• Selling the Dream - Guy Kawasaki
• The Business Value of Developer Relations - Mary Thengvall
• Developer Relations: How to build and grow a successful developer program - Caroline Lewko & James Parton
• The Developer Advocacy Handbook - Christian Heilmann
  • previously, The Developer Evangelism Handbook (out of print as a book, but available online)
• The Art of Community - Jono Bacon
• People Powered - Jono Bacon
• Buzzing Communities - Richard Millington
• The New Kingmakers - Stephen O'Grady
• Developer, Advocate! - Geertjan Wielenga
• Developer Marketing & Relations The Essential Guide - SlashData

• Presentation Zen - Garr Reynolds
• Slide:ology - Nancy Duarte
• Speaking out without freaking out

• Awesome Developer Experience - an Awesome List of Developer Experience resources.
• DevRel Collective - Slack (formerly, EvangelistCollective)
• DeveloperRelations.com from Hoopy.io - weekly email newsletter, blog, good resources.
  • These are the folks who run DevRelCon and DevXCon. The videos from those events are available online.
• DevRel Weekly - weekly email newsletter / summary of interesting links, from @mary_grace
• Developer Avocados Weekly
• API Evangelist - Kin Lane's API-centric blog
• The HackDay Manifesto - an Open Source handbook for running hackdays, that I collaborated on.
• Virtual DevRel - videos from the Virtual DevRel meetups, on YouTube
• devevangelist - @theSteve0's repo of resources
• devrel tag on DEV.to - lots more reading

• Starting Strong in Developer Relations - a very good and length piece by Alex Trost "Understand your company. Learn your product. Meet your people." - I love this.
• Growing the Next Generation of DevRel - an excellent piece from Lorna Mitchell on growth opportunities in DevRel and beyond.
• Sympathy for the DevRel - James Governor's summary of his closing keynote from DevRelCon London in 2018.
• How Does a Changed Market Affect Developer Relations - how the 2023-> downturn altered the playing field for DevRel, by Chris Heilmann (who literally wrote the book on this stuff, see above).

• What does a developer evangelist/advocate do? - Christian Heilmann
• Developer Avocados - Mary Thengvall
• The History of Developer Evangelism - Josh Marinacci
• A Developer Relations Bill of Rights - Anil Dash of Glitch
• Planning a Developer Relations Strategy - Matthew Revell of Hoopy
• The Core Competencies of Developer Relations - Reto Meier of Google
• Developer Relations, what is it and how do I get in? (Pursuit Podcast) - Jessica Rose and Bruce Lawson. Also, a very good podcast series in general.
• Introduction to Google Developer Relations - Patrick Chanezon, from back in 2011. P@ hired me to VMware in my first "proper" DevRel role.

• Understanding burnout (Brandon West)
• Care and feeding of burnout (Jessica Rose)
• Burnout: what happens when you take on too much (Mary Thengvall)
• The Reality of Developer Burnout (Kenneth Reitz)

• There's an excellent list of tools on the DevRelCollective Awesome DevRel page. i.e. I'm outsourcing this part of the doc... I may add things I think of myself in the future

(note: I no longer recommend the use of Twitter and I no longer use it myself)

I did not build these lists myself, but I've been added to some... here are a few examples, in no particular order. An interesting project might be to aggregate / de-duplicate the list memberships.

• Evangelists/Advocates
• Evangelism
• DEVREL
• DevRel
• DevRel
• DevRel
• #🥑
• DevRel Society
• Developer Advocates 🥑
• Avocados
• DevRelCMGR-All
• Developer Evangelists
• devrel
• Advocates

• Thoughts on DevRel in the post-Twitter era - blog post about being present wherever developers are, 2023
• Adapt & Survive slides and video from DevRelCon Tokyo 2019
• Rebooting a Community slides and video from DevRelCon London 2016
• A Life Less Ordinary? slides and notes below from the London Dev Evangelist meetup
• Developing as a Developer video from a StackOverflow careers meetup in London no longer available 😢

• Developer Adventcado 🎄
• DevRel Day

I am #TeamAdvocate 😉

Notes for this presentation

Who remembers this movie from the 1990s? (kickass theme song by Ash)

Developer / Technical / Product - Advocacy / Evangelism? we've debated these things in this group before.

This talk is going to very much be a personal story and some thoughts about what I do.

As I've thought about this, I look at where I've come from, where I've been and where I am in a few stages.

You can expect a lot of personal history - and honesty - from the next 20-30 minutes.

I started out as a hobbyist developer

I was online in the days of dial-up, I taught myself Linux and learned from the community.

In the late 90s I was helping out on various open source projects on SourceForge (Anjuta, OpenUT)

It was natural to me to learn from others and share what I had learned.

I was working at the UK Post Office at the time.

In 2001 I joined IBM in the UK

I was told not to be out in the community. IBM wasn't keen for me to be involved in Open Source at the time.

Consulting.

IBM very good at selling to business; not so good with dev community.

Frustrating! So after several years - 7! - I started to focus on what was needed to 'win over' developers and have a grassroots focus. I pushed MQTT as a community thing.

An advocate / evangelist but not a formal role.

In 2012 after 10? years I left IBM.

I was invited to join a new Dev Relations team at VMware, to do a new Open Source thing 'Cloud Foundry'

This was new for VMW which was essentially a closed-source company (but Spring, Rabbit, Redis etc)

At the same time MQTT was starting to explode - Eclipse, OASIS process - spokesperson / 'community lead'

Where do you sit as a Developer Advocate?

IBM - Technical Marketing

VMW / Pivotal - under the product manager / engineering team - outreach, real community

Twitter - part of business development but closely tied to engineering too

Some final thoughts - what I've learned about what works / what is needed

HAVE FUN

Believe in what you are doing - if you don't it will show.

Be enthusiastic! CARE.

Be patient; kind; and resilient

Easy to get burned out, easy to snap at people asking without sharing.

Resilient - MQTT story. Take time out.

Be yourself - you. It's best if you know who you are.

It took me a while to find my voice and persona.

Be honest and genuine - again, IT SHOWS.

Listen.

Hold fast to what you believe, but listen and understand too.

This is who I am.