the users, either in online forums or booths and conferences.
Technical Community Builder
The less technically demanding role, but equally important. They are responsible for building all the infrastructure that the community is built upon. All the processes, systems, and actual tools that will be used to create and foster an online community. They ensure that users talk with the appropriate persons, the community is headed towards the direction that the company wants and they are behind the alpha-beta programs. In other words, they are the maestro behind every successful community.
Developer Evangelist
An evangelist of sorts, it’s like the developer advocate on the first read, by they have a much more “salesy” approach to their goals. They don’t only talk about the technology and the product, as an engineer to engineers, but they also want to convince the audience about the importance of this new piece of technology. They will probably talk to the c-level executives which are needed to be convinced in order to initiate the sale process, not in a meeting, but in business conferences and thought-leadership events. The keynote stars who evangelize a new paradigm, largely supported by their company, that can potentially change the status quo.
If you want to read more about Developer Relations, here are a couple of threads:
P.S
If you happen to know someone in the field of developer relations and who is based in Athens, please reach out to me. I am thinking about launching a relevant meetup (community/dev-rel) so I would like to have a chat ✌️
News from my blog
I have published a piece on the Lindy Effect, a powerful heuristic that is super simple to use and can illustrate some very unintuitive results in our decision making.
(P.S Nassim Taleb has made numerous remarks on it)
The ultimate test of everything. Time.
Things that caught my eye
The Ultime Guide to writing online, by David Perell (click on the image)
Quote that I liked
Final Remarks
I do hope to return to more active writing. Writing is not about getting perfect essays out, but trying out different formats, practice your writing skills, and most importantly, getting your ideas out in the open. Writing, either through a blog, or event twitter threads is a great way to get some instant feedback on your ideas. It’s a powerful tool that most people, such as myself, haven’t leveraged to the fullest. I intend to change that.
For the time being, thank you for reading and I hope we talk again soon.
Best,
Odysseas