DevRel needs cheerleaders and effective virtual events with Jessica West

The DevRelX Podcast (ex Under the Hood of Developer Marketing)

Trick question of the week:

Why does Developer Relations need cheerleaders?

It’s been a long time since the trick question was really impossible to answer. Or not at all impossible if you listen to the latest episode.

One of the biggest challenges in Developer Relations is actually defining it in a way that helps people better understand it. “People” includes upper management, which has been the real challenge for most of our past guests: showing the value of developer relations and the benefit to the company to the executive level. This is where you want someone to “cheerlead” for you.

Yet. This is not enough to stop you from helping developers reach their “Aha!” moment, which is Jessica West’s favourite thing when it comes to developer relations.

This episode touches a lot of key developer relations topics, including:

• Skills to have
• How developer relations is affected by the pandemic
• What the future of developer relations holds and
• More importantly, how to reach developers when you can’t meet them at events.

Also, at a time when events are turning virtual, we discuss whether virtual events are cutting it.

The graphs Jessica picked for this week’s “Let’s talk Data” section: 3 out of 5 developer contribute to Open Source software and 29% of developers contribute to Open Source software to improve coding skills.

Jessica West is the Head of Developer Relations at LaunchDarkly. With over 12 years of software engineering experience, she works to empower development teams through code, content, and collaboration. She is an influential speaker, storyteller, and marketer able to share technical concepts meaningfully and memorably.