Podcasts

If some you will think that I have been living under a rock 🧗‍♂️ – that’s fair 🤷🏽‍♂️. In the past year I got totally hooked on podcasts. I know, I know – the first podcasts started appearing as early as 2003 and exploded in popularity around 2010.

I guess it’s better late than never.

I was always a semi-news junkie, listening mostly to news in the car (and reading news a lot). The news on the radio is usually repeated over and over again so it can get boring rather fast. But the world of podcasts has opened a completely new world to me. The sheer number and the quality of podcasts is simply amazing. With so many amazing and educational podcasts, it’s like having a private radio station where you build and customize the playlist and can listen anywhere and anytime. Podcasts provide superb education, entertainment and are free.

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Notes đź“ť, Pictures đź“· and Moređź’ˇfrom Developer Relations Conference đźĄ‘

At the end of March I attended the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in San Mateo. Overall it was a great conference 🥑. I took notes and pictures and want to share them with you here. Just a heads up, these are my notes mostly in bulleted list format, of things that I think I heard and most are not complete sentences 🤷🏽‍♂️

Session: The Trifecta of Greater Good: Developer Advocacy in Practice via Code, Content, and Community.
Name: Willie Tejada
Company: IBM

 

  • IBM Chief Developer Advocate Willie Tejada shared IBM’s approach to Developer Advocacy using the Code, Content and Community practice
    • Code
      • Large collection of Code Patterns
      • A Code Pattern is
        • 360-degree of the solution
        • Code on GitHub
        • Architecture/flow diagram
        • Video, tutorial
      • Helping developers solve problems quickly
    • Content
      • Large collection of tutorial, blogs, how-to’s, videos
    • Community
      • In-person events, community events and community support
        • Working with organizations such as Women Who Code
  • On marketing to developers
    • It’s not true that developers don’t want to be marketed to, they are simply very very educated “consumers”
    • Willie then gave an example of buying an expresso machine (such as Nespresso)
      • People will spend a disproportional amount of time learning about the machine and how it works. When they go to the store to buy it, if the sales person knows less than the buyer the buyer will be frustrated. We don’t like when we go to buy something and we know more about the product than the person selling it to us
  • Everyone can have Code/Content/Community strategy
  • For a very long time there were to main platform Java vs. .Net. Now it’s a single platform based on K8s
  • How do we engage a larger developer community, outside of enterprises
  • Call for Code
    • Invite 22 million developers to solve disaster preparedness problems
    • Engage developers outside IBM’s core (enterprise dev.)
      • Startups
      • Schools/universities
    • Ask them to help with solutions to help with disaster preparedness

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GraphQL, Application Modernization, Serverless, Blockchain and more – March 2019 Online Meetups Recordings

IBM Developer SF team hosts weekly online meetups on various topics. Online events is one of the best ways to scale your Developer Relations program and reach developers anywhere, anytime and for a long time after the event.

The following online meetups we hosted in the month of March with links to watch the recordings.  I also encourage you to join our meetup so you will always know when our online meetups are scheduled. All online meetups are hosted by the wonderful Lisa Jung 👋.

✔️ Serverless Java – Mobile Serverless Backend as a Service (March 6, 2019)

In this online meetup Marek Sadowski taught developers about:

  • Who are the players in the Serverless ecosystem?
  • What are some use cases for Serverless solutions – with MBaaS as one of them
  • Best practices for the Serverless architecture for MBaaS
  • Whether going Serverless is really faster, better, cheaper for developers and organizations
  • Live coding examples using Java and Android

Watch the recording 📺

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Using online meetups to scale your Developer Relations program

Online events is one of the best ways to scale your developer relations program. Online events such as webinars have been used for a long time to reach developers anywhere in the world. After a webinar, the video of the webinar can be shared and uploaded to YouTube (or any other web site). This allows developers to watch the recording who couldn’t attend it live and also by anyone else. Developers can watch it anywhere in the world, any time. And that’s exactly how a video allows you to scale.

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Developer Relations Conference in 10 pictures đźĄ‘📸

This week I attended Evans Data Developer Relations Conference held in San Mateo. It was a great conference with great speakers. I took a lot of notes and will publish a separate blog post about the conference. For now, here are 10 pictures from the conference.

devrelconf-program
Data Evans Developer Relations Conference 2019

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Active developers vs. awareness events, an approach we are trying

If you in Developer Relations space then hosting and speaking at events is probably a big part of your job.

There are of many type of events that developers go to: meetups, workshops, conferences, online meetups/webinars, Lunch & Learn events, panels and others.

Metrics is the holy grail in Developer Relations. One type of a metric that many companies track is the number of active developers on their platform. Similar metrics can be number of apps created, number services created, etc.

One metric for us is a number of active developers on the IBM Cloud platform. As you can image, that’s a metric for the larger Developer Advocacy organization at IBM and also company-wide. So we got a lot of help.

What is an active developer? Every company can define it differently but usually it’s a developer who registered for a cloud account and created a service (there is also a time window when the developer has to be active).

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Why you should consider hosting Lunch & Learn events as part of your Developer Relations program

In the context of Developer Relations, a Lunch & Learn event is a lunchtime developer education event. It’s very similar to an evening meetup but hosted during the lunch hour. While a meetup can have different formats (hands-on, lecture, panel, etc), this particular event has a lecture-style format. Developers come to the event, get to eat a delicious lunch, learn something new, ask questions and network.

So now the question is – why run an event during the lunch hour. I’m going to share why a Lunch & Learn can add value to your developer relations program. I want to mention this is not to run instead of evening events but in addition to evening events.

Many developers don’t live in San Francisco. They come to San Francisco for work but don’t want to stay in San Francisco after work to attend a developer event. Many want to get home to their families, significant others, friends or just to relax. So we thought why not host an event when developers are here during the day. People have to eat lunch anyways – right? So why not combine developer education and delicious food. And that’s how we started hosing Lunch & Learn events.

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So, how does your solution compare to…

Competition

If you have been doing Developer Advocacy for some time, it’s very likely you heard this question:

“So, how does your solution compare to <insert_competitor_solution>”

This is probably not a question of if (if someone will ask but) but a question of when. This question can be asked at a conference, meetup, workshop, an online forum or even just via email.

There is no right or wrong answer here – as usually in developer advocacy. I want to share some guidelines I shared with my team on how to respond to this question.

Unless you have a deep knowledge of the competitor’s solution and can offer a constructive comparison, don’t offer a comparison. With so many different frameworks, libraries, tools, clouds – it’s not easy to have a strong understanding of how competitor’s products work.

Never bash the completion. It doesn’t make you look good and most likely damages your credibility, reputation and your company’s. It also damages any goodwill you had with the community. It shows weakness.

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Why Developer Advocacy programs should consider working with partners

One of the goals of many developer advocacy programs is to reach more new developers. One approach that I leveraged when I was at Appery.io and we leverage even more at IBM Developer is working with partners.  In this blog post I want to share a few reasons why working partners has benefits.

We work with organizations such as Women Who Code, Hacker Dojo, The Den and others. These organizations have their own vibrant developer communities. We also work with developer companies such as Twilio, Slack, Cloudinary, Dashbot, JFrog and others. These companies have their own vibrant developer communities.

There are a number of factors why we like working with partners.

First, and probably the most important – working with partners and external communities allows us to provide developer education to developers who we probably wouldn’t reach otherwise. At the same time, the partner is able to tap in our growing developer community. This has a lot of value to both organizations. A one-off event is probably fine but we like to build a relationship with these organizations. We ty to be consistent and host a monthly event. If one event a month is too often, you can try to do once every two month. Event frequency is really up to you.

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How content creates content

A big part of many developer advocacy programs is content. Content can be in the form of tutorials, blog posts, videos and hands-on workshops and other forms. Coming up with content ideas is not always easy. In this blog post I’m going to share some ideas how to simplify content creation.

The IBM Developer SF team hosts weekly events. We host at least one in-person event and one online event (webinar/online meetup). For every in-person workshop we host an online event. It’s usually best to host the online event after the in-person event as people who couldn’t make the in-person event can watch the online version (but the other way is also fine).  The in-person event is about two hours and the online event is usually 40 minutes.  So yes, the content covered will be different but the basis will be the same. This is the first example where doing a hands-on workshop easily creates content for an online event.  The in-person event doesn’t necessarily need to be a meetup/workshop type event. It can also be a conference talk, a panel or a Q&A. It can really be anything.

We we host our online events on Crowdcast, the event is automatically recorded and the recording is available a few minutes after the event is over. The video can be downloaded and uploaded to your YouTube channel. Right there you have another piece of content. You can also take the video and create a blog post with it. Embed the video in the blog post with a short description of what you covered. That’s another content idea.

Here is an example of how you can start:

content-creates-content-1

This is nice considering this all from a single content piece.

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