Developer Relations: New Career Path for Developers
開発者関係: 開発者のための新しいキャリアパス
Summary:
要点:
Developer relations is a growing field with community building, developer marketing, developer education, and developer success as key areas.
As a developer advocate at Agora, the narrator has focused on developer education through tutorials and talks, and developer marketing through general content creation.
Developer relations roles vary by company
some have specialists while smaller teams cover all areas. It's important to ask questions when interviewing.
Direct work has included content creation, conference attendance, product feedback, package development, internal strategy, and collaborations.
The narrator finds developer relations more fulfilling than engineering due to aligning with life goals, despite being more challenging.
(00:00) i created a poll on twitter and over 80 of you don't fully understand what developer relations is and i don't blame you it's a very confusing industry but it is rapidly growing and i don't believe it's gonna stop anytime soon i think there's gonna be more and more developer relations jobs popping up in the future in this video i to break down what developer relations is and my experience in the past year and two months working in the industry so past year i've been working at a company
(00:22) called agora and to put it lightly we're basically building out a new internet you've probably heard of web 2 web 3 but we're so far ahead we're at like web 12 or something but all jokes aside agora has an sdk that is built on top of their very efficient network which can be used for real-time engagement with our main two priors being audio and video calls now during the past year as a developer advocate at agura i've been learning a ton as well as being involved in building out and expanding our team
(00:48) during this process i've learned a lot from the actual company from online resources and even some books that i've read and what i found is that there's a lot of confusion about developer relations i think the main reason for that is just because there's just so much in developer relations and it all fits on that one umbrella term of developer relations and developer advocates might do a lot of things or if it's a bigger company they might be specific to one thing so this image is from that developer relations book i
(01:13) showed you i think it sums up developer relations in general very well the developer relations field has a lot of different sections it has this community developer marketing developer education and developer success and some companies especially early stage companies startups that are focused on building a really good product haven't dove deep into what developer relations is when they go out to hire a developer advocate for their product and i don't necessarily blame them there's a there's a lot to learn
(01:38) just make sure when you're interviewing for a developer relations position you ask a lot of questions so that you actually understand what that role is so i wanted to cover a little bit about each of these sections of developer relations and what kind of work they entail like i said every company kind of has them different and depending on the size company you might be the only developer advocate there and you would maybe have to cover all of them and maybe some companies focus on community more than all the other ones so you
(02:00) would be doing more community stuff and these other fields might not be covered that much it really just depends on company but in general the community aspect is engaging with the people using the product building out a community this most often includes doing stuff like events and maybe meetups hackathons maybe online events discoint servers just any way to get the community engaged with the product and get more and more people using it and i see with these arrows in the middle this will probably have a lot to do with the
(02:26) retention of the people coming in so they can stay a part of the community get engaged and maybe invite more people so also grow awareness a little bit then you have the developer marketing section now this one's a little bit tricky because some of the first sentences in this book are developer relations is not marketing developers don't really like to be marketed to but there are still ways to get the awareness of the brand and getting people to really learn about what the company is this includes running their social accounts maybe
(02:50) twitter maybe creating some youtube content made to kind of spread the awareness of the company and things along those lines so this is mostly for awareness getting people to learn about the brand and that feeds directly into developer education now this is the part where you actually teach the people about the product and how to use the product how to build stuff with it all cool things like that also most likely involve maybe creating some youtube content some blogs maybe even other social formats of content teaching
(03:15) people just how to use it maybe creating demos going to talks teaching people about how to work with it live things like that now this deals with the activation getting people to actually use it and a little bit of the engagement so that they start really using the product and getting to know what it's capable of doing and things like that and the last section is developer success which is helping developers be successful in the things that they're building this includes answering questions on stack overflow or
(03:40) slack or wherever the questions are coming in from this might include building products that make it easier for people to use the product in general maybe some local tools some no-code tools stuff like that basically whatever helps the developer be successful in using this product this of course helps engagement and retention of the developers and like i said this varies a bunch between companies so maybe there's only one developer advocate that does literally all of this stuff or maybe the company's a little bit bigger they have
(04:04) a person for each discipline but even then there's still a lot of variety and what type of stuff you will be working on for example something you'd probably want to ask a company in developer education is what type of content would you be making is it blog content is it video content you might only be comfortable with one kind so you got to make sure you ask a bunch of questions if you're interviewing for a role like this now the more direct thing that i can give you is things that i have actually been a part of within agora so
(04:29) at aguero we all have these roles pretty much defined for whoever is working on what parts of the developer relations team now my role in the company is focused on the developer education and the developer marketing part in my opinion these have a lot of overlap so they can kind of be handled by a similar process the way we have it structured there is a lot of it is driven by the content that we create so the developer education content teaches people and sometimes we create content that spreads it for more for awareness so in the past
(04:55) year here's a list of some of the stuff that i've accomplished so first i've created a bunch of tutorials about agora so teaching people how to actually use this stuff as a part of the developer education part i've also created videos that aren't necessary tutorials but just general videos about the industry i think this falls more in line with the developer marketing part i've also done some online talks about agora teaching people how to use the product live this of course falls into developer education
(05:18) again a big part of it has been answering questions on slack and even stack overflow that falls into developer success i've attended two conferences one of them was gdc which is the global developer conference and the other one is collision in toronto this falls in line the developer marketing and the developer education part depending on who's coming to our booth giving feedback to the engineering team has been another big part this falls in the developer success where you basically see what the community's asking for what
(05:44) kind of things we need give it to the engineering team so they can build out that product and make it better then there was the agora ui kit package for flutter that me and mahir built out this made it a lot simpler for developers to integrate a gore into the application because now they only need three ounce of code instead of creating layouts and all this other stuff and that falls into the developer success part now more recently as i've gained experience at agora and learn more about the product and experience and develop relations
(06:07) i've been taking on some bigger initiatives those include internal content strategy as well as working with outside creators to spread the agora brand that's a little snippet of what i've been doing in the developer relations and personally i really really enjoy it even though i think it's significantly harder than my previous job as a senior software engineer i think it's just a lot more fulfilling and something that aligns more with what i want to do with my life now i'm curious and let me know in the comments
(06:30) was this video helpful and would you be interested in getting into developer relations at some point
