Recently I took part in a community session hosted by SlashData. We reviewed the results from a Q4/2021 survey about developer program strategy. This post is a summary covering a subset of the topics and my thoughts on each. You can learn more about the developer program survey, how to participate, and past results on the Developer Program Survey website. How do program leaders spend their time...
I joined Google in 2018 as a Senior Developer Advocate. Over the past 4 years I founded developer relations for a new product area, was promoted to Staff Developer Relations Engineer, and built a team from scratch. I’ve been a poster boy of Googleyness, referring and recruiting friends, speaking at colleges about my journey to Google, acting as an internal mentor, and participating as a...
It all started as a joke. A bunch of bored graduate students started throwing a foam dart at a whiteboard. This morphed into software that combined an interactive touch display with Nerf guns. More and more students started playing. Anything to keep us from working on our dissertations. This distraction turned into an even larger one when we somehow convinced our supervisor to get involved. This...
Deshawn from Survivor 41, the first player (hopefully the last) to ever participate in the “Do or Die” twist In season 41 of Survivor, there were a lot (and I mean A LOT) of new twists introduced into the game. One twist that sparked a lot of conversation, analysis, and mathematical breakdown was something called the “Do or Die” twist. The twist worked as follows. At the...
I recently participated in a white elephant party for work. This type of holiday event is also known as a Yankee Swap or Bad Santa gift exchange. As I was participating in this event, I started thinking about what’s the optimal strategy? Should I steal or open something new? How much does my position in the gift selection order impact my chances of getting a good gift? To answer these deep...
I started my career at Google as the founding developer relations team member for a new product called RCS Business Messaging or more commonly referred to as RBM. I was new to Google, new to developer relations, and tasked with figuring out the developer go-to-market and what developer relations and developer experience should mean for this unknown product. This article details how I approached...
Original article posted on Google Developers blog. Google’s Business Messages lets customers message a business directly from Google Search, Google Maps, and any brand-managed property. Developers on Business Messages can leverage tools like Dialogflow to create AI-powered conversational experiences, where customers can chat with lifelike virtual agents that understand, interact, and talk in...
People vector created by pch.vector Few people grow up thinking about a career in developer relations. Even those that study computer science are rarely exposed to this world. They are typically thinking about a career as a traditional software engineer or perhaps a product manager. If you’ve found yourself reading this article, I’m willing to bet that you are already working in a technical field...
Website vector created by stories — www.freepik.com In developer relations, we are often a cross-functional team, sometimes seen as a support and amplification mechanism for core teams like engineering and product. A “nice to have”, but not necessarily required component for program success. Personally, I am not comfortable being considered “nice to have”, so how do we change that? We...
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. — Peter Drucker Peter Drucker’s often cited quote is one of the most famous quotes in business and one from my own experience as a startup founder and manager I’ve found to be very true. However, when it comes to developer relations, it is notoriously difficult to measure in part because it’s also notoriously difficult to define. Developer relations...
