IBM Developer NA West team had a great 2019, the team accomplished a lot. A big thank you to the team 💙. I want to share some of the highlights of what the team did in 2019. You can also check out the cool infographic below.
Measuring success in Developer Relations is always one of the most interesting questions or challenges. Every organization does it differently – from measuring how many stickers were handed out, how many Twitter followers one has, to how many people attended a conference talk, to how many API calls were made. There are many more things you can measure. Every approach has its pros and cons and every organization will use an approach that helps reach their business goal(s).
I listened to a great Under the hood of Developer Marketing podcast with Jesse Davis:
where Jesse shared that a metric we should care about is how to help the developer next.
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 online meetups we hosted in November 2019 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. Our meetups are hosted by the wonderful Lisa Jung 👋.
📹 Build Watson-Enhanced Voice Agents on IBM Cloud with Nexmo (November 6, 2019)
In this online meetup with Dave Nugent developers learned how through the IBM Voice Gateway and Nexmo platform integration, you can direct voice interactions with a cognitive self-service agent—IBM Voice Agent with Watson—or access real-time transcriptions of a phone call between two people.
📖 Microsoft wants anyone to be a developer, whether they code or not – Microsoft shares plans to make anyone a builder and creator
📖 ‘Low-Code’ Becomes High Priority as Automation Demands Soar – CIOs are embracing the use of No Code and Low Code tools to allow noncoders to build applications
📖 Low-Code Platform Adoption Gets a Boost from Digital Transformation – use of low-code platforms has increased and will continue to do so in the near future despite negative feelings according to a survey
Continue reading “No Code/Visual Development links – November 26, 2019”
I attended the No Code Conf in San Francisco on November 13, 2019. This blog post is my conference recap. I also added some opinion and history of No Code space.
The main theme of the conference (in my opinion) was: the 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 allows to focus on customer experience and value, not on servers. No Code is going to democratize software development.
I know this is a lot so let’s unpack this.
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.
This week I attended No Code Conf in San Francisco. Here are some pictures from this great event.
Last September I was in a meeting with Burr Sutter. Burr runs Global Developer Advocacy at Red Hat. We were talking about Developer Advocacy and I remember Burr saying something along these lines:
Our job is to make developers awesome
I right away thought about this image:
I think the first time I saw this image was at Share Knowledge Not Features. The original graphic is from Features vs. Features.
I think it’s easy to focus on features but that’s not what Developer Advocacy is about (at least in most cases).
Developer Advocacy is about showing what developers can do with your product/service, what problems developers can solve and what solutions developers can build. I covered this topic earlier in this blog post: Share outcomes and results, not features.
Our job is to help, show and educate what rad things developers can build.
Developer Advocacy is how to make developers awesome 🙌
Update
When I shared this blog post with Burr, he told me he uses another phrase:
Our job is to give developers super powers
So here you go, two really great phrases to describe Developer Advocacy from Burr Sutter:
Our job is to make developers awesome
Our job is to give developers super powers
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 online meetups we hosted in October 2019 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. Our meetups are hosted by the wonderful Lisa Jung 👋.
⭐️ Managing Kubernetes Traffic with Istio (October 9, 2019)
In this online meetup, IBM Developer Advocate Mofizur Rahman showed how Istio can be used to manage traffic in a demo application running microservices. Developers also learned why Kubernetes need “service mesh” and how does Istio improve network traffic management.
Scaling your Developer Relations program is a challenge faced by virtually all organizations. It doesn’t matter if you are a startup with 10 people or IBM – you still need to scale your efforts.
IBM probably has one of the biggest Developer Relations organizations in the world. Even with such size, Developer Advocates 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 conference travel budget. You need to reach these developers and also scale.
The way to scale a program is through content, online meetups (webinars), videos and online forums. I shared how to scale with online meetups and content before:
All these resources are available to anyone with an internet connection regardless of location and can be consumed any time of the day or night. In addition, all these digital resources can provide value for a long time, months or even years.
Continue reading “Scaling Developer Relations with an online conference for developers”
A few weeks ago I attended Evans Data Developer Marketing Summit. During a panel one person said:
“Developers hate marketing”
I don’t agree with that.
I think developers don’t like bad marketing.
People in general don’t like bad marketing so I don’t think developers are any special here.
When someone says “developers hate marketing”, I always associate this with an old car salesperson:
No one would disagree that this is bad marketing (or sales), most of us probably experienced that. These folks usually use shady tactics and push features, not solutions.
Most will agree that (most) organizations today don’t do this.
At Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in March 2019, Willie Tejada, IBM Chief Developer Advocate said this:
On marketing to developers:
It’s not true that developers don’t want to be marketed to, they are simply very very educated “consumers”.
Here is an example of buying an espresso 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.
There are many great books on marketing out there. A great book I recently read is This is Marketing by Seth Godin. Here is how the book defines marketing:
Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.
and this one:
Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward.
There is nothing inherently bad about marketing to developers. Companies simply need to be helping solve developer’s problems. If we do this, then we won’t need to say that developers hate marketing (hopefully).
Our goal should always be to share outcomes and results, not features. My all time favorite resource is Adam DuVander’s Share Knowledge, Not Features.
I think here is one good example of that (there are thousands more of course):
Webflow is a No Code platform to build websites. Above is their home page. Webflow is not telling people that they have a visual HTML editor – that’s a feature. They are telling people what problems they can solve, what is the outcome – build a better website, faster, without coding.
Whether you call it developer marketing or something else – let’s help developers solve their problems, show them solutions, outcomes and share knowledge 🙌
