^I've been involved with developer communities for... forever. I first got involved with them in high school, and from there through college I ended up running dev communities of over 60,000 developers (for better or for worse). ^It's been a good experience, a learning one, and definitely not for everyone.
^A lot of times in tech we think of networking as a dirty word. It's not about schmoozing and business cards though anymore, but about being a resource for others, and a community is a natural outcome of that!
“a telephone — without a connection at the other end of the line — is not even a toy or a scientific instrument. It is one of the most useless things in the world.”
- Theodore Vail, chairman of AT&T in 1908
^Since one telephone without any connections is utterly worthless, a telephone network with even two users has sufficient value to exceed the inherent value of a single product on its own. In this day and age of collaboration and the peer-driven economy, we have to think of ourselves as something like a telephone. We need to build our connections with each other to sustain ourselves, and sustain our communities.
^There's no one silver bullet for how to build a dev community. There's so many tools and options that it is less about the medium you use, and more about how you approach it.
- Make a code of conduct and enforce it
- Pick a platform that's accessible
- Treat it as a first-class citizen
^Your community is going to be public-facing, and people are very funky variables. Will it be a place for support? For questions? For bug reports? Will it be search indexed (Discord)? Will it be a place for announcements? For events? For beta testers and ambassadors? For everyone?
^At Netlify, the forums community is run by the support team, and the Jamstack Discord is run by a dedicated community engineer. Some companies have the marketing team run the community, or have a dedicated community team. Some are actually community-run, like Supabase. Some are developer run, like Obsidian.
^A dev experience team that takes care of the developer community is an incredibly good fit, with the right people and goals set in place.
^If you're building a DX team from the start, it's worth considering deeply who you will bring on the team.
- They don't need to be popular on socials
- They need to communicate and listen well
- They need to care about developers
^Some of the best DX engineers/dev advocates/etc work behind the scenes to make things work smoothly. ^They should be able to understand developer struggles, provide solutions, make connections internally, and interpret feedback. ^These kinds of workers are deeply valuable. They can build demos based on what they think the community wants/needs (and help integrate into feedback), they can understand bugs and issues from a developer's perspective, and they can anticipate the needs of developers when new features are upcoming.
^Great question, you don't (loljk) ^DX engineers, developer advocates, developer relations folks tend to very quietly job hunt. Because the nature of their work is public, they have to be careful about who they tell when they're on the hunt! ^Talk to advocates you know and appreciate. Tap into developer communities that already exist and see who the helpers are. Some of the best advocates I've seen are engineers who happen to be involved in their communities!
^There are memes about this. You can say "it's the number of people in the community" but sometimes really small, talkative 20-person communities are better than spammy 1000-person ones. You can say "it's the number of interactions you get on socials," but are those really indicative of what people think? ^A lot of dev rel work is broad, qualitative, and long term. The team in general has to have a lot of trust from their organization because of this, which is why it only sometimes works well under engineering, or under marketing.