From The Blog

08 Mar
2023

Raising the Next Generation of DevRel

Developer Relations isn’t new, but it’s also broad, ill-defined, and constantly evolving. It’s difficult to keep your own skills up to date, never mind coping with a whole team full of people and constantly creeping industry scope. The required combination of specialist and generalist skills to be successful is any of the Developer Relations and allied roles is extensive, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and end up coasting being just-good-enough at things but never feeling mastery.

As an individual contributor, manager and general DevRel presence over the years, I’ve developed some tactics both for myself and my team, and I’d like to share them in case they’re useful to others. Also since I’m moving to a less DevRel role, writing this down while I can still think about it! Continue reading →

Posted in work | Leave a reply

28 Feb
2023

Improve Existing OpenAPI Descriptions

I’m a firm fan of a design-first approach to building APIs, and advocate for it at every opportunity. Repeatedly. Design-first means that an API change starts in the OpenAPI description, gets reviewed and approved by the stakeholders, and then gets built afterwards.

I also live in the real world, where OpenAPI descriptions get generated from existing codebases, and engineering teams lack either the knowledge or the enthusiasm to modernise their processes. With a generated OpenAPI description, everything else that OpenAPI enables is likely to be disappointing, because the description only contains the information that was in the serverside code, and if you’re lucky some comment metadata. Enter OpenAPI Overlays, a way to describe alterations to an existing OpenAPI description that can be reapplied every time that description changes. Continue reading →

Posted in tech | Leave a reply

26 Feb
2023

Manager’s Secret Second Calendar

Employees expect a lot from their managers, and as managers we do our best to meet those expectations. However most managers are only human (I’ve met a few that I had doubts about), and so it can be difficult to get absolutely everything right absolutely all the time. I’d like to share a tactic that I learned from another manager around the time that I took my first line manager role, that I think really helped me to at least give the impression that I knew what was going on: a second calendar, visible only to you, with key dates in. Continue reading →

Posted in work | Leave a reply

Talks, Articles, Podcasts, and More

Article

Write documentation like you develop code


opensource.com, October 2022
Slides

Engineering Documentation


GOTO Copenhagen, October 2022
Butterfly

Neglecting Open Source Developers Puts the Internet at Risk


Dark Reading, September 2022
Article

What does a successful developer look like?


Silicon Republic, June 2022
Slides

Landscape of Open Source Databases


EMFCamp, June 2022
Article

How to accelerate your software development career


Computing, May 2022