My last three years of DevRel (A summary)

🌱 - A collection of sprouting thoughts.

All great things come to an end. Like my time at Strapi or a cup of tea. You never really feel it when the heat is on, then again no one likes a cold cup of Earl Grey. I’m writing this as a form of housekeeping, both to prepare the next cup of tea and to talk about how good or bad a cup of tea I just had.

This is also a town crier’s message to the townspeople who ask me to collaborate. I sadly don’t work there anymore.

I joined as a Developer Advocate in mid-2020, fresh-faced, and eager. Here is some of what I have been up to.

2020 - Genesis

I joined to learn about what it takes to grow a dev tools startup. I was curious, excited and very eager. Solo DevRel isn’t easy. Everyone tells you to push back as much as you can just because of the sheer number of requests you get, I didn’t listen and this would bite me in the behind.

We had a visibility problem, the low-hanging fruit was to tackle this. I took over community initiatives, ran a webinar series, gave talks, wrote blog posts and featured on podcasts. There was a visible plugging on the me sizes DevRel gap the company had. I was as the cheugy kids say, “killing it”. Traffic was up, sentiment was growing,

Some highlights for your consuming pleasure!

• introducing the community champions program I worked on
• one of the many product release support streams
• feature-specific blog content to boost usage
• one of the numerous online meetups we ran for awareness

2021 - Experimentation

I moved continents in 2021. This is NOT easy. Regardless, I was kicking butt! We started regular community calls, scaled blog content and explored video content with partners, for releases and streams. With the usual demos, program management and educational content for new feature releases. We also did our first developer conferences as a company which was a huge success. Great value! It helped with partnerships and ecosystem relationships, sentiment was great, company morale was up and so much more. Not to mention the replay content played well with our investment in YouTube videos. We did way more videos, this is where my preference for video probably started.

What came out of all of this…

• a stream on a feature to drive usage
• educational content to support a new major release
• even more commitment to adding value to our community
• some external content, engaging the masses
• a lovely community call; more community investment
• educational content aiming to create a better developer experience

2022 - Scale

This was an incredibly busy year. A large chunk of it was spent hiring, managing and putting out fires. We had a major version released that needed some time to take off. Breaking changes and tough deadlines did not help. The first half of this year was creating content for the releases and preparing for the second edition of our user conferences. DevRel of course a big part of that. The second half was hiring and growing my team while balancing a lot of what I’ve already mentioned before. This is where pushback becomes important. Towards the end of the year, I got super stressed and had to take medical leave. We were still pushing content, giving talks, and supporting the community. A larger team means that we could double down on what was successful and we built a robust content and community strategy.

Some things to look at from that year.

• a workshop with an ecosystem and business partner
• a stream for a plugin week to drive plugin creation
• an industry panel on the state of headless cms

2023 - Trouble

Not to be melodramatic with the title but I didn’t realise it then, I was burned out. Being the reliable person I like to be, I feel that I didn’t put needs first until it was a little too late. I decided to step down from my role as manager and focus on feeling like myself and enjoying what I do as an IC. “I used to love this” I would think to myself as I dragged my feet through a task that should have been way easier than I made it out to be.

Nevertheless, I still had talks to give, courses to prepare, programs to run, posts to write, conferences to half prepare for and all that jazz.

Some artefacts from that epoch!

• a content refresh following a major release with breaking changes
• supplementary api content and something to ride the AI hype train
• an egghead course on how strapi works with the next.js version
• more program work for open-source sustainability
• a screencast on a new feature to educate users
• a talk on website speed and performance

In April, I left the job.

I could write a whole post about what it takes to get you to that somewhat dark place professionally. Stay in touch, you might just read it.

Now this is all worth saying that this is what I chose to share because the nature of DevRel makes it insanely difficult to share everything I worked on. I’m writing this on the off chance that I can look back and appreciate the experience for what it was. I learned a lot about what I like and don’t like professionally, where I can improve and where I’m well-adjusted.

I know I missed building regularly, I was hungry for a larger devrel product impact as evident in this post and many other unpublished pieces.

As if I have not foreshadowed enough, I led a panel on product-led growth with some fantastic guests and I’m working on transcribing it. There were so many great takeaways that I need to share. You can watch it here.

How am I doing now? Good, better! I’m looking for my next gig (in this market? I knowww) so if you feel like any or some of this might be useful to your company. Reach out. It’s a TMI galore which I understand might be a lot for most companies but yeah

Also, I wrote this to be somewhat entertaining because everything professional or adjacent shouldn’t be a snoozefest, I can write without the humour and wit for those who might read and think I’m incompetent or something idk, people are weird.

ciao!