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    Category: work

  1. Raising the Next Generation of DevRel

    08 March 2023

    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!

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  2. Manager's Secret Second Calendar

    26 February 2023

    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.

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  3. Outline your writing to ease the creative process

    11 April 2022

    For most of my career I've been a software developer, but now I'm mostly a communicator. As a manager, I give the right level of detail to many different audiences, and I deliver that in words they can understand. As a Developer Advocate, I explain complex technical concepts in useful, memorable, and occasionally entertaining ways. However the best software developers are lazy and I'm still always looking for ways to get things done with less effort on my part! For writing, the best process I know feels like unnecessary overhead, but it's always worth it in the end so today I'm sharing my secrets: create an outline before you start.

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  4. Keeping your finger on the (digital) pulse

    15 February 2022

    Whether you are building your own presence, or representing a brand or employer online, it's useful to know what people are saying! Keeping up with all those possible places you should look for news or mentions can be pretty laborious and when things are busy, it's difficult to keep up with this work unless you have some decent tooling in place. There are some great automation offerings around but here's my very basic strategy.

    TL;DR a bookmarks folder in my browser to open a bunch of saved searches all at once.

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  5. What Happened to your Blog?

    12 December 2021

    What happened to my blog? Nothing happened, I still blog ... except then I looked at my site the other day and realised, it's been a while.

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  6. Considering Developer Relations as a Career Move

    24 May 2021

    I think that Developer Relations is a fabulous career, and I'm often asked how I got started, or how someone else could get started. There are a lot of people hiring for Developer Relations roles just now (including me!) so here are my tips.

    There are so many different Developer Relations roles (called "DevRel") that I am definitely going to fall short of covering them all in any sort of detail! My own background is in Software Engineering, and I've mostly worked as a Developer Advocate since making the move into DevRel, so that's my context here.

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  7. Lab Book Meets Bullet Journal

    31 January 2021

    I enjoy a productivity hack as much as the next person, and I'm often asked about my setup. My background is in engineering (I hold an MEng in Electronic Engineering from York) and recognise the legacy of the lab book in much of what I do. If you're new to the lab book concept, check out this excellent article on how to maintain one properly. My practice breaks a LOT of the lab book rules and is also heavily influenced by the Bullet Journal trend (if you have time to spare, the instagram #bulletjournal hashtag gives a prettier introduction), which is a way to combine the benefits of productivity and processing information by writing it. Today's post gives a quick tour of my process.

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  8. Digital Developer Relations: Past and Future

    23 December 2020

    I work in Developer Relations, or "DevRel", and 2020 was a strange year with travel restrictions that meant that the entire industry did everything online, or digitally. I see this as a very positive progression of the way we work as DevRel professionals, and I understand that might be controversial, but I'd like to back up my position so hear me out (and then let me know what you think!).

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  9. What does a Developer Advocate do?

    30 January 2018

    I'm a Developer Advocate (you might also hear job titles like Developer Relations, Developer Evangelist) and I'm constantly asked what that means. What do I do? The answer is different for every one of these jobs but there are some common themes. After 18 months of practice at answering this question, I think I'm ready to give it a go.

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  10. Using OS X From The Keyboard

    04 July 2016

    I have a new job (Developer Advocate with IBM Cloud Data Services) and subsequently a new work laptop. It's a mac and after almost 10 years as a linux-only user, that's rather a shock! Due to some nasty RSI issues, I don't use a mouse or any other pointing device*, so as well as learning a whole new operating system I also needed to learn its accessibility tools. I'm still at the swearing stage but mostly past the tears so I thought I would share what I've found - using a computer from the keyboard is fast and productive for everyone as well as less painful for me, so you may find some tools in here that you want to try yourself.

    I collected all my tools, my own notes and scribbled cheatsheets and put them into this gist so that I could refer to them later; I also intend to keep updating this as a reference.

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  11. Simple One-to-one Meetings

    09 February 2016

    Recently I was giving some advice (that I was asked for, which is novel) regarding one-to-one meetings between developers and either team leads or management can be structured. My thoughts really boiled down to some very short points (this is why sometimes, those meetings take 15 minutes and other times they take 3 times that for a monthly update!). In case they're useful to anyone else, here's my meeting outline:

    • What's going well/what are you excited about?

    • What's tedious/annoying or actually a problem?

    • What could I be doing that I'm not?

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  12. New Job With Siftware

    17 November 2014

    After 4 years of working independently, today I start my new job! I'll be Principal Developer with Siftware, a small development agency specialising in project rescue, migrations, and generally being excellent at things that need business-conscious development skills applied to them. They're UK-based but distributed; I will still work mostly …

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