Getting into DevRel
What is Developer Relations (DevRel), and how do you build a career in it? Chris is joined by Martin Woodward — Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, and the person who brought Git into Microsoft — who shares his journey from developer at banks and insurance firms, through building and selling an open source project to Microsoft, to leading developer community work at scale.
Topics covered include:
- The open source contribution funnel — from passive consumer to active contributor to project co-maintainer, and how to optimise each stage
- Community leadership vs DevRel — the difference between volunteering for community and being paid to do it as your job
- Giving vs taking — why it is okay to contribute to open source for selfish reasons, and when it is right to walk away to avoid burnout
- GitHub Actions as a community case study — how a simple, composable automation concept grew to over 9,000 marketplace actions and outpaced older CI/CD ecosystems
- Building a DevRel profile — content creation, presenting at meetups and conferences, podcasting, and streaming as ways to practise and demonstrate skills
- Handling feedback and trolls — assuming best intent, recognising deliberate emotional DDoS tactics, and the accountability that comes with a large community
- Positioning yourself for rare DevRel roles — building your network, specialising in a domain, and creating a body of work before the opportunity arises
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