Author Archives: lornajane

24 May
2021

Considering Developer Relations as a Career Move

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. Continue reading →

26 Apr
2021

Best Things About Developer Advocacy

There are some excellent articles around about what a Developer Advocate does, but have you ever wondered WHY we do what we do? I tried to articulate this when chatting with another developer lately, and I'm still thinking about it! So I thought I'd write it down to share a little more widely why I love this strange, misshapen career as much as I do. Continue reading →
14 Apr
2021

Measuring Repo Community Health with GitHub's API

I'm on record saying that GitHub is your Landing Page and when I think about companies having open source profiles, I think about how many developers will have the first contact with them on GitHub. If it's a code example you're looking for then like it or not, GitHub is considered a search engine by many developers.

With that in mind, I wanted to look at GitHub's Community Health measure of the repositories I'm responsible for. You can view each repo's community page separately through the web interface (look under "Insights") but that's not especially scalable if you have a lot of projects to track.

screeshot of the project's /community page, showing low completion Continue reading →

08 Feb
2021

Intro to RPi Pico with Mini Memory Game

I am the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi Pico which is a dinky microcontroller from the lovely people at Raspberry Pi. I also have the RGB Pico Keypad Base, because my husband was buying something else from Pimoroni (3D printer filament, more on that another day) and we love them and ... here we are :)

I've tried to write down and link to the stuff I found useful along the way with this project, in case it helps you too. Well, no, really so I can come back to it next time I'm using one of these!

Continue reading →

31 Jan
2021

Lab Book Meets Bullet Journal

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. Continue reading →
23 Dec
2020

Digital Developer Relations: Past and Future

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!). Continue reading →
14 Dec
2020

What's New in OpenAPI 3.1

With OpenAPI 3.1 coming "soon", I gave a talk at APIDays Paris about what to expect. But I'm a great fan of the written word as reference so here's a written recap of what's in the next OpenAPI release.

Top features:
- Compatible with JSON Schema 2020-12
- Webhook support
- Many other minor improvements
Continue reading →

04 Dec
2020

Bystanders Guide to Repository Maintenance

Today's post is about bystanders and open source. We sometimes have anxiety about doing things on "other people's" projects but the thing about open source is that those are not "their" projects, those are "our" projects, and they only exist because people other than their nominated gatekeepers chip in now and then. Continue reading →
16 Nov
2020

Making SDKs a Value-Added Experience

I've been working with SDKs quite a bit this year, simple ones that wrap a bunch of API endpoints. The best bits of these SDKs isn't just the delightful developer experience of using the clunky endpoints with the elegant SDK wrapping them. I mean, it is, but I already wrote about consistent and Delightful SDKs for Nordic APIs; today I want to cover the some of the "extra" things that make a big difference in the APIs. Continue reading →