At the WordPress 31st Skopje Meetup, my friend and I presented on the topic of DevEx & DevRel.

Here is a brief summary of some of the stuff we talked about:

• There is no single definition of DevEx/DevRel. Our take is that it’s like a tourist guide that spreads the word (company culture) across.
• It can be seen as an engineering intersection with one or more of {HR, Marketing, Product, Community, Content}
• The three pillars Product+Community+Content are useful fictions and a lot of stuff overlaps between these
  • Community: meetups, conferences, workshops, hiring, mentorship…
  • Content: blogging, documentation, tutorials, podcasts, talks…
  • Product: coding examples, integrations, collecting and applying feedback, tooling, processes…
• Developers by nature are skeptical folks * – we can achieve much more by doing “indirect marketing” (things such as mentorship, bottle pickup, content writing, etc.) with the hope they follow along and improve – more specifically, they see “by example” why some things are useful doing and they eventually start doing it themselves. This approach is in contrast with e.g. “let’s actively teach you [X] so that you will be better at [Y]”, where I think this will repel more than attract.
• DevEx exists because of the intersectional voids between engineering and [X]. Building relations/partnerships helps fill these voids.
• Measure success in terms of lifetime value rather than OKRs – you can measure how many fishes someone fished but you can’t really measure how you taught someone to fish.
• Why DevEx/mentorship: Third perspective argument – developers get easily stuck in a cycle when programming (focused work) and it is easy to “forget” the big picture.

* This argument is of the form “Everybody is a skeptic” – you either agree with it, or you don’t, which proves the point in any case. One can argue it’s an unfair argument 🙂