What can you do besides online events?

With most of the world in lockdown due to Coronavirus (COVID-19), most organizations switched to running online events. IBM Developer SF team has been running online events for almost two years so the switch to online-only was simple for us. I shared before how online events allow you to scale.

Not everyone can or wants to run online events. You might be in a place where internet connection doesn’t permit to produce live high-quality events. You simply might not be comfortable doing live events. And that’s fine. The good news – there are other things you can do.

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No-code, Coronavirus, Call for Code 2020, innovation

In November 2019 I attended No Code Conf in San Francisco. The main theme of the conference was that there are millions of people who want to create and build solutions but they don’t know how to code. No-code will allow these folks to build applications without code.

No-code will democratize software development.

Today there about 24-25 millions developers in the world which means only about 0.3% of people today know how to create software, invent new things.

I'll just leave this here. #nocodeconf #nocode @webflow pic.twitter.com/wYZmQpAybR
— Nattu 🇲🇻 (@reallynattu) November 13, 2019

Imagine if millions more people, who are not coders, could create and build software, invent new things. We would have awesome new services, products and markets that we probably don’t even imagine today.

Innovation would accelerate.

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Borrowing brilliance, or one quick way to come up with content ideas

Content (articles, blogs, tutorials, videos) is one of the best ways to scale developer relations. Content can be accessed by developers anywhere and anytime. High-quality content can be your evergreen content – that is content that doesn’t go out of date.

One thing that’s not always easy is coming up with content ideas or what to write about. Here is one way to come up with interesting content ideas.

Peak at what other people are publishing (also called borrowing brilliance). There is probably disproportionately more content written about using various Amazon AWS services than any other cloud provider. You can see what tutorials, articles and how-to’s were published and borrow some ideas.

For example, a lot of content on Serverless is based on using AWS Lambda. Take a tutorial that uses AWS Lambda and write a similar one that solves a similar problem using Azure Functions, IBM Cloud Functions or Google Cloud Functions.

Hope this little tip helps you publish more content.

Extra credit. You can also look at Stack Overflow. Browse a topic and see if there are any questions you can answer. If yes, you can answer that question in a blog post. Then go back to the question and answer it with a reference to your blog.

Some advice on running online meetups

IBM Developer SF hosted over 100 online meetups in the past two years and I also shared how to scale Developer Relations with online meetups. In this blog post I want to share what works for us, how we run the online meetups, what we do before, during and after the event. Pick what you believe will work for you.

Before the online meetup

This is what we do or try to do before an online meetup.

Publish the online meetup 3-4 weeks before the event (like a regular in-person meetup)
Promote the event via regular channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn (like a regular in-person event)
- If hosting an event with a partner, ask them to promote the online meetup to their community
Publish on Meetup, Eventbrite or any other platform you usually publish events on
- A note about Meetup: they seem not to like when people post to many online events but I don’t know their official policy on that
Make it clear where to register for the online event
If the event is with a remote employee or external partner, schedule 15 minutes dry-run a few days before to make sure the software you are using works for them and they can share their screen

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TensorFlow, Deep Learning, Red Hat OpenShift – watch February 2020 online meetup recordings

IBM Developer SF team hosts weekly online meetups on various topics. Online events are 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 are online meetups we hosted in February 2020. Register for any future events on Crowdcast.

Introduction to TensorFlow and Watson Machine Learning
February 5, 2020
Watch the recording 📺

Deep Learning Master Class II – Computer Vision
February 6, 2020
Watch the recording 📺

Fraud Prediction using AutoAI
February 12, 2020
Watch the recording 📺

DL Master Class III – Model Performance, Quantization, & Hyperparameter Search
February 13, 2020
Watch the recording 📺

Deploy Microservices with Red Hat OpenShift
February 19, 2020
Watch the recording 📺

Serverless Mobile Backend as a Service
February 26, 2020
Watch the recording 📺

How to scale Developer Relations with online meetups

Online meetups (webinars, web conferences or webcasts) is one of the best ways to scale Developer Relations. In most companies Developer Relations teams are small, probably under ten people. Even if we look at some of the big companies with hundreds of people in Developer Relations organizations such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, AWS and some others – they cannot be everywhere to host in-person workshops, meetups and attend conferences. You cannot scale with people.

Even if you could send a Developer Advocate to every meetup or conference, there are many more developers who don’t attend meetups or conferences. There are many reasons, maybe they leave in an area where there are no meetups or they don’t have a travel budget. You need to reach these developers and also scale.

Reach developers anywhere

As online meetups happen online using software such as Zoom, Webex, Hangouts Meet or Crowdcast (we use Crowdcast), developers from anywhere in the world can participate. Developers from places that you would never reach other wise can join your event and get high-quality developer education. Here is a map from one of our recent online meetups Deep Learning Master Class I – Introduction:

Where in the world are people joining from?

People joined from all over the world. We would not be able to reach these folks with in-person events. We simply don’t have enough people and time to do that.

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Get started with deep learning, a 5-part online master class

Machine Learning Engineer Lavanya and IBM Developer Advocate Upkar Lidder joined together to host a 5-part educational online series on deep learning. Some of the sessions already happened but no worries as you can watch the recordings (links below).

This series takes engineers from zero to expert in machine learning in 5 sessions. The world needs more people who understand machine learning, and our goal is to get you started on that path as efficiently as possible. While there are plenty of online resources, we know it’s tough to learn a technical topic without a teacher. This workshop will arm you with the tools to get started using machine learning in your day job, and the resources to find additional help if you want to go deeper.

Deep Learning Master Class I – Introduction
January 30, 2020 – 9:30am PT
Watch the recording

Deep Learning Master Class II – Computer Vision
February 6, 2020 – 9:30am PT
Watch the recording

Deep Learning Master Class III – Model Performance, Quantization, & Hyperparameter Search
February 13, 2020 – 9:30am PT
Watch the recording

Deep Learning Master Class IV – Intro to RNNs, LSTMs, and GRUs
March 20, 2020 – 9:30am PT
Register

Deep Learning Master Class V – Advanced RNNs, LSTMs, and GRUs
March 27, 2020 – 9:30am PT
Register

Streaming/Live Coding for Developer Relations – DevRel meetup recap

This week I attended the SF Developer Relations meetup where the topic was Streaming/Live Coding for Developer Relations. This blog post is a short recap, notes and pictures from the event. Thank you to Courier for proving space, food, drinks and Nicolas Grenié for organizing the event.

The meetup started with Nicki Stone, Technical Evangelist from AWS and Matt Auerbach, Developer Advocate from Twitch sharing their experiences and best practices on streaming and live coding using Twitch. In the second talk, Potch, Developer Evangelist from Glide shared his experience with live coding.

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Measuring success in Developer Relations, a 3-part framework

How to measure success in Developer Relations is one of the most discussed (or debated) topics. Having been in Developer Relations for a good number of years I believe it’s important we measure it. Without measuring we don’t know what to improve, what works and what doesn’t work.

Now, I don’t believe there is one way to measure Developer Relations. Every company with a Developer Relations organization or a team will measure its success differently. The same way companies approach success in general, every company has its own unique ways to measure success.

Instead of telling you how to measure success, I’d like to offer a framework. The framework can be adjusted for a company’s specific goal and needs. The framework consists of three parts: