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Listen to the audio episode. [Intro] Hello and welcome to “Under the Hood of Developer Marketing”, a podcast from SlashData. This is a podcast to come to for best practices and insights from the developer marketing world. In each episode we meet a different guest each with a background in technology. We’ll share their experiences, success stories and lessons learned. We are /Data and our mission is to help the world understand developers. Stay tuned for more episodes by signing up at www.developermarketingpodcast.com .  [Jo] Hello and welcome to “Under the Hood of Developer Marketing”, a podcast from SlashData. I’m Jo Stichbury, one of the senior analysts in the team and today I’m joined by Katherine Miller. Katherine and I worked on a book together recently, Developer marketing: The Essential Guide . We published the book in September last year and it aims to be the de facto text on the up and coming field of marketing to software and hardware developers. I have a fair amount of experience in this field as I’ve worked as a developer and in marketing for Nokia, Sony, Ericsson, Symbian, and in various publishing fields. More recently, I’ve moved into technical writing, working on documentation for developers and those that want to attract them. But Kattie, tell me about yourself. What’s your bio and background? [Katherine] Thank you so much Jo for having me on the podcast. I am currently the lead of the events team within the Cloud developer relations organisation at Google. I’m going on about 13 and a half years now at Google and have worn many hats, across our ads and agency and developer marketing and developer relations businesses. Today I am here on behalf of myself and I’ll be speaking about my experiences that I’ve gained through my years at Google as well as in my other experiences. But prior to Google, I actually had a career in higher education. I ran the admissions office at a dental school in Boston. What I really like to think is the common thread that runs through all of the work that I’ve done, whether it be developer relations and marketing, ads, customer service or convincing people to go to dental school; It’s all about building programs and communication experiences that help people get the information that they need to make decisions and be successful. Whether that’s where they want to become dentists or what technology they want to use to build their applications. [Jo] Okay. Wow. That is quite a journey though, isn’t it? Did you think that you’d end up in this area? How do you think your younger self would see your current role? [Katherine] I reflect on that a lot particularly, and I’m going to age myself now. I’m coming up on my 20th reunion for university and I reflect back on what I said I wanted to do when I graduated and, amusingly, I would have jokingly said I wanted to be the education secretary for President Hillary Clinton and run the Boston marathon. So, I guess I had some foresight back in the late nineties. Fortunately I have completed the Boston Marathon, so that’s that. But my initial career did take me down the path of education and that’s actually what brought me out to California in the first place. Working in the tech sphere in any capacity would have been so far removed from what I was doing in the late nineties. In fact, not only did much of this technology not even exist for us to comprehend, but also when I even look at the journey that I’ve had over the last 13 and a half years, the vast majority of the technology that we’re talking about and that we’re marketing didn’t even exist at the time that I started at Google 13 and a half years ago. [Jo] So that is quite the journey. So, within Google, what would you say has been your biggest challenge in your roles there? [Katherine] That’s an interesting question and I don’t even know if I would say that this is something specific to Google or is just something specific to tech, which is, I think twofold. I think the first is how as a brand and a product suite, we can really think about not just differentiating offerings, but really thinking about how to do so in a way that really is thoughtful and sensitive to the user. So, really putting the user at the center in the heart of everything, and helping them really understand the benefits of why to pay attention to what we’re saying in the first place. So, really that user centric journey. And then, I think the second is – again, more of an observation across the broader tech sphere and not specific to my work at Google – how we really think about bringing diversity and inclusive experiences into the products that we build, the events that we create, the marketing experiences that we put forward out into the world. I think that those are two really interesting challenges when I just reflect on the 15 years I’ve spent in Silicon Valley as a whole. [Jo] That’s really interesting. I’ve actually just been writing about women in tech. When we’re talking about diversity, it’s one that I think a lot of people would immediately think of. Though obviously not the only one. I was quite surprised to see that there was about one in 10 developers at the moment women. I thought we go beyond that now. And that it was more parity, but it seems not. That’s a global figure. I’m sure things are a bit different in your part of the world. Would you just say so or, or is 1 in 10 still kind of a common statistic? [Katherine] Observing the events that my team has run and the events that I’ve been able to attend and participate in, I think it varies quite considerably across the platform and across the geographic location. A lot of what we see, and this is again observational, and observe in tech is really related to what we see and observe in terms of diversity in the workforce as a whole within those particular regions and cultures. [Jo] Yes. I think that must be very true. Let’s go back to the challenges that you’ve experienced. Something that we were very strong about when we wrote the book was that we didn’t just want the glitz, we wanted the mistakes, we wanted the secrets of how you overcome the obstacles. What would you say is your biggest mistake? And what did you learn from it? [Katherine] That’s such a good question. I have 13 and a half years to dig into. And even beyond that, if I think about early stage career. I think the biggest mistake is… And this applies across the board and I can’t think of necessarily one specific instance. I’m two and a half weeks out from a major event, so I’m probably being very self critical of all of the things I haven’t done in preparation for that event. I would say it’s that, I haven’t taken the extra five to 10 minutes to ask the questions and to listen and to really understand the audience and the stakeholders when I wanted to do that. In that true tech mindset, run fast, fail fast, act and ask for forgiveness. And every one of those instances, taking that extra bit of time to pause and say, “what are we really trying to accomplish here? Who are the people that we’re trying to reach? What are the goals of this? Is this the best strategy? What are the trade offs of what we do?” And I think in those moments we’re in an effort to just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, and to meet deadlines, sometimes there are moments in there where maybe we should have paused. Maybe it would have been a deadline slip, but in the end it would have been the right thing for the internal stakeholders and for the event attendees. [Jo] Yeah. I see exactly what you mean. I think as a technical writer I’m guilty of much the same in that. Sometimes in my rush to get down what I want to write, I stop thinking about what the problem is that I’m trying to solve for the reader or even who the reader should or would be. And certainly in, you know, in my past career as a tech writer, we Symbian, perhaps I was always solving the wrong problems. We were writing to the converted rather than looking at the external developers and trying to pull more people in. Because of course Apple came along and Google with your Android devices and the Symbian platform just wasn’t really ready for third party developers in the same way. And I was the one that was writing the content for a lot of developers at the time. So absolutely, the problem that other people are trying to solve has got to be right at the top of the list, isn’t it? It’s not always the problem you’re trying to solve, unfortunately. [Katherine] I love the way that you reflected on that because it really made me reflect on the experience of collaborating on the book and on the chapter where it was a lot of me getting down my ideas and experiences and you all were really pushing me to think about the readers and all of those different angles. And so, in many ways that’s what made the experience of working on the chapter so positive. [Jo] Oh Great. I’m glad you enjoyed working on it because your chapter was so much fun to review because I learned so much about, well why don’t you tell us, what did you choose to talk about in your chapter? [Katherine] So my chapter was about producing events for developers. In my time at Google thus far – and that is really where I have built up the muscle around developer events – even though again, the perspective is my own. I have worked on everything, from small meetups up to large tent pole marquee events. And so, it was an incredible opportunity to share the wisdom, the strengths, and the failings of the work that I’ve done to hopefully open people’s eyes and minds to what developer events truly can be. Oftentimes, people think about events as very difficult to measure. Very difficult to measure. They can be expensive. What’s the ROI out of them? And I really truly believe they’re such an incredible vehicle for delivering other programs, other initiatives, other campaigns, and in a really human way. I’ve been really lucky that over the last 13 and a half years, events keep coming to the top of what I’m doing within my particular roles. And it’s just a real passion. It’s something that I really believe in, in terms of it being an effective mechanism of developer marketing. [Jo] Absolutely. So, this week I think is GDC in San Francisco. I’ve got very fond memories of that event. It’s one of my favorites and also WWDC at the Moscone Center. Those are two really iconic events I think, in the developer calendar. But what do you think makes them so attractive? [Katherine] Such an excellent question. When I reflect on events like that, when I reflect on events like Google IO, even some of the more emerging ones that you have, Facebook has F8, Amazon and Microsoft have their events, the ones that have been done really effectively are the ones that really understand the different audiences and craft experiences and content that match the needs of those audiences. So that, you know, as an attendee, whether you’re there as press, whether you’re there as an analyst, whether you’re there as a partner, whether you’re there as a practitioner, there’s a place for you at the event and you know how to find it. And you feel, when you walk away from the event, from an ROI perspective that you have gotten out of the event that what you’re looking for. And I think for those ones that are done really well, people are going looking for deep technical content. They are looking to connect with one another. They’re looking to connect with the experts. They’re looking for that balance of wow in amazement because oftentimes the attendees are also fans of the consumer brands, as well as the developer brand. And so, just that sense of being respected as brand ambassadors on both the consumer and the developer side and that they’re able to walk away and say, “I was inspired, I was shown what was possible, but that I also now have new information to do my job better. And I’ve made really personal, meaningful connections to help me do my job better, to help me think about my next step in my career, to feel supported, to feel recognised”. And I think all of those iconic events understand the different audiences. They understand the type of content and experience for them. And when you go, you get out of it what they intend for you to get out of it. [Jo] I think that’s so true. I think, you said in the book that you should come away only understanding 2/3 of the technical content if you’re a developer and it gets you fired up to learn more. And I think, certainly with WWC DC you would by far exceed that in terms of not understanding things. I definitely walked away with a very long reading list. I’m not so sure about connections for everybody though. I think there’s quite a perspective that developers are introverted and certainly I find in my experience I’m definitely an introvert and I don’t always find it easy to make connections at developer events because I’m in my own little bubble and I don’t really want to talk to people and it’s a bit embarrassing and I’m British and all this. How do you go about bringing people together so that they do actually interact and engage with one another or engage with the staff that you’ve got on the booth or doing the teaching so that you find that people do actually get the most out of it? [Katherine] That is such a fun question. Ιt’s something that I really keep top of mind. I’ll answer it in two ways. One is more on the technical experiences side and one is more on the community and social experience side because I think they’re in many ways equally important. On the technical side, when I reflect on the events that we do, we’re really thoughtful about the staff that we choose to be present at the event and really rely heavily on individuals from developer relations. And there are people who are known within the community and by bringing them there and bringing them in, attendees can relate to them because they’re the same. They get one another. And these developer advocates and developer engineers really know how to both create digital technical demos and experiences that welcome and invite people into the conversation. Then, once they established that, they have a sense of how to communicate and relate with one another, I think that’s a really important part of it. On the social and community side, it is really about creating those spaces and making sure people can find them. If it’s birds of a feather, having a very visible and obvious schedule that’s pushed out to them so they know where to be and when and who’s going to be present. And even in the social events, and this gets to the inclusivity piece, is thinking through how are all the different ways people like to interact. And that comes down to everything, from as simple as drink choices that are available, to having quiet spaces within, an event that it’s not one type of social interaction or activity. So I would say that those are ways that I’ve really approached it both in terms of connecting from a technical standpoint and connecting from a social and community standpoint. [Jo] Yeah, they sound great. I’ll definitely be coming to one of your events. [Katherine] I hope you will. We still need to meet in person! [Jo] So before we turn to smaller events, because we’d been talking about some real flagship events, I wanted to talk about possibly the most, glitzy event of the technical calendar, South by Southwest (SXSW), which also happened fairly recently. It’s definitely kind of next generation in many ways, or maybe even like a Ted event. What do you think are the hottest trends in events and, where are we going to get to next, when it comes to the developer events so that we can mimic Ted and SXSW a bit more closely? [Katherine] Really good question. I will be frank. I’ve been to SXSW. That was in 2012 while I was still in the ads organization and I gave a lightning talk on the porch of a house on innovations search ad formats. I was in Austin for 24 hours and it poured the entire time. So I had a quite uniqueSXSW. Following along with it in the media, when I think about the developer experience and I think about the type of experiences that are created there and that really resonate, some of it is pushing the boundaries. And while developers are incredibly pragmatic, I think when boundary pushing technology and ideas are presented in a really authentic way and in a humble way, it really does resonate with them. I think that one thing, one lesson that I take from those things is at events that we do, we can’t be afraid to push the envelope, but we need to do it in a way that shows humility. This, again, is my personal reflection, that it needs to show humility. It can’t necessarily promise the world. It needs to be put out there and say, “we’re going to try this thing and we think that this is the direction”. So I think that that’s one element to really take from those, which is: we want to armor attendees with really practical information to do their jobs and be successful, but without losing that they are technologists. And part of what this space is, is always thinking on the bleeding edge and in balancing the innovation and the opportunity. That’s one thing that I think to take away. About the second, I love the use of space at SXSW. I actually really reflect on a time that I spent in Edinburgh Scotland during the Fringe Festival, which for those listeners who haven’t participated in it, it’s a month-long festival of festivals in Edinburgh, Scotland. And one of the most special things about it is where the content is delivered, where the performances are, could be everything from a pub to the basement of a church, tο a car, to a street. I like the different use of spaces and really thinking about how to create large vs intimate, loud vs quiet, learning and connection experiences through the use of space. That’s the second one that I think as I’ve gone to a melange of events at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, is really seeing how the producers of the event are using space and bringing, instead of a city, how do you recreate that within the confines of a conference center or conference space. In terms of the TED talk piece, that’s again, really thoughtful attention to the curation of content. It is that balance of deep technical content, right? Recognizing that people need to free up their brains and learn in different ways. Dipping back into my education pedagogy from that time in higher ed is people’s attention spans are limited and the ability to continue learning diminishes pretty quickly. I can’t remember if it’s at the 40 or 50 minute mark within something. So, having a really nicely curated content list, where people will use their minds and brains in different ways depending on where they are at the stage and their conference journey is really important. I think that’s something that SXSW and Ted do really, really well. The mix in how content is delivered in and who’s delivering it. [Jo] I see. Yes. I think your point about humility is absolutely right. And it goes back to your point of making the people that are attending, the ambassadors, really. You’re always speaking to them and saying, well, what do you think? You know, where should we go next? This is not us telling you, it’s us working together. And I get the sense that Ted is very much the same, it’s a conversation isn’t it? And light wires coming together and as much it’s done behind the scenes, it happens in front of the camera as if it were part of the presentations. I loved the use of space you mentioned and looking for different venues. I mentioned this on the last podcast actually, but I’ll share it with you as well. There was a game developer event recently in Finland, using quantum computing emulators and they were working in the Saunas and on a Ferris wheel. And I think that’s got to be the most bizarre pairing of locations to work. But you know, why not? [Katherine]  You know, there’s that line that everyone shares, that the most important track at a conference is the hallway track. And your point of how do you help people connect when you have people who run the scale of extroverted to introverted at an event? It is by creating those spaces in nooks and crannies. If somebody knows they’re going to be more relaxed on a Ferris wheel, create an opportunity for a couple of people to sit together and have a Ferris wheel journey. And I am sure that the quality of those conversations, if they were in their zone, must’ve been incredible. [Jo] Absolutely. Yeah. So let’s turn a bit to smaller events now, because in some ways they must be more difficult in the scope. You know, when you have a smaller group of people to work with. I’ve done events, for example meetups, where it’s a startup, so it’s all hands to the pump. Everybody has to be involved from the most introverted kernel developer through to the marketing team. Everyone’s got to get out there and press the flesh and take names and it was uncomfortable for us doing that because some guys, had never been to an event before. You know, the young actors, they’re not really into it. So how do you, how do you work with a meetup and get people to come together in the same way that maybe a more professional team that’s had that experience, would automatically sort of dive into things. How does this event work? Say if you had a group of people that said “hey, we want to do a meetup on something. We’ve all got day jobs, but we’re all fascinated by code and computers and we want to work together”. How do you guide them? [Katherine] That’s a really good question. I feel like in the moment, we’re quite spoiled and how we answer that because platforms like meetup.com have come to be what really facilitates that connection and that discoverability. Even reflecting on what the experience would have been like 5 to 10 years ago, I think my answer would have been quite different. When we think about community work, we think about all of the things that you just said: which is what is the minimally viable product (MVP)? What is the time, the location, the space, the food that is going to make people want to take those two hours out of their evening to come and spend time with one another? Really having that critical mass of individuals who have a shared affinity. My experience with meetups has been quite fortunate, not only because of the platform technology side of things, but it’s been done through other larger scaled community efforts, whether it be through Google developer groups or having event managers who are supporting different chapters of open source communities. So, my experience is probably a little bit different, but I think my advice for people would be to really leverage platforms, things like meetup.com because the search functionality makes it discoverable, to really leverage connections and relationships within networks. I think that becomes such a huge piece. If, you know, someone knows someone who works there, “Hey, can you ask if we can get that space?” And especially if it’s at larger companies or incubators and shared coworking spaces, many of them are now set up with event request processes to actually make it quite easy and somewhat turnkey for those meetups to come into this space. And so, probably in the same way that folks deliver career advice, I would give very similar advice back from the meetup space, which is, really to think of the folks that you’ve met throughout your journey, introductions and connections that they can make, to give you that space and that foundation to then be bringing people together. And then, I think as well, on the content side, many of the large tech companies want to be finding scaled ways to get into these communities as speakers, as contributors, as community builders. And so not just to be tapping into the network for space, but also to be tapping into them, because companies are really hungry to be present and to help foster and grow these groups. [Jo] Yeah, that’s very true. I think people don’t realize just how much help they’ll get if they ask for it. It can make a big difference between people coming home and say, you know, I met somebody from this company and I asked a question and I now understand why this book hasn’t been fixed or why this speech is being delayed. And they’ll go back and they’ll keep going back because, that’s what you want, isn’t it? You want people to give up their time and come to my event. It’d be awesome to think that, you know, if we’ve talked through this, that maybe somebody listening is inspired to run a user group meeting or a meetup and, you know, just give their hands to it and see who turns up. I’m almost tempted myself I must admit. So yes, if you’re out there listening and you’re interested please let us know on Twitter it will be fantastic too. Anyone that wants to set up an event, particularly if they want to tell us about it or get any advice. I think we’re pretty much closing Katherine. I suppose I wanted to ask you before we go, what do you think the hottest trend will be in developer marketing couple of years, from your observations over your 13 years prior to that? [Katherine] Wow, that’s a great question. I know I keep saying that, I must sound like a broken record, but this is just really fun. I enjoy being challenged with these questions. [Jo] For example, do you think it will be Ferris Wheels? [Katherine] Uh, I don’t know about Ferris wheels, but when you challenged me to ask that, and this is actually the historian in me that says – actually what I studied in university is – I actually look back over the years that I’ve done developer marketing and developer relations to say what has and has not changed in terms of the practice. And, to me, perhaps this isn’t where I see it going, but more where I hope to see it going. I think the things that have really worked and that have really stuck have been when, when technology is really invested in by a company or if it’s something that’s very experimental, that it’s really positioned as such. I think that there’s such an opportunity to lose trust from developers. If something doesn’t work or doesn’t have longevity and isn’t stable. And so, to me, my hope for the future, if you will, is just companies and platforms continuing to focus on that. That again, it’s kind of that really, really radical pragmatism if you will, just continuing to make sure that it comes down to what do the users really need to be successful? If I extrapolate on that, where I hope to see that trend is, is really thinking about what those next million or billion users are both from the consumer side of how do we think about how technology is used globally and how people can access that technology and make sure that we’re developing platforms and APIs and tooling that allow developers to actually create experiences that can be used globally. Whether you’re a farmer in Kenya that has a weak mobile signal or somebody sitting in the luxury of Silicon Valley. That’s one, one direction I hope to see it continue to go. And then I think the second is in terms of building up those next million or billion developers is really inviting and welcoming into the fold a diverse and inclusive set of technical practitioners. That’s the way. We’re not just going to get there and making technology pervasive and accessible and thoughtful by having the platforms that work globally, but also making sure the people building that technology, understand and think and know who those users are and what they need. And, and the way you do that, is having a diverse and inclusive set of developers. So those are the trends that I hope for. [Jo]  Yes, yes. The people and communication. It’s such an important part of it. And let’s hope that you have this wish granted, even if you didn’t get to work for President Hillary Clinton, at least this is one thing that does come true. [Katherine] That’s what drives me every day when I come to work. So… [Jo] Well, it’s been fantastic talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out to take part in this “Under the Hood of Developer Marketing” podcast. And it was a pleasure working with you on the book and I’m sure we will be updating and continuing to write great content about this topic for many, many, more episodes to come. So thank you so much. I will close now by saying thank you to the listeners. Thank you for listening to “Under the Hood of Developer Marketing” a podcast devoted to developer marketing and relations. If you want to listen to any other episodes, you can subscribe at developermarketingpodcast.com and follow us on Twitter at @slashdataHQ for regular updates. Thank you. #google #GoogleCloud #developermarketing #KatherineMiller #Podcast #developerevents #UndertheHoodofDeveloperMarketing

Listen to the audio episode here. [Intro] Hello and welcome to “Under the Hood of Developer Marketing”, a podcast from /Data. This is the podcast to come to for best practices and insights on the developer marketing world. In each episode we meet a different guest each with a background in technology, who shares their experience, success stories and lessons learned. We are /Data and our mission is to help the world understand developers. Stay tuned for more episodes by for signing up at developermarketingpodcast.com . [Jo] Hello, welcome to “Under the Hood of Developer Marketing”, a podcast from /Data this is the very first episode and today I’m very lucky to be joined by Mary and Andreas, who are both heavyweights in the world of developer marketing and developer relations. I will get them to introduce themselves so Mary, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do and your career to date and your book. [Mary] Sure, thanks for having me today. My name is Mary Thengvall and I’ve been working with various developer communities for a little over a decade now. I started at O’reilly media have a lot of experience around DevOps and the performance basis there and then worked with Jack infrastructure, working with their community team, a company called SparkPost here in San Francisco as well which is the email API company building their DevRel team. I have noticed a lot of patterns and trends along the way, over the last few years especially, as developer relations cannot come into its own. And so, for the last year and a half now I have been working with consulting companies that are trying to figure out what developer relations is and how to build these technical communities. I have been helping them build a team or work on a strategy or figure out the business value of what there are doing, building a community with their developers, with their technical audience. And released a book back in October, called the business value of developer relations, that’s split half and half between how to define the business value for your company and how to figure out what that is. So, that you have the metrics and you have the value you can take back to the stakeholders. As well as practical application now that you have a DevRel team, what do you do? How do you handle it? How do you connect with the community? Some best practices along the way. [Jo] Thanks I’ve been looking at your book. And I have to ask, I was gonna ask later but I have to ask now. What is it with the avocados? [Mary] Sure thing. When I was back in SparkPost, about three years ago, we had one of our product managers who had a hard time saying developer advocate when she got to talking quickly and so would come out developer avocado every once a while. And all on our team loved avocados so we kind of embraced it and it became our internal team name. And then couple of us where sitting chatting about it one day and realized that there’s an actual analogy around it that might help our coworkers understand the value of developer relations and what they can get out of that. The basic idea, and I have a blog post about it is that and giving a talk about it this weekend, is that DevRel can be viewed as a kind of fatty department or an expensive department with sponsorships and swag and community events and all these things. But used in the right time, in the right ways, in the right combination is incredibly healthy for both the company and the community and beneficial to the longevity of the product. [Jo] I see, right and yet it’s only stone hard on the cover. [Mary] The avocados on the cover of the book are folks that I did case studies with throughout the book and I have snippets for each of those case studies throughout the book with that particular person. [Jo] I see, well the cover is very remarkable and memorable, and we’ll put a link to the page of the podcast so people are able to see that and read more about the analogy. So, Andreas turning to you now. I know a little bit more about this because I worked with you on it and it’s got a more more post-modern cover I would say and can you tell us a bit about what’s inside it and how you came to write it and about yourself please. [Andreas] Yes I’ll start with myself. I used to describe myself as a developer once, I also was a strategist, these days I am more of an entrepreneur and CEO. So, the book came out of probably a conference. Our Future Developer Summit ( futuredeveloper.io ) which we run for the second time in 2017 and there we had a few folks who were giving talks in what was essentially a relatively small audience. It was invite-only as well we didn’t publish any videos. We thought how we can get the word out to a wider audience. And I think it was one of the attendees that mentioned it together with the Nicholas Sauvage, my co-editor for the book. And so we said let’s find the medium through which we can spread the word more widely for what speakers in this conference, the future developer summit talk about. At the conference we had quite a few senior practitioners, director level people, VP level people, your usual suspect companies, the big platforms speaking on whatever they were an expert on, whether it is email marketing or hackathons or building communities and so on. So, we thought let’s invite them to write a chapter of the book each. So, we created a book that essentially is best practices from the experts. And that’s how the book came about. It was published at our September 2018 conference. We are also working at a version 2 I should say as a teaser that will come out in the next few months. Basically, it is as close as it gets to a definitive guide on developer marketing, by the experts and the practitioners in our field. [Jo] I am, yes we have two very different books about a similar kind of build. There is a developer marketing book from experts in the development marketing stage and then Mary your book with the case studies is something that you wrote solely with a technical reviewer Jojo Bacon, a very well known in the field. Looking at the two subjects, DevRel and developer marketing, Mary how would you define the difference between? [Mary] I think there’s actually a lot of overlapping as I’ve been reading the developer marketing book. There’s a lot of times that I’m sitting there nodding saying yes I say the same thing to people all the time. One of the interesting things will developer relations and one of the things a lot of companies struggle with, is where it fits within the company. There are pieces of marketing in there, there are pieces of product in there, pieces of engineering in there and figuring out where DevRel fits is difficult. But I think because of that there’s things that we can learn from marketing, there’s things we can learn from product, there’s things we can learn from engineering. The focus on developer marketing is fascinating to me because it is helping marketers who don’t have a tech background and aren’t necessarily too tech savvy, understand how to approach a technical audience, which is huge and that’s what has been a problem for years in tech companies, that developers don’t trust marketing team because they don’t know how to speak their language. So, I’m excited to see the impact of the developer marketing book on the industry as more people start to read it and more people start to apply the principles in it to see how that changes the trust balance between developers and marketing teams. [Jo] Do you think there’s a different skill set or a demographic required for that kind of work or do you think it’s something that anybody could pickup given that we’ve now got two books on the subject? [Mary] I think it is something a lot of people could pick up and I think developer relations depends on the role that you’re pursuing. So, someone who is excited about technology and interested in doing some research and getting to know specific communities can absolutely pick up a technical community manager job or some of the other related jobs within developer relations. Developer advocates usually come from a developer background or a coding background of some sort, as they are those who really dig deep into the code with many members. And, while a technical community manager is absolutely expected to carry on a conversation, a technical conversation, that’s more of a high level than “I’ll pull up my laptop and open my terminal and code into the API alongside the community member.” I think there is a slight difference there of when someone can just step into a role versus having some things in their background that qualify them for it. But I think anyone who is interested in meeting the needs of a developer audience and is willing to invest in the time that it takes to learn the technical aspects of that can absolutely step in at least in some of those roles. and at least in some of those rules. [Jo] Andreas I bring you in here, you have your own views I’m sure, for the differences and the overlaps. What do you say is the biggest area where there is an overlap? [Andreas] First let me talk about marketing vs relations. I’ve been grabbing with that distinction for a while and we’ve talked about it with Jo, doing a blog post on this. To me, it maps roughly as marketing vs client relations would map any other field. In other words, marketing vs sales. Sales has a bad reputation in some developer circles as well and I think the closest analogy would be marketing and client relations. Marketing in my mind is about defining target audience, market plans, outreach channels. How are you going to reach those developers, the product marketing side, marketing communications and so on. Relations is all the field work, in other words working with developers to help them understand how to use your tools to build better apps. That’s one that’s going from the company to the developer and then it’s the opposite side which in some companies and circles is called specifically developer advocates, because it’s about going from a developer to the product manager in the company saying “I’m getting very strong feedback from people who use these tools that we should actually include feature X or Y and is very often the case that the product managers not get to listen to that feedback because a) they don’t have the means or b) because they are based on the words of big customer feedback and they won’t hear the guys in the long tails. So it’s a very important role, advocating on behalf of the developers to the product managers on the next features our product should include. [Jo] I can see Mary’s nodding along to that. [Mary] I completely agree. There’s a mantra that I tell people often: to the company I represent the community, to the community I represent the company and you have both those interests in mind at all times. So, it is a balancing act at times because you’re constantly going back to the company with feedback from the community or constantly turning around and explaining to the community why a product road map looks the way that it does and why those are the decisions you’ve made and there’s also some industry though-leadery tight pieces in there as well, as you’re explaining why we’ve made these decisions or what best practices are we following, here’s the reason why this fits within the current landscape of the tach industry. And so it’s kind of a mixture of all those things. There’s a lot of storytelling in there, not from a telling a white lie storytelling, but from making what you say fit to the perspective of the person that you are talking to. Taking the feedback from the developer audience and the technical audience and communicating that in a way that the product team and the stakeholders and the company are going to understand and vice versa, taking the business speak from your product team and the stakeholders and communicating that back out into the community in a way that they understand and because you are that bridge, you build trust on both sides. The biggest thing that I see developer relations being responsible for is building connections, both community member to community member and community member to coworkers. Then making sure that those connections are strong and then stepping back and letting the other people do their jobs. I’ve been calling that DevRel qualified leads along the lines of MQL because it’s a business phrase that people understand. But I’ll make an intro of a community member to a recruiter and it’s not my responsibility whether or not that person gets hired but I’ve mad that connection so I can claim that connecting piece or connect the community member to someone at the marketing team, a community member that is active in our forums and is posting the longer posts in there and they might be able to write a blog post but it’s not my responsibly if that blog post actually gets published on the site, There might be a three-month long for content or that community member might not have time to do that but I’ve made that connection and is a qualified connection that could bring value to the company and so focusing on how many of those connection can make how many of those connections am I responsible for vs what’s the actual work output so we aren’t getting saddled with sales numbers or marketing numbers or traditional business metrics that don’t really fit within the developer relations structure. [Jo] I see. It sounds like you are doing a fantastic job there and clearly love it. We came up in our book with some experts we thought represented the best of developer marketing. Which companies or individuals do you think are doing a brilliant job in the field so that, for example, if you were building a new team, the stars, the key players that you would want to put on that team? [Mary] This is a hard question because there’s so many good people in the field right now.  It’s been really exciting to see as the industry has grown, people have become more passionate about it and more understanding of the value that we bring to the table. To see the people who are really leading the industry in doing really really awesome things and pushing the industry forward. I don’t know, narrowing down that list difficult. [Jo] Yes, no need for names of course because somebody always is forgotten. What do these guys and girls have in common? What could you say really makes them shine? [Mary] So what I think is the biggest thing is they’re passionate about their community. Those who want to enable the developers and community they are working with to do their best possible work. That comes up in different ways. Might be best practices for APIs or best practices for incident response or any variety of things. But they’re very passionate about how I mean how do I make this the best possible experience for them so that their job is easier, their life is easier so that they have a work life balance, any of those types of things. That passion leads them to give talks about best practices or connect more people because they’re interested in digging those relationships within the community. And so it leads to all of these someone going down a rabbit hole and researching a topic because a community member is really passionate about it and now I want to understand how that fits into the overall structure of everything that we’re doing. That passion for their community really drives and then you can see it on the technical work they’re doing, and the community work they’re doing. [Jo] I’m gonna move to Andreas now about the book. We published “Developer Marketing the Essential Guide” in September last year, so technically just before Mary with her book. So ours was kind of the first book on the subject. Why do you think there weren’t books before and why now is the right time to be publishing this book? And why is it so important? Why has developer marketing become so important? [Andreas] Firstly, developer marketing practices are substantially if not fundamentally different from consumer marketing or even if you take B2B marketing in any vertical. One of the reasons is that the audience is extremely technical, extremely demanding and critical of any marketing activity. I would say much more critical than any of all other audiences. It’s often recognized that if you have experience in developer marketing, then any other marketing field is downhill for you, it’s much much easier. It’s exactly about developing a practice of client relations by supporting and not selling to the community. So, this subtle way of creating friends and advocates and evangelists within the community is much harder than actually getting people to buy something. The reason why there wasn’t something like that before? I guess the field started practically when Windows was introduced with Microsoft pioneering this platform economics model and Steve Ballmer dancing on stage with famously “developers, developers, developers”. But, most people saw the opportunity as a business model to start with and there has been tens of papers in the academia on how you build platforms and innovation platforms, if not hundreds of papers, but not on how do you get the these people, that community to engage. Because you’re not buying an audience hitting people with ads. We need people to interact, to engage. People who contribute back in most cases.  I think that aspect of the community engagement was largely underhyped and not paid enough attention to. This has changed perhaps in the last year or two, because it’s not just the big platforms that are in this game. You know, the likes of Microsoft and Google and Facebook and Amazon that we have authors from in the book. Its many more smaller companies, companies across verticals, you have car makers, you have sports companies, lifestyle companies, retail and so on, all creating developer communities. Because they now see that their APIs or whatever they have out here, their SDKs are now getting action, they say “cool, how can we get more of that? How can we get 10x, 100x the traction?” I can see communities being created in the wild. I was talking with a payment service provider recently and they said “We have use cases of our API out there which we had not thought of and are very cool. Can we have more of them? How can we market to get more developers building those use cases systematically?”. The practice of developer marketing is new because we just hit that inflexion point going from early adopters to mainstream if you like where companies are realizing that this is a systematic process, a process that can be systematized in building developer communities.  [Jo] Yes everyone’s a software developer these days or having software development teams. We had the example in in our book about a bank creating a software product. And I guess all of these companies need the expertise. Not everybody has it, not everybody gets it the right way.  Mary? Do you have any examples of when you go to a community site, one that appears to be failing? What you look for in a good site or a bad site and how do you spot where the problems are? [Mary] One of the biggest or the easiest ways to spot a company that isn’t investing in it, is companies who set a developer site and then it’s static and not updated. There are many companies who say “what we need is developers.company.com and it will maintain itself and developers will see we’re on their side and we never have to do anything else for that”. So, you go on a site and it’s very obviously a static site, hasn’t been updated in a while, there’s no activity, no investment. It’s very easy for developers to see that a glance, they checked that box and walked away; and go see someone who is investing in the community on a regular basis. But it’s interesting to see, I think you asked Andreas about it, the timeliness of these books and I think there’s been a lack of resources for the last few years there’s a stat I always like to go back to “Why is developer relations such a big thing now?” it’s had a classic hockey stick growth over the past few years, because startups have become a big thing again. A lot of the startups that are coming up aren’t consumer audience startups. They are B2B, working with other companies. The developers are now responsible to build that software and make that integration. And there’s a stat from 2015 that basically says there is a new startup about every second or around that amount. Not all of those succeed of course but out of that amount even if we say 10% have a developer faced audience, the amount of companies who need to market to developers and need to build relationships with developers just need to skyrocket. I had an interesting conversation with a client the other day, I was trying to get at the bottom of why you’re really wanting to build a community into the foundation of the company. Which is a question I ask all my clients, to make sure they’re not just checking the boxes, they actually have a direction they need to be going and why they want to include this. And his response was “I know that I can absolutely build a successful company without a community behind it, but that’s not the company I’m interested in creating” like “I want to build a company that has a solid community, I want to get feedback, I want to be selling to people’s needs and I want to be solving these problems for people. You’ve got a lot of startup founders these days, especially in Silicon Valley where the founders are developers themselves. So the focus is shifting to knowing that type of marketing is not working that type of sales isn’t working, that type of relationship building is not working. We need to be connecting with developers one on one, we need to be building those relationships. Or else, no one will even think twice about using our product because they know we aren’t investing time in them and why should they invest their money on us. [Jo] Yeah absolutely. I’m not gonna ask you to give away all your secrets of how to build a strong community and from my own experience, I’ve worked in a number of companies where we set up communities, some more successful than others.  I recently did an interview and they were saying that, really, you don’t need a huge amount of documentation, you don’t need a forum, what you need are answers. A knowledge base. This is a problem you might experience, this is how you solve it. Some on your site and a really solid StackOverfolw presence. So the people can go there and see all the different manifestations of their problem and how to solve it. Would you agree that less is more? What would you think would be the basic quick wins to build a strong community? [Mary] I definitely agree that less is more if your resources are limited. Focus on the top questions people are asking and more importantly than answering those questions over over, fix those issues within your infrastructure. So if you’re seeing the same questions pop up all the time on all support sites, then your documentation isn’t great on your website or maybe there’s an easier, clearer way to communicate that in the actual work flow, setting up an integration. So paying attention to what are the common questions, not just to prove the documentation but to improve the developer experience overall. One of the fascinating things that I always love hearing from clients and always a very interesting conversation afterwards is when they say well we don’t have a community, we need to build one from scratch. And my answer always is, unless it’s a brand new company that hasn’t even gotten started and has a long way to launch the product yet, “you do have a community, they’re out there you might just not be engaging with them”. They will be on StackOverflow, they will be on Twitter, they will be on Facebook, Reddit, they will be in all of these different places talking about this company and talking about the issues that they are having or the experiences they are having, bad or good. Whether or not the company is connecting with them is a whole other question. Your community is out there so it’s just a matter of how and when you’re going to engage with them and engaging with them where they already are, is your starting point. Then bringing them back to your site or creating a forum, if that’s even necessary, is the next question to ask. But figuring out where your community exists is the first step in where they’re already talking so you can be engaged in the conversations of the platform where they already are. [Jo] I see, yes. Andreas you have a different overview of this because /Data surveys 40.000+ developers a year about developer resources among other things. What people typically tell us about what they value from a community. [Andreas] I’ll answer that straight away let me first add a comment on Mary which directly popped into my mind as she was going through her story. I remember, probably 2008 or 2009, Nokia days and Nokia had a developer program, at least early stages, or very early stages, I think it was probably only documentation. The prevalent thinking was that “developers would come to us” because at that time Nokia had 40% market share of mobile phones globaly. It was number 1 and was no number 2. And of course, they assumed that developers would respect that market share. And of course, it was nowhere near that and the fundamental reason that Nokia and to an extend Windows lost was because of lacking developer love and developer traction. I think people still will make the same mistake and saying “ok, we’re kind of big enough, no need for developer APIs because we exist, and we have investors” and whatever else. But that’s not the case. Back to your question Jo, on defining the most important things, a developer marketing or relations effort is nice to have and I think it’s extremely clear and very stable in our metrics. We run this study we call Developer Program Benchmarking and one of the things we measure is the features or marketing initiatives a company needs to offer to support developers. Among the top ones you have, documentation is core, which is hygiene. Then you have tutorials and how-to videos, answers in public forums like StackOverflow you mentioned and dozens of others and non-English speaking parts of the world. You have development tool integrations, training courses, official forums, technical support, more and more with that. And the most interesting is that the types of developers that go to each, vary a lot. So for more experienced developers, hackathons aren’t resonating as they are with newer developers. Documentation becomes more important as you are an experienced developer the more experience you have. Same goes for technical support so whereas it’s a set of hygiene factors if you like, they differ a lot by the kind of developer, the region and in some cases if you’re talking about IoT or cloud, or machine learning and so on, there’s a disciplined audience to target. [Jo] Something that came across while we were writing the book, we had a chapter from Qualcomm talking about hardware developers and that really struck me how different are hardware developers from a software developer. It’s just one word and it doesn’t really seem like it makes a lot of difference but the background of people coming from and the kind of assumptions they make about writing code are very very different. Mary, have you had that kind of observation? [Mary] I’ve seen that a little bit, I’ve more heard about it in startups where a hardware startup gets an investment from a software VC and the advice that they are given and the ways that they’re told to approach things doesn’t fit their community, doesn’t fit their audience at all. Like you said, it doesn’t seem at a first glance that it should be so much different but it really is a different audience. And there’s people mixing them both, there’s a Venn diagram there, but I think the way that it’s set up, the types of events that you’re at, the types of places that you’re going to meet your community members can be very very different between hardware and software. [Jo] Thank you. We’ve got to wrap up soon, so before that I’d like to ask you both for your top tips of the hottest trends in this space in 2019. So, where do you think we’re heading and what new things we’re going to see. Mary I’ll let you jump first. [Mary] I’m actually really really excited about this year and next year as well to see what happens and where we go. I think we’re finally hitting a point in the industry where people are starting to understand this is necessary. They might now understand why, but that’s the next piece and at least we’ve come to a point where companies go “ok, now we need developer relations, we need someone building a community here or checking that box and the next question that they’re starting to ask is “why do we need? And what does it do? What’s the value there?” and we’re starting to get more and more resources about it as well. So, I run the weekly DevRel newsletter and I did just a quick analysis of the data that I pulled in from my first year, based on the tweets and the blog posts and the things that I was collecting on the span of one year. It was fascinating to see some of the patterns and one of them was job skyrocketing throughout the year consistently. Another one was topics like burnout highlighted in April, which is after the first set of conferences for the year and then again in December, which absolutely makes sense. But, as we hit the end of last year there was a lot of pushback particularly on Twitter around the value of developer relations and “what is DevRel anyway? Is it really necessary?” and stuff from other technical community members, honestly. They weren’t understanding.  That went on for a while which was kind of discouraging but interesting to watch. But the fascinating thing that came out of it was that there was a whole slew of people posting about “here’s my experience with developer relations”, “here’s what I do”, “here’s why it’s valuable”, “here’s how it helped me”, “here’s how it helped other community members”. Direct feedback from community members of particular companies. How we were incredibly valuable in helping them use our product or make their jobs easier, all these different things. As more of those stories surface, more people start to understand where that value really is and the value in those DevRel qualified leads, the connections that we’re making. I think it’s not only continue growing as an industry, but there’s actually going to be an understanding of the value that we provide to companies and the advantage of building a community from the start and not just tacking in on at the end because “Oh, we don’t have a community and we need one t able to succeed.”. But the value of creating it from the start and making it a community-centric company and the advantage that this gives you over your competition. [Mary] Yeah that sounds fantastic it’s exciting when you put it like that. I’m gonna share mine now and I’ll come to you Andreas. I recently spotted a quantum computing games jam in Helsinki which combines two of my favorite things. But the trend I was particularly excited to see was that the guy sat on a Ferris wheel writing code. So they went round and round on the Ferris wheel and occasionally hopped off and jumped on again, all the while writing games using a quantum computer emulator. I think that’s fantastic, so let me put my pitch in what I hope should be the hottest trend in 2019. Now Andreas I’ll come to you. Have you got anything more crazy than that? [Andreas] The hottest trend that actually very few people can understand and code, right? I hope it gets more popular. I’m much more of an industry observer, always had a knack for that so I would point to three trends. I think that probably within two or three years developer marketing will be recognized as a field of B2B marketing, because of the sheer innovativeness of the domain. In developer marketing and with that I include relations, we have so many innovative ways of engaging people that no other industry has tried simply because it wasn’t that hard to engage an audience. Developer marketing has and will have much more than others fields of marketing. I was seeing in the news today that Salesforce is giving out its tools for training employees, including trailhead which is how it trains developers. They were selling those as an add-on on top of Salesforce. It’s a sign of that move or lending of experience and best practices from development marketing to other fields. That’s one trend. The other trend I see again from an industry perspective is that we now have the big five consultancies move into developer marketing. The first company I’ve seen do that is Accenture and they have a formal team. Last I knew it was over a dozen people, working with enterprises and their developer programmes. It’s visionary of course but I think it’s just a sign that the big consultancies and again the big enterprises as well are looking at this very very seriously and there is a demand for that. The third trend I see relates who developers more and how their needs are addressed by a developer program. In our research, the most and that’s by far the most under-funded marketing activity above all is answers in public forums such as StackOverflow. What developers tell us versus what development program managers tell us is that there is a huge discrepancy. For developers is very important to get peer support through public fora for developer marketing and relations folks it actually doesn’t receive a big part of their budget and this comes on comparing two surveys against each other. Because of it being such a fundamental need, I think we’ll see many more “StackOverflows” emerging, especially in countries where English is not the primary language. We’re seeing already there are companies with Q&A platform products and they’re successfully selling those. And I think we’ll see competition for where the person go to get supported by their peers. [Jo] I think that’s very true and I think I am. It’s one of those things that will absolutely be growing constantly. I’d like to thank you both Mary and Andreas. We had a great conversation here and I think it’s time to wrap up, but if you would like to leave any questions, I am sure we can find a way to get them, maybe Twitter? Is this the best way to ask questions of you Mary? [Mary] Sure, my DMs are open so feel free to send me a message my handle is @mary_grace [Jo] Anyone listening out there that has any questions for Mary, direct them through Twitter. Andreas I guess the same? [Andreas] Yes mine is @andreascon. [Jo] Ok, and I am Jo Stichbury and I’m @fluffy_macoy on Twitter. Thank you both, it’s been great chatting to you. [Outro] Thank you for listening to Under the Hood of Developer Marketing, a podcast devoted to developer marketing and relations. If you want to listen to other episodes, you can subscribe at developermarketingpodcast.com or follow us on Twitter @SlashDataHQ for regular updates. #developermarketing #devrel #marketing #marketingtodevelopers

Missed Part 1? Read it here. How important is your community? Only the core of all your efforts. Community is probably the #1 theme that came up in our podcast episodes, coming strong even from the first one. As soon as a product/service is available, a community will be created with regard to your product. Mary , Adrian , Jeremy , all DevRel professionals, agreed on what “community” means. It’s people who interact or work with it and get together to seek information on how to best solve problems or talk about features they love or hate. The strategic decision is where you will choose your community to live. Are you going to leave it “out in the wild”? Andreas asked in our first episode. Jeremy discussed how running a coffee shop helped him better manage a community in episode 4 . You just have to offer a space that people will want to visit and make sure you take different tastes into consideration. Adrian gave us the basis for all communications with your community: be authentic. Mary sums it pretty well: “Your community is out there so it’s just a matter of how and when you’re going to engage with them and engaging with them where they already are, is your starting point. Then bringing them back to your site or creating a forum, if that’s even necessary, is the next question to ask. But figuring out where your community exists is the first step in where they’re already talking so you can be engaged in the conversations of the platform where they already are.” Do you need to be a developer to become a Developer Advocate or work in developer marketing? Short answer – no. You don’t need to be a developer. But you need to be tech savvy and have the 4 skills we mentioned in Part 1: passion, curiosity, empathy, inclusion. Curiosity will get you started. You need to be curious so you can understand how your product/service works and what users have to say about it. Passion is a must. DevRel is based on being in the middle: between the company and the community and you need to be passionate in bringing those two to work together effectively. Empathy is also crucial, if you don’t understand the struggles or concerns developers have in using your product/service, you won’t be of much help to them. Inclusion is key, make sure you are taking care of all members of your community and offer a welcoming space for the newest members. Is every developer valuable? Absolutely. Every developer is valuable as they add to your community and help it grow. Adam adds the business value of each developer: “Talking to developers is a critical part of what means ‘business success’. A developer actually means something to you. It might even mean that the solution you just sold to a customer will be implemented in a correct way and become successful.[…] By engaging with developers you open up your ecosystem to expose yourself to new opportunities and potential customers.[…] If you know what the value of the developer is to your business, you can use that to work out what you can be doing to change or invest in those different channels.” How do I engage my community? For this question, we will rely on wisdom collected from all episodes. To keep engaging your community, you should offer a space that serves your community’s purpose. A space where all developers can interact, share and solve problems. Communities are self-sustained when built but you need to be there and help Make sure you remain authentic and inclusive, the community should have a place for everyone. Stay up to date and make sure your space is tidy – trolls are everywhere – but to offer real value, focus on content that helps developers be and work better. If all goes according to plan, the result will be a community that functions independently and you should only take action when and if needed.   Hopefully, it will be one that even your engineers will want to crash their meetups as Arabella says in episode 6. Season 2 will be coming soon. If you like what you read in these posts, make sure you listen to the episodes . There are a lot of insights that couldn’t fit in these blog posts. If you want to join as a guest in season 2 or want to be notified for new episodes, check out our podcast page at developermarketingpodcast.com

At /Data, we pride ourselves on being the analysts of the developer economy. Developer marketing and developer relations (or DevRel for industry insiders) are in our DNA. In our annual Future Developer Summit event, we bring together some of the champions of the industry and ask them how they do it. In September 2018 we published the output of the insights from those events,   a walkthrough guide to successful developer marketing, essential to new professionals in the field and still relevant even to the most seasoned veterans. Still, we felt that we had so many more topics to cover and many more professionals we wanted to be heard. So, in March 2019, we launched our podcast series Under the Hood of Developer Marketing , where we invited professionals to share their success and failure stories in 40-minute interviews. After 6 episodes, we’re ready to wrap up our first season. Here’s a collage of some of the best parts from our first episodes, but we encourage listening for yourself so you don’t miss anything! Developer marketing and developer relations (DevRel) are not the same. They are interlinked. Jo Stichbury, our podcast host, tackled that topic specifically in a previous blog post . Yet, if we were to sum it up here, we’d use Andreas Constantinou words from episode 1: “I’ve been grappling with that distinction for a while. For me, it maps roughly as marketing vs client relations map in any other field. Marketing is about defining target audience, marketing plans, engagement channels, how to reach developers, product marketing and communications. Relations is about all the fieldwork, working with developers to help them understand how to use your tools to build better apps. Going from the company to the developer and then from the developer to the company. Some companies call that Developer Advocates.” What skills should a DevRel professional possess? Passion. Curiosity. Empathy. Inclusion. Passion By Mary Thengvall “They [DevRel professionals] are passionate about their community. They want to enable the developers and community they are working with, to do their best possible work. […] That passion leads them to give talks about best practices or connect more people because they’re interested in digging those relationships within the community. And that passion for their community really drives it and you can see it on the technical work they’re doing, and the community work they’re doing.” By Jeremy Meiss “I love building relationships. I think it is just exciting and brings a lot of a purpose to do what I do. It is what really drives me to be a part of [DevRel] and spend this as my career. It’s something I’ve I really passionate about.” Inclusion By Katherine Miller “The events that have been done really effectively are the ones that really understand the different audiences and craft experiences and content that match the needs of those audiences. Whether you are there as an attendee, as press, as an analyst, as a partner, as a practitioner, there’s a place for you at the event and you know how to find it. And when you walk away from an event, you feel that you have gotten out of the event that what you’re looking for.” By Adam FitzGerald “With Diversity, the most important thing is to make sure the internal culture has the sorts of tools and mechanisms that make for better understanding.” By Arabella David “We have the online component and the in-person component. The in-person component helps me measurably in increasing the diversity and inclusion. There is always a venue and a reason for people to come and hang out together and do something together. Once you boil these basic human needs to get together and make things together, you have unlocked a whole new level of inclusion.” By Jeremy Meiss: “You have to know, what’s your audience like and why are they coming there, what are the things they enjoy the most. So that you can help craft an experience that meets that.” Empathy By Arabella David: “What helps me get the best out of everybody and produce the best for developers, is always keeping their needs and what they want prioritised.” By Jeremy Meiss: “Developers don’t care that you know, until they know that you care. That embodies that empathy and developer advocacy so much.[…] It’s important to have a good code of conduct, you can’t deal in just black and white. There’s the importance of understanding that each situation is different and keeping community trajectory and health at the forefront of your decisions ” By Adam Fitzgerald: “You really need to understand that talking to developers is a critical part of what means business success. A developer actually means something to you and might even drive your [product] success.” Curiosity By Adam Speyer “[For me] I think what happened is…I just jumped in. You need some technical acumen or an interest and really a good dose of curiosity. I think understanding of the things that matter, just jumping in and learning in that way.” By Adam FitzGerald “Curiosity I would say is the one thing [on how to extend yourself.] I like keep being curious. It’s the one thing that I would keep reinforcing to my younger self. What do developers think of marketing? Fasten your seatbelts because Adrian Speyer sums it in a great way “Most of the time the answer I got from them [developers] is that they want frictionless experiences. They just want to get the answers, they need to move the project forward. They really enjoy seeing how people are ingenious and doing things and solving problems. And of course they’re very, very allergic to obvious marketing ploys. So I think authenticity is really important. I think really it was hard with marketing messages and is probably not the way to go. And certainly focus on showcasing people that are creating crazy or cool things with your project.” You can find Part 2, which further highlights season 1 of our podcast series here . In the meantime, why not listen for yourself and let us know about the common themes you spotted in the interviews. We noticed more than a few! You can listen to all our episodes and get in touch at developermarketingpodcast.com #developermarketing

The technology industry often takes credit for the changing world of work. One example is the model of remote employees working as digital nomads in their favourite coffee shop, connected via Slack and collaborating via the cloud to create products and services for consumption over the internet or on smartphones and tablets. But what about work within the technology industry itself? We take a look at the profile of women in technology and compare it with the profile of their male counterparts. If we exclude those who preferred not to share their gender with us, and those who skipped this optional question, female developers responding to our survey were outnumbered by males by a ratio of 1 to 10 (9% women and 91% men). This suggests a global population of 1.7 million women developers and 17 million men. The technology industry is dominated by men and the imbalance in numbers is such that we cannot make numerical comparisons between men and women. Instead, in the rest of this chapter, we will look at relative differences in terms of experience, age and roles adopted, and the most common company sectors and development areas for men and women. What are their ages? Looking at the comparative ages of male and female developers, we find a higher percentage of women are under the age of 35. The 25-34 age group accounts for the largest number of developers of both genders (36% of women, 33% of men), yet male developers are more likely to be older: we found 37% of male developers are over 35 years, compared to 29% of women developers. There are (at least) two different ways of interpreting this observation. One is to say that women are being increasingly drawn to software development; the comparatively young profile of women compared to men illustrates recent gains made in attracting girls and young women into technology. Analysis of college data for entrants to computer science courses, in North America at least, suggests that this is indeed a plausible explanation, as women are increasingly studying courses in the subjects that lead to a career in technology. An alternative, or additional, explanation is that women may have always been involved, but tend to leave software development as they get older, either by choice or necessity. And here’s a preview of the roles they undertake: What is their educational background? When we looked into the education levels of the genders, we noted that women developers are equally likely to have been educated to degree level in computing/software engineering when compared to men. Likewise for other classroom training that doesn’t lead to specific degrees, and for attendance at developer bootcamps. Women are slightly more likely than men to have learned their craft using online course materials and slightly less likely to have learned on-the-job. Women are significantly less likely to be self-taught (57% of women compared to 75% of men) but it is still the most popular way of learning about development for both genders. The relatively older profile of men probably explains why more have become self-taught: they have engaged in continuous education throughout their longer career because of the rapidly changing nature of the industry. As women developers mature, we would expect the level of “self-taught” women to rise as they also teach themselves new skills to advance their career. For more details on the Gender Wars, you can download our State of the Developer Nation 16th Edition report. It’s free and full of insights. #developers #men #women #womendevelopers

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between developer marketing and developer relations? And what is the difference between  an advocate and evangelist? Just who is behind those developer portals you use for the developer documentation and who answers your queries on official forums? Read on to find out! In this blog post, I’ll set out to disambiguate the roles within a company’s developer outreach team and explain what each person does and where they focus their attention. If you are a developer, you have likely visited a number of portals and joined communities over the years, some successful and some less so. You’ll find it interesting to know the inside story on how they are put together and what happens behind the scenes. If you work with developers, or are planning to, you’ll also find this post useful, particularly if you are considering building a developer community, or funding one. It’s also likely to be something that you need to consider if you already have a nascent community running already but want to push into the next level of the developer community maturity model. Here at /Data, our Developer Program Benchmarking reports track how developers perceive individual developer programs. Twice per year, we measure developer adoption, engagement, and satisfaction across the industry, reaching over 40,000 developers in more than 165 countries. Our data shows that developers visit the top developer portals at least once per week and, on average, developers report to be involved with 3.1 different developer communities. These days, development uptake revolves around community, and your outreach team is likely to have a huge bearing on your success. So, without further digression, let’s dive in to the structure of a typical developer outreach team. Developer product engineering What is a company’s developer product? Well, it could be a Github repo that you clone, or an installable tool. it could be a zip file that you download, maybe it’s an API, maybe it’s a library or a package. It’s something you use if you are a developer — and somebody made it. That person, or group of people, sit in the developer product team. The developer product team can range from a handful of developers to hundreds of people in big organisations. This team is responsible for setting out their product strategy & roadmap, for developing the product and its supporting documentation & sample code, plus tooling, and libraries and IDE integration where relevant. They will be the know how behind the technical support provided when you need it. Their goal is to develop the best product for you, the audience, in terms of its usability and relevance. They will want to know how to improve their offering to you, and also want to be able to demonstrate to their company that they are worthy of what has been invested in them. Many product teams would agree that the marketing metrics of “who read our blog?” or “ how many twitter followers do we have?” don’t really apply to them. In our recent book, Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide,  Pablo & Rex of Arm’s developer ecosystem team, made the point that their goal is to help developers’ code run better on Arm products, and their efforts in this direction is what they need to measure. Their approach is to educate themselves on their developer audience so well that they find a unique way to serve them and make their lives better, thus raising their awareness of the company. In the book, they describe how they spent time meeting developers and listening to woes about a particular development workflow. They set out to build a tool to smooth out the experience for developers, and set themselves a target for the installation process to get a developer up and running in under 5 minutes. Developer relations Now we’ve seen into the team building the developer product, let’s turn to the main interface between that team and developers using their output: those working in developer relations. Their goal is to build credibility, trust and influence with developers for the company they represent. Many people struggle with working out exactly how to pin down the role of developer relations, and those working in it may alternatively be labelled community manager, developer evangelists or advocate. The role incorporates some marketing, but it also fits alongside the product group and within engineering. We’ve described previously that developers don’t trust always marketing, so developer relations is often seen as the bridge or connector between the two. Developer relations is about field work: working with developers to help them understand how to use the developer product. Some of the activities you may find developer relations working on include: – public speaking – attending hackathons and contests – writing sample code and running demos – social media (including technical blogging) – attending events and meetups – hosting office hours A role in two parts The developer relations team has two distinct ways of working. Part of their responsibility is evangelism: to communicate the company’s message to external developers. They may find themselves explaining which features are available and which are not, yet. Conversely, the other part of their job is advocacy: to convey the developers’ views back to the product team. Developer relations practitioners are familiar with saying “I’m getting very strong feedback from people who use X that we should actually include feature Y and not Z”, and defend specific feature requests to the product team. It’s a very important role, advocating on behalf of the developers to the company and evangelising the company to the developers. It’s also something of a balancing act at times. In our recent podcast with Mary Thengvall, author of a recent book about developer relations and well-established community builder, she said: “… you’re constantly going back to the company with feedback from the community or turning around and explaining to the community why a product roadmap looks the way that it does and why those are the decisions you’ve made. You find that you’re explaining why we’ve made decisions or what best practices we have decided to follow. There’s a lot of storytelling in there, fitting your knowledge to the perspective of the person that you are talking to. Taking the feedback from the developer audience and the technical audience and communicating that in a way that the product team and the stakeholders and the company are going to understand and vice versa, taking the business speak from your stakeholders and communicating that back out into the community in a way that they understand…”. Developer relations people are responsible for building connections, then stepping back and letting other people do their jobs. For example, they make an introduction between a community member and a recruiter, or they connect an active community member to someone at the marketing team, to write a blog post. The developer relations team are not responsible for hiring the person or publishing the blog, and it may or may not happen. But the connection was made and it can bring value to the company, ultimately, so that’s the job. It isn’t measurable in terms of sales numbers or marketing numbers or traditional business metrics. Developer marketing Working in developer marketing, the focus is to encourage developers to learn about, try out, adopt, use and contribute to a software product. This is the team that defines the target audience by building a model of developer segmentation and personas. They also create the developer marketing strategy and product go-to-market plans, and work on outreach channels of social media, content marketing, email campaigns and blogs. Some developer marketeers will be in teams that establish developer rewards programs and early access programs for software or hardware; other, smaller teams, will be focussed on growing an audience via sponsored events and meetups. There’s a great chapter in Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide, by Ana and Christine of Qualcomm, who talk about building a developer community around hardware. They describe the process of narrowing down the target audience for the community around their Snapdragon 410E processor. It was ‘…to let a thousand flowers bloom: to make it as easy as possible to use, to build up a broad community and channel, then see where biggest leads came from and tune the business approach along the way. That’s a difficult place for developer marketing to work. “Who is our target audience?” we asked. “Lots of people,” the product team told us. “What will they make with the board?” “Lots of things. You know, for the Internet of Things.” “Can you identify a few key vertical segments to focus on for our initial campaigns?” “Why would we do that? We need to position the product as broadly as possible.”…’ As they say in the book, it wasn’t exactly a well-defined target audience and clear direction, but that is as succinct a description of the place that a developer marketing team finds itself as I’ve ever seen! And finally… The following table illustrates the subdivision between roles as I’ve described them above. Please let me know in the comments if you think I missed anything about the roles, or if you have good (or bad!) examples of how they work together to allow the developer outreach team to engage with its community. #developermarketing #developerrelations

Machine learning (ML) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently one of the hottest topics in most organisations as it continues to expand across many sectors. In the past ten years, various data science third-party platforms have emerged and evolved, gaining widespread success among developers and catering to data scientists’ increased needs for developing, scaling and deploying ML models. In the 15th edition of our Developer Economics survey, we asked 8,600+ machine learning developers which data science platforms they use, how satisfied they are and how likely they are to recommend each of these platforms. As you would expect, there is generally a strong positive relationship between developers’ satisfaction and usage for a given platform – the more satisfaction a platform gathers, the more mindshare and recommendation it gets. In this post, we explore the implications of this relationship as well as some of its nuances for third-party platform vendors. Taking a step back The majority of developers use more than two data science platforms. ML developers leverage the specialisation of various platforms to manage different tasks, such as end-to-end model development, data sourcing, algorithm development and model deployment. “Loyalty” is not yet a concept that applies to data science platform users as the product offering is still evolving and there is no single product that answers all the needs of developers and data scientists. This fragmentation is reflected in the usage of and satisfaction with machine learning platforms. Mindshare goes hand-in-hand with satisfaction and NPS The higher the satisfaction and the NPS, the more mindshare a platform gathers from developers. The two polar opposites best illustrating this point are Anaconda and SAS Enterprise Miner. Anaconda is the undisputed leader across mindshare, satisfaction, and NPS while SAS ranks last for both satisfaction and NPS which in turn translates to a mindshare ten times lower than Anaconda’s. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is Anaconda’s closest competitor for both mindshare and satisfaction, even though it follows at some distance. Title: Data science/machine learning platforms Benchmarking For some players high specialization translates in high satisfaction Niche or specialised products do not get as many users as the top players do but are deemed highly satisfactory by their more limited audiences. For instance, ML developers using Cloudera Data Science Workbench platform show higher levels of satisfaction and NPS than users of MATLAB, even though MATLAB’s mindshare is six times higher than Cloudera’s. This is good news for specialised platforms – as they already compete head-to-head with the leading platforms in terms of level of satisfaction with platform features, they have significant potential to increase their mindshare. For these platforms, it would be worth looking into different strategies that could lead to increased mindshare – from the right marketing message to adding more widely used features or providing more documentation and support. A landscape full of opportunities Mindshare for data science platforms is poised to change in the near future. Indeed, awareness for the top data science platforms remains relatively low with more than half of developers not being aware of most offerings. Furthermore, awareness does not always translate to usage. For example, IBM Watson Machine Learning and Anaconda have similar level of awareness (around 35% of ML developers), and yet Anaconda’s mindshare is three times higher than IBM Watson’s. This gap in usage stems, to a large extent, from developers who are aware of Watson ML but have never tried it. In summary, data science platform providers need to work on turning awareness into usage. If you enjoyed this post, our data science and machine learning Developer Satisfaction Tracker provides a more detailed deep dive into usage, awareness, reasons to adopt or reject a platform, satisfaction, and recommendation for the top data science platforms. #usage #developersatisfaction #NPS #machinelearning #datascience

Have you ever visited a website with a ‘ghost’ developer zone? You know the type I mean? Where the blog posts are over a year old, nobody has posted on the forums in months and there haven’t been any new releases on GitHub for quite some time. I think we’ve all seen these portals, and maybe even worked on one (I know I have!). Image source: Konrad Forstner on Flickr [CC BY 2.0] They come about when a company has ambitious plans for engaging with developers, but somehow, things don’t quite come together. Perhaps there wasn’t the appetite to provide the staff to build a convincing developer product and support it? Or maybe the product just wasn’t great, or as good as the competition. There are many reasons why developer marketing goes wrong. This blog post is how to tip the scales in the balance of success, and take your developer program from strength to strength. A maturity model for developer marketing You may be familiar with maturity models for assessing the “ability of an organization for continuous improvement in a particular discipline” (Wikipedia). Formal or informal evaluation of particular characteristics, such as processes and structures within a system, against agreed stages or levels are used to determine maturity. A number of  models have been developed by practitioners and academics over the past years, if you are interested, there is a thorough academic review here; the capability maturity model and ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE) are probably the most familiar formal models within the software industry. In marketing circles, there are various ways to assessing the maturity of your digital marketing, such as Boston Consulting Group’s approach for digital marketing maturity based on organizational structure. Image source: Boston Consulting Group However, when it comes to measuring software developer marketing, metrics and maturity models are not yet part of a common toolset. As we’ve previously observed, developer marketing is still a young and fragmented industry, with pockets of best practice locked within the companies that master it. We have recently answered the lack of recorded thought leadership on the subject, by publishing a book about the essentials of developer marketing. But we’ve yet to see a discussion about the way to measure the maturity of your developer marketing efforts. Why market to developers? Perhaps the first question should be – why market to software developers? Increasingly, we are seeing developers make technology adoption decisions and take control of the process by which software enters their organisations. In much the same way that IT departments, which were a rarity 20 years ago, have become standard in most companies today, it seems likely that, in the near future, companies will need to become conversant with developer marketing. Good software developer marketing is rather different from consumer marketing; it consists of technical outreach and education, such as software documentation and example code, tools and downloads, knowledge bases and contact points both online and in real life, through focussed events. A developer marketing program has a number of aspects and channels and the maturity of such a program can be measured, in part, by their uptake. Let’s take a look at some details by working through the phases of developer marketing from the least to the most mature. Newbie Image source: FreakingNews.com Newbie developer programs are the entry-level for companies wishing to engage with developers. They are limited in scope and provide just a few APIs or SDKs, with limited documentation or hands-on support. The developer liaison team is of a small size (2-3 engineers focused on API product and documentation) and runs on a small budget. A developer portal to attract and encourage registered developers will be on the list of must-haves, and the team will endeavour to engage with potential developers in other online channels, such as StackOverflow and Reddit, but they will have limited visibility and few external advocates. Developer programs at this stage of maturity should be asking how to build momentum to encourage engagement with their program. They should be looking at building developer interest that can be retained and built into a larger program. Examples include Memgraph, OutSystems and Zebra Technologies. Challenger Image source: wetwebwork on Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0] Challenger developer programs are Newbies that are taking root and growing. They have matured to the point of offering a range of APIs or SDKs.  The portal provides solid levels of documentation plus hands-on support. The audience is typically focussed in one area, and has grown from Newbie levels to about 10,000 developers. Engagement is mostly online through the developer portal and typical third-party channels, but there is some face to face outreach via hackathons and meetups, typically within a single region. There is a overall developer marketing budget of up to $1M in place, and a team to provide product management and product engineering plus developer outreach and support engineering. Challenger programs are asking questions about marketing strategy, such as the best activities for RoI, reaching an audience, and best practices for the marketing team to follow to justify their budget. Examples include Pivotal and Mastercard. Authority Image source: Camera Eye Photography on Flickr CC BY 2.0 Authority developer programs are well established and offer a portfolio of developer products for their audience. There will be a range of APIs or SDKs available for a disparate developer audience of up to several hundred thousand that is located in multiple global regions. The total developer marketing program is staffed and funded at a level appropriate to its size, typically up to $5M. There will be a need for a number of product managers and product engineers, plus a separate team for developer relations and developer marketing, plus a level of developer product business development. Developer marketing will be able to present a range of events, and provide a solid online presence via a mature developer portal that has suitably high levels of documentation and technical support, as well as engagement external via third-party channels. Authority developer programs are sufficiently established to run a number of developer facing events per year across different regions, including hackathons, conferences and sponsored events. They may also provide training and developer certification. The Authority programs are looking for validation for their marketing spend, and want to develop a strategy to target the right segments, extend their reach and build upon their established audience. Examples include Mozilla and Unity. Unicorn Image source: Wikimedia Commons Unicorn developer programs are well-established, providing a number of different APIs and/or SDKS to a range of different developer profiles across a broad audience that numbers in the millions. The program is well staffed and funded with a budget of over $5M, which is used to provide a wide level of engagement online and in person at events, hackathons and training. The Unicorns need to focus on the competition to stay ahead, and look to build up regional audiences where these do not currently exist. Examples include Google and Microsoft. How to evolve your developer marketing program Having set out the characteristics and levels of maturity for typical developer programs, the natural question is how a program makes transitions between them. It’s dependent on the core platform or product, of course, since regardless of the size and skill of your developer marketing team, it’s not possible for them to deliver unless developers see value in it. And that comes down to your place in the market and how you deliver on your roadmaps and vision. Investment in the right elements of the developer program is also key; if you do not provide what your audience needs and values, you will not reach it. SlashData’s Developer Program Benchmark reports tracks the leading developer programs through twice-yearly surveys that that assess developer satisfaction across 20+ developer program features and services, including marketing. The reports show the levels of importance that developers place upon each feature, which can be used to guide the focus of marketing spend within a program of any stage of maturity. Ultimately, building reputation among developers comes down to the quality and nature of the communication you have with them, and in this, your developer marketing and relations team are crucial. As we explain in Selling it Softly, developers possess a healthy level of cynicism towards anything that could be interpreted as marketing. Anyone venturing into developer marketing swiftly becomes aware of the developer’s disdain for the hard sell. Our book sets out some best practice in some of the many aspects of developer marketing, but a central message runs through it: respect the unique character of your audience! If you’re setting up a developer program as a Newbie, or already up and running and aiming to ‘cross the chasm’ to the next level in the maturity model, we have data to help you focus your efforts and budget in the areas that matter most to your developer audience. Our mission is to help the world understand developers. We help the top 100 technology firms understand the profile of developer communities and measure the ROI of their developer strategies. As an analyst firm, we survey 40,000+ developers annually and analyse that data to help our clients target the right developers, prioritise the right features for their products, and optimise their marketing budget to drive developer engagement and satisfaction. If you’ve any questions about what we do, or want to find out more, please do get in touch! PS: While you’re here. if you want to find out more about the subject of developer marketing, check out our book, Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide. #developermarketing #developerprogram

When developers evaluate new technologies, one of the elements they often look at is the size and strength of the community surrounding that technology. “Can I get help and support from peers when needed?” It’s one of the reasons why open source technologies tend to be so popular. Conversely, technology vendors regularly signal their virtue with community numbers: “Our product is used by millions of developers, choose us!” However, there is reason to be critical of this line of thinking. The activity of a core group, or indeed the vendor itself, may matter more to get great support than the sheer number of users. Most technologies are not subject to network effects: they don’t become inherently more valuable when more developers adopt them. Even in open source projects, there is often only a small number of core contributors. Furthermore, vendors may bloat the numbers they report: deliberately, or simply because they don’t have good data available. At /Data, we’ve been maintaining and publishing estimates on the global developer community for a few years now. Our biannual survey also gives us a solid idea of how those developers are spread across various communities. So let’s see where some of the largest developer communities can be found and how powerful those communities may really be. What do you mean by “community”? The largest regions in terms of developer population are North America, with an estimated 4 million active software developers in mid 2018, and Europe (3.8M in the EU28). However, calling these communities is a bit of a stretch. Developers in these regions are fragmented across countries and cities, as well as technologies and languages. North America includes the relatively homogenous USA, but also various Latin American countries. Europe includes software powerhouses like the United Kingdom, but also smaller Eastern European countries. From the perspective of finding peers to support you (or talent to recruit), looking at small groups gathered in cities around specific technologies is more useful than considering the wider geography. The largest developer program in our research, with over 10 million active users globally, is Google. Google is great at empowering and supporting their community through forums and the likes. This said, they also have excellent developer satisfaction scores when it comes to vendor-driven support of developers with documentation, tutorials and training, tooling, and so on. Google is the default choice for many developers; it’s not clear whether that is due to the strength of their community or due to the value they provide themselves. They of course offer a multitude of technologies, where experience in one product doesn’t necessarily translate into another. Perhaps it’s more correct to view them as a collection of communities. What about different sectors of the software industry? More than 14 million developers are involved in creating web apps. Once again, we can wonder about the fragmentation in this community across technologies. A sector view may not be the right level of analysis. Finally, we can look at a technology. There are over 10 million active Javascript developers, making it the most popular programming language in the world today. Here we may see a stronger sense of community, with forums, real-life groups, learning institutions and more being organised specifically around the language. In short, when we say “community”, it’s not trivially clear what we mean by that. (Neither is “developer” for that matter, but that’s a story for another blog post). Community size is not necessarily an indicator of homogeneity, coherence or level of activity. That makes it less than straightforward to assess the value of a developer community. How (not) to count developers If you’re interested in estimates of developer communities, you will have no doubt seen very high numbers being floated. Developer tools routinely reports user numbers in the millions; communities who claim a broad reach, like Stack Overflow or Github, will report tens of millions of developers. At /Data, we are skeptical of such numbers, in particular if you intend to use them to make adoption decisions. First, because it is not clear where each source draws the line in what they consider to be an (active) developer. Are IT professionals, DevOps, or sysadmins included? What about people who once made an account, but never actively used the product? However, the bigger issue seems to be where such numbers are sourced. Most estimates floating around the internet are based on (unique) pageviews, downloads, IP addresses, and the likes. All of these are susceptible to a multiplier effect, not in the least due to multi-machine and multi-browser software testing, frequent cleaning of caches and cookies for testing, repeat downloads of developer tools, and development automation (e.g. build servers). Abandoned accounts may significantly skew the estimates as well. Sometimes, numbers we’ve come across seem to be based on nothing at all. Measurements like that are only a vague indication of the number of actual active developers and therefore of the strength of the community. They tend to be not comparable across vendors. Not to mention that it is in the self-interest of the vendor to report the biggest number they can find. Indicators that indicate actual developer activity, like Monthly Active Users, are exceedingly rare. Conclusion Whether you’re a developer thinking about the direction of your career, or someone who is deciding on which technology to adopt, the question of how strong the supporting community is, is perfectly legitimate. To asses the true benefit of community, however, make sure to use the right scope and reliable, meaningful numbers. On our part, we will continue to provide you with our best estimates of active software developers, using sources that are direct evidence of recent coding activity. If you are interested in having a look at a list of the largest developer communities in terms of active users have a look at the 1 Million Developer Club .

In this article, I’m going to talk about how I perceive the mainstream consumer audience to have rejected virtual reality, and suggest that its child, augmented reality, may be the Slope of Enlightenment that convinces us to buy in. While these are my views alone, towards the end of the piece, I’ve dug out some data from software developers around the world who are working with AR and VR.  Tomorrow’s world, today I worked in the smartphone industry before it came of age. Our mission was “a smartphone in every pocket” at a time when simple feature phones like the Motorola RAZR were the must-have communications device. Within a few years of our early projects, the competitor, Apple, launched the iPhone. The rest is history. The App Store opened its doors, the stars aligned, the technology dream was realised and smartphones went on to rule the world. I grew up in a time of change. We had a BBC microcomputer before I was ten years old. As a teenager, I sashayed along to the sounds of the eighties on a tape Walkman, and later mobile CD players and minidiscs. Then Napster, now Spotify. Change. The cadence of technological evolution was a rapid heartbeat, sounded out by the Internet, mobile phones and a maturing software development industry, which I joined enthusiastically. Maybe I just got used to an unrealistic pace of change? But whatever happened to virtual reality (VR)? Its heartbeat seems to have flatlined. Nothing much has changed in the years that have passed since the “year of VR” (pick your year, we’ve had a few of them), which turned out to be nothing much of the sort. When I look at my mobile phone of a few years ago, or my website developed in 2004, I think how clunky and quaint they look compared to the sleek form factor and execution possible today. But when I look at the VR headsets of yesteryear and today and compare what they deliver? Not so much. Take a look at this  slideshow  of legacy VR hardware. Sure, we’ve come some way since the Sensorama, but the Sega VR of 1993 wasn’t significantly more dorky than today’s HTC Vive Cosmos, was it? Does anybody really want to strap a heavy, nerdy headset on that makes you suffer motion sickness after a few minutes use, tethers you to a PC, dulls your senses to the real world outside the headset and causes you to trip over your furniture? Sure, expensive and shiny, next generation VR devices, are coming. But much of the hardware available is unchanged from when it came to the stores two or more years ago, which means hard-core early adopter audiences aren’t shelling out again.  While availability of more cost-accessible hardware for casual users has increased, e.g. the Oculus Go, the handsets are still expensive enough to give mainstream consumers pause, and typically compromise on aspects of quality that mean the VR experience is somewhat flawed. Convince people that you’ll change their lives In the consumer world, expectations for VR were raised early and sadly led to disappointment as it became clear that the ambitions went far beyond what was possible given the technology available. Overpromised, VR lost the attention of mainstream audiences, as it simply could not deliver. In part, this was down to  problems with the hardware , such as cumbersome headsets, inadequate processors, poor displays and weak audio. Then there’s the secondary reason: there is no “must-have” killer app that convinces sufficient people that you’ll change their lives. The two issues go hand in hand (the ‘chicken and egg’ situation) since if technology is inadequate, the content creators see no justification for investing heavily in VR. In turn, this means insufficient buyers and revenue to justify the investment in improving the technology. (It’s worth pointing out that secondary uses for VR, such as in industry, education, healthcare, have a very different uptake/content model, and as such, I’m considering just the mainstream here). And, as such, entertainment content is the key to unlocking adoption by persuading consumers that VR devices are a must-have item. Like 3D TV, VR has thus far failed to deliver a sufficiently convincing experience that sends people rushing to shops to buy the hardware, despite its costs and the limitations involved. What’s more, VR content isn’t coming along as fast it used to. Hollywood used it for marketing, e.g. to promote films such as 2016’s  Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them  and TV shows including  Game of Thrones . But this has dropped back as consumer uptake and gratification was found to be negligible. Venture funding for consumer VR software companies may drop by more than half this year, to $265 million from $576 million a year ago, SuperData says. And this isn’t surprising. According to the SiliconANGLE. VR headset sales have dropped nearly 34% since Q2 2017. Even committed hardware manufacturers are showing signs of taking their foot off the gas. Samsung, which was one of the first to market with its Gear VR mobile headset, didn’t say anything about VR in its major announcements at CES this year. Is AR the way out of the trough of despair? Experts predict that new kids on the block, Augmented Reality (AR) on smartphones and Mixed Reality (MR) headsets, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens. will pick up the audience that VR failed to serve. In terms of the  Gartner Hype Cycle , AR and MR — the children of VR — look to serve as the Slope of Enlightenment. AR can be delivered by the hardware already in your pocket. It doesn’t need the level of resolution or processor power demanded by VR. AR is also far less cumbersome than VR and can be used on the go since it doesn’t require total immersion in the experience. The software brings in a virtual element without losing the real world.   Certainly, analysts report adoption of augmented reality and mixed reality to be on the up, with earnings expected to come from mobile AR apps, particularly games. Google and Apple have strongly embraced this market with ARCore and ARKit, enabling developers to access AR services on more than 500 million devices in the wild today. Both Apple and Google envisage third-party apps and services that use AR as valuable additions to their app stores. Successful apps add billions to the top line (Apple was expected to make $3 billion revenue over 2 years from in-app purchases within the best known AR title to date, Pokémon Go) and high-profile AR apps also strengthen the ecosystems of both companies, boosting other revenue streams. The smart money is now shifting to companies working on AR and MR. Apple have a rumoured  research project  to build a headset for delivery next year. Investment in companies working on MR is expected to jump by nearly 50 percent this year, according to SuperData, with sales of MR headsets expected to ramp up significantly and  surpass earnings of VR headsets  within the next two years. The above is purely my opinion, based on observations of the tech industry over a number of years and a healthy degree of skepticism when it comes to inflated expectations. It’s uninformed by experience at the coalface of development however. So, what do software developers working with AR and VR, have to say? Software developers working in VR and AR told us… Here at SlashData we run regular surveys of software developers around the world to uncover valuable insights from those working in mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, web, game, AR/VR, data science and machine learning. In our  Developer Economics 14th edition report , which is based on a large-scale online developer survey that ran over a period of eight weeks between November and December 2017, we reached over 21,700 respondents in 169 countries. We studied the data returned from developers working in AR/VR and found the following: 25% of professional game developers say they are targeting AR and/or VR. This figure falls slightly to 19% across the entire corpus of developers surveyed. Dedicated VR hardware, such as Oculus Rift, is attractive to games developers (61% report using it), but across all developers working on VR projects, we see a much lower uptake (33%), reflecting its early adopter status in fields other than games. Across all developers working on VR projects, 32% are targeting smartphone hardware using Google’s Cardboard, and 19% are using Daydream View, built into Android Nougat and beyond, reflecting that developers, and consumers, are still experimenting with the technology on their existing hardware. A similar picture emerges for AR, with Android and iOS taking the lead in most popular AR platforms across all developers targeting AR. Of the dedicated AR hardware available, Microsoft HoloLens leads the pack, with Google Glass at Work and MagicLeap trailing behind when the survey ran in late 2017. We are currently running another survey and we would value your input. If you’re a software developer working in the field of AR or VR, or considering doing so, please  consider answering the questions . If you’re not a developer but are working in the AR/VR field, pass the  link  on to your developer friends and colleagues. Every survey completed has a chance to win  Oculus Rift +Touch Virtual Reality System  to test your creations (or simply play around),  Samsung S9 PLus ,  $200 towards the software subscription of your choice, or other prizes from the prize pool worth $12,000 ! Plus, if you refer other developers to take the survey, you may win up to $1,000 in cash. Just don’t forget to sign up before you take the survey, so that we know you want to be included in the prize draw! What do you say, are you in? #augmentedreality #virtualreality

Have you heard this geek joke? Q: How can you tell an extroverted software developer from an introverted one?A: The extrovert looks at YOUR shoes while she’s talking to you. It is something of a cliché that developers (aka hackers, nerds, geeks) are all pale, bespectacled boffins who ache from endless hours spent in dark rooms in front of multiple screens. Not strictly accurate, it might still be fair to say that developers constitute an audience with some noticeable shared characteristics—among them, a healthy level of cynicism towards anything that could be interpreted as marketing. Anyone venturing into developer marketing swiftly becomes aware of the developer’s disdain for the hard sell. So how do you market to developers? During the Future Developer Summit in October 2017, the /Data team realised that developer marketing is still a young and fragmented industry, with pockets of best practice locked within the companies that master it. While countless books, courses and blogs exist for consumer marketing, and for various forms of B2B marketing, developer marketing has been poorly served. What was evident during the summit was that we needed a medium to spread knowledge—currently held behind closed doors—to a broader audience around the world. So the vision for the book was simple and powerful: to become the standard textbook that every new recruit into developer marketing reads to immerse himself into this brave new world. A book whose influence may extend beyond the field of developer marketing. Given that developers are the most marketing-averse audience out there, it could become a toolset for B2B marketers in many more industries. We brainstormed the book concept at the summit, and invited leading practitioners from the best companies in the field to contribute. At this point, if we were in a film, the screen would fade to a blur and we would be brought forward to the 2018 Future Developer Summit, with a caption underneath that read ‘12 months later,’ as we effortlessly launched the book.  Of course, the 12 months between summits brought a number of challenges as Nicolas and Andreas encouraged leading developer marketing practitioners to author chapters in the book, and they were edited together into a whole. But we got there, and the hard work paid off when, finally, we launched Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide last month. What’s in the book? Instead of a step-by-step guide to writing a developer marketing strategy, we present a toolbox of knowledge and practical understanding. Topics covered include: running successful developer events, building and maintaining a solid community of developers, how to get the most out of email marketing, how to nurture IoT / hardware developers, how to encourage experts in your community to advocate for you, and how to create a mindset for content marketing in your organization. In each chapter, our authors have been encouraged to share valuable but non-obvious learnings, including mistakes they’ve made along the way, and a set of actionable best practices. We typically begin each chapter with a problem statement to introduce the topic and make clear why it is important. Then we describe the company’s ‘journey’, with the goal of sharing what does and does not work (and why) so you gain practical insights from the voices of experience. Each chapter was contributed by experienced developer marketing practitioners working at companies with successful and well-established developer marketing programs: /Data: Developers Are a Big Deal. Marketing To Them Shouldn’t Be.Microsoft: Using Developer Personas to Stay Customer-ObsessedFacebook: Successful Developer Email MarketingSalesforce: The Power of CommunityOracle: Repositioning Your Brand to DevelopersSAP: Connecting Developers with ExpertsVMWare: Hands-on Labs for Deeper EngagementAtlassian: Growing Up by Scaling Down: How a Small Developer Event Can Make Big Impacts on Your EcosystemArm: How to Connect with Developers When You Can’t Meet ThemQualcomm: Hardware Is the New Software – Building a Developer Community Around a Chip Instead of an SDKGoogle: Behind the Scenes of Great Developer EventsUnity: Developing the Right Mindset to Create Great ContentAccenture: Closing Thoughts: How to Attract, Engage and Retain Developers There are also some common elements throughout the book. One of the key themes that runs throughout is the increasing influence of software developers within the companies in which they work. How have software developers gained their superpowers? In the past, technology selection was determined by system administrators and procurement teams, but the availability of open source code and free-to-trial software development kits now allows developers to evaluate platforms and tools and choose what to use without having to ask for authorisation. Developers are increasingly in control of the process by which software enters their organisations, and as complexity increases, the managers to which they once deferred are now asking them to make technology adoption decisions. This also applies to paid services; let’s take the cloud as an example. It’s easy for a development team to select and adopt a free trial of a cloud platform during the development and testing phases. The team lead can instantly license, provision and use the tools it needs, avoiding delays and paperwork and allowing for rapid experimentation and innovation. Some months later, when the team is ready to scale up its code to production, the costs kick in for its company. And the decision as to which platform to use? The developers have already made it and wrapped it in many layers of code. The “bean counters” are unlikely to be able to reverse it. Your role in developer marketing is to make sure that initial choice is your platform, app or service. But how? When a software developer needs to select a tool for a series of projects over the coming year, he or she often already has an idea of what to use, maybe from reading a blog post, watching a webinar or attending a presentation at a recent event. Our chapter from Matthew Pruitt, who works at Unity, shares insights about Developing the Right Mindset to Create Great Content, and explains a range of techniques to communicate meaningfully about your product: You don’t need to work in a large organization or have multiple teams support you.  I’ve seen great, successful content produced by solo indie developers and that’s because they put themselves in the right mindset. Let’s explore what I mean by developing the right mindset.  Before you start creating content, you should be asking yourself two very important questions: ’What is the one takeaway I want someone to have after viewing my content?’ And ‘Why should they care?’ Developers really value the opinions of others like them, and will look at feedback on your product before committing. To get a good idea of what other developers think, they may look at discussion forums on your developer website. They are also likely to visit sites such as Stack Overflow, to understand just how easy your offering is (or isn’t) to set up and use. They are looking for statistics, such as the number of recent, active discussions, along with the kind of sentiments expressed, and the commonly mentioned pain points. Developers want technology that is supported by a community, and they want a community that is growing and enthusiastic. They want to know that, when things go wrong, there’s a place to ask a question and get a swift response, and a place where answers to common issues are easy to find because the community is well-established. When marketing to them, you need to know how to grow your developer community, and how running a developer program for experts in the field will encourage them to advocate for you and amplify your messaging. If developers are happy, they’ll recommend you to others, who will also sign up to be part of your community and will, in their turn, make recommendations to their fellow developers. You need to understand the dynamic within a developer community and what you can control. Jacob Lehrbaum, of Salesforce, contributed an insightful chapter entitled The Power of Community: Community is fundamentally about people coming together to help each other, and the first step is to create a community that people want to belong to. A big part of that is your product itself, but there are things you can do above and beyond your product to make your community be a place that people want to spend time. One of the ways you can do that is through culture… Why read this book? In much the same way that IT departments, which were a rarity 20 years ago, have become standard in most companies today, it seems likely that, in the near future, companies will need to become increasingly conversant with developer marketing and consider creating departments of people that understand and value developers. Maybe that’s you! Perhaps you are just starting out on your developer marketing career, transitioning from traditional marketing, or from working as a developer yourself. Or perhaps you already have some experience but want to learn from the experts how to build your ecosystem to attract, support and grow your developer base. Whatever your experience, you know, or soon will know, that the developer audience is a tough one to market to. This book will teach you how. Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide is available from mid-September 2018 from Amazon. All profits from the book are to be donated to worthy causes that support software development in vulnerable or minority groups. #developermarketingguide

Now that the dust has settled it’s time to celebrate. And share some data and insights. In September 2018 we ran our third Future Developer Summit in Menlo Park, California. It was an unprecedented success, bringing in a net promoter score of 80. We hosted 60+ leaders in developer marketing and relations, hand-picked at Director level and up, from nearly 40 companies, from Amazon and Arm to Salesforce and Samsung. They gathered to debate best practices in developer marketing, learn, and design better developer strategies. Like all things at /Data, we never sit still. Our 3rd Summit was twice as large as our 2017 event, with more innovations on the format (including an investment session with ‘monopoly’ money!), more interactivity, more companies represented, and a pre-event networking dinner. David Bryant, Fellow at Mozilla, captured the atmosphere of the event as follows: “Future Developer Summit was a fabulous event that managed to combine outstanding speakers, a creative and engaging agenda, and dynamite topics at the leading edge of developer programs and outreach.  So many great opportunities to exchange ideas and learn!” The day was packed with data and insights, with presentations from Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, Twilio, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Digital Ocean, Pivotal, Twitch, and Arm. Some of the most tantalising insights came from the developer program leader survey which we ran during the Summit. 46 developer program leaders participated, allowing us to capture an up-to-date view of developer program resourcing spend, RoI and priorities, for all major developer programs represented at the Summit (see list of companies represented at the Summit here). Technology-driven developer programs represented at the Summit ranged from small (1-5 headcount in developer marketing/relations) to medium (11-50) and large (250+). The median developer program budget was in the range $2M-$5M. Developer programs have significant budgets and resources, but still small compared to their enterprise counterparts. More importantly, we measured the most popular RoI metrics for developer programs, based on the business function – marketing, relations or tooling – which produced wildly different results. Developer marketing teams prefer page views, unique visitors, or social media mentions as a metric of developer RoI, i.e. metrics directly related to traction and traffic. Relations teams favour developer satisfaction, active users and Net Promoter Scores: their focus is mostly on quality. Finally, developer tooling or engineering teams opt for SDK downloads and telemetry-type data as a measure of RoI, i.e. actual, real-life usage of their products. Less popular metrics were omitted from the graph. At the Summit we also launched our Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide, a book co-authored with the leading practitioners of developer marketing, working for the top platforms, from Accenture and Amazon to Unity and VMWare. The first of its kind, the book is designed to spread knowledge, currently held behind closed doors, to the broader audience of developer marketing practitioners based within thousands of platform companies around the world. We also held our 4th Developers’ Choice Awards, celebrating the leading software platforms, based on the independent and unbiased opinions of over 20,500 developers from 165+ countries. Run twice a year, the Developers’ Choice Awards reflects the results of /Data’s semi-annual global Developer Economics research program. We’d like also thank our partners – Catchy, Accenture, Developer Media and Gerson Lehrman Group who supported the Future Developer Summit with their presence. Until the next Future Developer Summit – watch this space. If you’d like to be considered for next year’s Summit, please let us know by emailing chris@slashdata.co Andreas #futuredevelopersummit

Future Developer Summit is back September 13, Menlo Park, CA, bringing together 60+ VP & director-level champions of developer marketing in an intimate invite-only setting to share knowledge, celebrate innovative thinking and discuss the course for the future. What goes into the creation of an award-winning documentation or live streaming communities that attract thousands of developers? What do developer personas at top tech companies look like? Do open-source developers require different engagement strategies than other dev segments? Where should developer programs invest their money in the next 5 years? These are the kind of questions the leaders in developer marketing are tackling every day. To bring the best practices forward, we’re excited to announce that our annual Future Developer Summit is back September 13, Menlo Park, CA! That’s right, the event falls nicely on the international Programmers’ Day, not by sheer accident. So what better way to celebrate developers than by highlighting the successes and learnings from the top tech firms who live and breathe code? Who is coming to the Future Developer Summit 2018? For the third year in a row, Future Developer Summit brings together 60+ director-level trailblazers in developer marketing (twice more than last year!) to debate best practices, learn and design better developer strategies. Speakers for this year’s Summit include some of the industry’s top experts: Amir Shevat, VP of Developer Experience – Twitch Andrew Clay Shafer, Senior Director of Technology – Pivotal Arabella David, Director Developer Marketing – Salesforce Bryan Davis, Engineering Manager, Technical Engagement – Wikimedia David Bryant, Fellow – Mozilla David McLaughlin, Director Global Developer Ecosystem – Google Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Director Developer Partnerships & Programs Partnerships – Facebook Nicole Herskowitz, General Manager, Azure Product Marketing – Microsoft Ricky Robinett, Director Developer Network – Twilio Shiven Ramji, VP Product – Digital Ocean Zach Shelby, VP Developers, IoT Service Group – ARM Who else is coming? Attendees include developer marketing champions from the top platforms (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla), hardware companies (ARM, Intel), enterprise (Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, VMWare, Adobe, Cisco), game companies (Epic Games), cloud software (Digital Ocean), emerging platforms (Twitch), finance companies (Visa, Intuit), open source foundations (Linux Foundation), recruiting (StackOverflow), and more! Also present – our partners who help produce this stellar event: Developer Media, Catchy, Accenture, and GLG. We’ve designed an agenda jam-packed with interactive discussions, keynotes, networking opportunities, Developers’ Choice Awards ceremony and a couple of surprises, all wrapped up in a beautiful sunny setting, with tasty food, wine, and live jazzy tunes.  You can find all the details at www.futuredeveloper.io Want to get a quote or an exclusive scoop about the event? Drop a line to miljana@slashdata.co #developermarketing #futuredevelopersummit

Emerging technologies are often a hype haven for media pundits. All the talk of Augmented Reality has been no exception and as with anyone who’s paid attention to the talk of flying cars or trips to Mars, one wonders if there’s fire to all the smoke. Is there a signal amidst all the noise? If yes, how does one come by that knowledge? Fortunately, there’s a method known to man and it’s feasible: ask the architects of the digital age themselves, developers as we call them, wherever in the world they might be. Augmented Reality: What Are Developers Working on? In our global developer surveys, we’ve asked developers about their involvement in Augmented Reality (and of course it’s siamese twin Virtual Reality), what devices or platforms they use, what market categories they are targeting and several other questions about their development experience. Their responses tell us how they are engaging with this emerging area of tech. Said engagement has given us a window into what their perspective on Augmented Reality might be: let’s take a glimpse. Data from our Q4 2017 survey shows that only 21% of developers are involved in Augmented Reality as professionals. The remaining large majority of developers identifying as hobbyists suggests that most developers are tinkering and experimenting with AR via side projects. They could be doing so in search of use cases that will resonate with the masses of the consumer market or the behemoths of the enterprise world. Once the opportunity in these use cases is realised developers may give the area their full attention. Our data also reveals that 50% of developers involved in Augmented Reality see smartphones & tablets running iOS or Android as the primary device to develop for.  This is far more than the figures for competing devices like the Microsoft Hololens (8%) or Google Glass at Work (2%). One reason could be that developers are going after the mass consumer market that is served by mobile devices today. This is also confirmed by our data: 56% of developers involved in Augmented Reality told us they are targeting consumers as against 25% targeting the enterprise audience. As headset devices haven’t reached critical mass yet developers are using the ubiquitous mobile platforms to test their ideas and prepare for the world of mass-market Augmented Reality headsets as well. These data points show that developers consider Augmented Reality a viable candidate for the next mass market opportunity. Companies looking to engage these developers must dive deeper: knowing the size of the developer community so as to get a hint of the addressable market for Augmented Reality technologies is a good first step. If you are interested in more data points and deep insights from our AR/VR developer research, please see our just-released AR/VR Developer Population Forecast 2018 report or talk to us at sales@slashdata.co #augmentedreality