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Travel and strong social media presence are practically required for the job. Since they are on the “front lines,” they also keep their ears open CSS Entities for any feedback they might hear about the technology or the company. Evangelists may be called advocates, thought leaders, and influencers.
The key to increasing adoption and engagement in a developer community is actually knowing your community. You need to know the segments, personas and personality types of the developers within your community, and understand what drives them to visit. This knowledge will help you make informed decisions when crafting your engagement plan. It is no secret that Apple’s developer relations are at an all-time, abjectly abysmal low.
- This will fill potential gaps in your understanding.
- Maybe there’s time to regulate this industry as any other utility which it has obviously become.
- Chances are we know of a tool that could be beneficial or we might be able to introduce you to someone else who can help you more directly.
You can make your Q&A sessions themed or invite guests, like a CTO of your product, who can not only answer technical questions but also tell your community more about the bigger picture and the future of your technology. They want to be part of something, whether it’s a community, an innovative idea, or a movement. As discussed in Chapter 2, content is incredibly important.
But before we even get to Developer Relations, let’s define Community. To help you understand the essence of Developer Relations. This blogpost was originally presented as a closing keynote at Glue Conference 2019.
🧰 What can we build?
It just takes time to sometimes understand the many facets of interacting with people, from different approaches to their online persona and tone. People aren’t always logical, and many factors affect their behavior. A vast majority of people, though – once you actually take the time to listen to them – aren’t as bad as you think. It does take time and patience, however, staying calm and working hard to understand different perspectives. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t ever lose your temper, although I’m hoping most of you can stay calm. But just don’t explode directly, and not in public.
So when you get feedback on your things, or you give feedback on others’ work, remember that there is never just one way of doing it. Not everyone is that online, and sometimes the gut instict is to just be defensive or attack back. I’d urge you, if possible, to at least give disrespectful people an initial chance.
This can make it hard to measure how successful you or your team are and if you’re hitting the mark with your community. Whatever your selected business objective is, make sure to communicate it to your team, stakeholders, and the entire company. Every specialist involved should be working towards the goals and have a clear vision of why building an online community is important, along with taking care of the developer relations.
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You’ll be able to provide insights to your product team, and be able to help users with more advanced use cases. If you have a complex enterprise software product like Shopify, there are dozens of complex features with hundreds of developers building features. Even learning the core product might take a couple weeks. First we’ll learn everything we need to know about the company. Your initiatives should tie into your company’s goals, values, positioning, and beliefs. Understanding your company provides important context for the product and community.
This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple disclaims any and all liability for the acts, omissions and conduct of any third parties in connection with or related to your use of the site. All postings and use of the content on this site are subject to the Apple Developer Forums Participation Agreement. My app’s large and very complex compute shaders ported easily to iOS 12/13. It would be a lot easier to deal with this if the feedback on bug reports was better.
DevRel in a Downturn
It can also help to create and manage your own communities, especially if there isn’t one in your space at the moment. In your own community, there may be more moderation work to do for your DevRel team, but you also get the opportunity to structure it to your wishes. To me, it means trying to inspire people, and being there for them. Taking the time to present, introduce or engage people in a certain topic, and then being around – in-person – for discussions, feedback and thoughts. We develop a professional creativity software that has some fairly non-trivial Metal shaders. We have a user-base in the thousands – not massive, but decent.
Maybe there’s time to regulate this industry as any other utility which it has obviously become. They are killing the geese that lay golden eggs with developers. They have a missed opportunity to create loyal customers by rewarding their loyalty instead of locking them in by draconian measures. Anyone who creates a general What Is GitHub? A Beginner’s Introduction to GitHub purpose operating system they expect third parties to develop for have to provide these things no matter what or the OS fails. Then iOS users would be exactly as fucked as Android users in regards to security. If you want an insecure platform, Android exists, go do that instead of trying to bring a secure platform down.
I suppose the dev team is busy up over their ears with all driver issues and the best thing they can do is just dig into it – any time spent on developer relations is time taken from actually fixing issues. ” but that doesn’t mean we aren’t technical, tech-savvy, or capable of helping you get to the bottom of your question. Because we value people first and technology second. This may seem backward… after all, we work for tech companies, the success of whose products pay our bills. But we believe that used in the right ways, at the right times, with the right combination of items, we can contribute to the health of the company as well as the overall community of tech professionals. You might feel like some of these things are reflected in your own roles as well, and you’re not wrong!
Developer advocates, who lead technical content creation. And then, to make matters worse, developers received zero communication from Apple during this outage — not even an acknowledgement that an issue existed. Depending on when you start counting, it took multiple days (or months!) for their “system status” page to reflect reality, despite many reports of ongoing issues since last November. You’re there to learn, so observe and ask lots of questions.
We watch the conversations happening on Stack Overflow, Reddit, The Practical Dev, and other public forums. So that’s most of the popular titles that you’ve likely heard throughout the industry. But there’s one more thing I want to clear up… because I know if I don’t, I’ll get questions about it later. A Technical Community Manager may not have this coding background — tho they could! They need to be able to carry on conversations that take a fairly deep dive into where your product fits within the broader technical market as well as answer questions about the technical aspects of your product. Community is about bolstering, nurturing, and cultivating the developer community with compassion and governing its interactions fairly.
What is Developer Relations (and why should you care?)
While that isn’t Sales in the classic sense, itisabout encouraging people to choose to use something in order to improve their lives in some way. But Developer Relations is no longer a new discipline Piaget’s Stages: 4 Stages of Cognitive Development & Theory in tech. Company leaders are not hiring DevRel teams without understanding what they mean and what their goals are. They aren’t doing it because their competitors have DevRel teams.
Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today. Community members, who set up and manage spaces for external developers. Sometimes users will reach out to you specifically, or you’ll see someone sharing concerns on Twitter. When that happens, see if you know the answer or can find it with a search. Otherwise help them find the proper support channel.
You also want to gain their trust and establish credibility with them. That way, they will use your products with confidence. These quotes, and so many others, area prime example of people not understanding what Developer Relations is and the value that we provide to our company, sure, but more importantly… The value we bring to YOU — our technical community that we so desperately want to connect with, not so that we can sell you on our product, but so that we can empower you to do your jobs better. Developer Relations operates on the front line of this Developer Marketing philosophy.