Last week, I sat down with our Developer Community Manager, Heather Barr, to chat about our Developer Community on our weekly(ish) Twitter Space.
As you read our interview, you’ll notice how palpable Heather’s passion for this community is. She has (often single-handedly) fostered the growth of our Developer Community throughout her career with BigCommerce, and her answers sound like she has no plans to take her foot off the gas anytime soon. Read on to learn more about the community we’re so lucky to have, and Heather’s vision for the future.
This article is the TL;DR of our Twitter Space!
The Interview
Katie Hoesley: Hey Heather! Thanks for sitting down with me today. Let’s get right into it: can you tell me about what a Developer Community Manager does?
Heather Barr: Thanks for having me! What a loaded question! My primary role at BigCommerce is to advocate for the community’s needs and resources while being a resource to the members as well.
To dive into these — Advocating for the community’s needs! This looks like answering these questions:
- What does the community need to thrive?
- What can I do to address these needs?
At the moment, this is broken down into two main categories.
- Better tooling! The most important tool is our spaces, like Slack. Next are things like improving our swag offering for contributor programs (that we want to revamp!) and events/challenges, optimizing and tracking developer experience, improving onboarding, and supporting opportunities for members to do more with the community (such as working more with us or organizing community-led events and programs), access to additional resources for self-help and discovery within the community or documentation, and lastly — visibility into what’s going on and how to get involved.
- More resources! For example, knowledgeable BC-ers who have a similar experience, or more experience, than myself! Since I am the most consistent and present BigCommerce contact in this space (aside from Twitter — you are rocking Twitter!) bandwidth gets pretty stretched. A large effort of mine has been to change this, and not just for the time that I’m here, but beyond that, as well.
This leads me to another large responsibility of my role: being a resource to the members. This looks like acting as someone who can test and share visibility on issues or odd behaviors that our community members are having for a faster turnaround. This benefits our community members and BigCommerce by helping identify bugs and any necessary documentation updates.
Over my tenure here at BigCommerce, my role has gradually shifted focus to these two key aspects. As most of you have likely observed, I have days where I’m more focused on long-term processes and experience improvements (that’s when y’all don’t see me as much), and then I have days where I’m much more active in the community myself. Balancing is tough sometimes, but I do the best I can and am grateful for our members who are incredibly helpful with one another.
KH: Why do developer communities matter?
HB: I can’t speak for all developer communities out there, as they all have different benefits and ecosystems that are being supported — But for companies like ours, they’re so important for a partnership. Not only that but also for building on and improving the platform, together. BigCommerce wouldn’t be the same without our partnerships and without all of the developers out there who are challenging our platform limits and building real solutions to problems our merchants face and even bringing more merchants to BigCommerce through their relationships as agencies. In my opinion, I feel that developer communities are a huge part of DevX, which is an important investment for any company to commit to, especially those that depend on developers.
KH: What is the state of our community/where do we want to go?
HB: Great question, Katie! So, it’s two-sided. I’ll tl;dr it by saying the current state of our community is what I’ll call a layup for BigCommerce and a great peer-to-peer resource for devs. Currently, our members are mostly engaged in peer-to-peer, meaning dev-to-dev, conversations, and sometimes engaging with BigCommerce employees as well.
As far as where we want to go — This is what I meant by a layup for BigCommerce’ — This is the perfect time for BC-ers to step in and learn about developers building on and for our platform. Katie, Stephen (our Developer Advocates), and I still have work to do on this front to foster that connection, but it’s something I’ve personally spent a lot of time on recently, and may have some news soon.
I want to leave this question with a note — We’re extremely lucky to have so many of you who are open to helping and sharing your experiences. Specifically speaking about our Developer Slack space — this is the general vibe of the community, at the moment, and I hope this remains a constant as we grow!
KH: Any cool community things coming up?
HB: Cool things? Yes! Over the next few months, there are a handful of things I’m excited about.
To start with — DevWeek! DevWeek is an internal collaboration week that I played a big part in organizing for some of us internal folks at BigCommerce. This is a week where our developers, our DevDocs team, the DevRel team, and I are coming together to talk about areas of our roles that overlap and to work together in solving some common problems that you all face. We’re also going to be using this time to plan for 2023, so I will probably have more to share about fun opportunities closer to EOY!
I love that these Twitter spaces are a constant opportunity for our teams and our members. Every week this is something that excites me. Katie, you do a great job with these, and a note to all of you who are here or will be listening to the recording: if there’s a topic you want to hear about, let Katie know! Or if you want to get involved to be a guest, let her know! I would love to see more devs and partners co-host or be guests on these, as this continues to grow.
Our customer community manager, Jacinda Espinosa, will be running another series of Partner Q&A’s in Q1. This is where partners can, for example, run a demo of their app and host a Q&A immediately after in our primary merchant-facing Facebook community group to get feedback, ideas, questions, etc! If you’re interested in joining, apply here!
KH: What kinds of community contributions do we want?
HB: We’d love to see our members contribute by creating content! Written or visual tutorials, blogs, how-to content, general talks, videos, or blogs on your development process, maybe something interesting your app solves or an interesting solution you created for a problem other developers likely encounter as well. Anything unique is amazing to see!
To mention a few who’ve done things like this:
- Tom Robertshaw from Space48 does a great job at this with the Space48Apps YouTube channel.
- Although this was last year, Max Karlsson had a memorable contribution I’d like to talk about. He wrote a 2 part blog on implementing the forgotten password workflow for headless, as it was a common topic in the community at the time — that was incredible to see and I won’t ever forget that. (Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of that blog!)
- Just the other day, Jack Harner wrote a blog on Stencil CI-CD via GitHub actions. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet!
- During BigCommerceDX, the most recent community-led event organized by Space48, Matt Coy from ArcticLeaf demonstrated an Advanced Handlebars live-code tutorial that was so popular and valuable in the community.
These are just some examples, but the main takeaway is that the most impactful contributions are those that help your fellow community members. Engaging in our community spaces with each other, on Slack for example — is incredibly valuable and my absolute favorite type of contribution.
KH: What are some pie-in-the-sky goals you have for the community over the next few years?
HB: My main goal with the Dev Community over the next few years is for it to become more of a collaborative space between BC-ers and the members. Last year, I created and ran a pilot program focused on a couple of BC-ers for exactly that purpose — and learned a lot from it. Notes were taken, adjustments were made and I’m about to try again in a much bigger way.
I believe this goal has the best chance of making the Developer Community not just a space for developers, but a space that is used as a part of BigCommerce’s development lifecycle. I can’t wait to show our Community members what I’ve been working on for them!
KH: What would you like to see more of from/in the community?
HB: I would like to see more collaboration in our community between BC-ers and external developers, and I know I’m not alone in that!
I think we’re at a great time with the right people on board to start seeing these changes. Now that our DevRel team is ramped up and settling into their roles, we’re able to approach problems from different sides to move forward faster, together.
Secondly, I hope to see more community-led events, either virtual or IRL events and gatherings that our members organize and host themselves. I think as the community grows, more individuals would be interested in something like Space48’s virtual BigCommerceDX last year and other types of events where they can meet each other and share the awesome things they build on the platform.
I hope to create new ways to reward our members who do this and incentivize others to get involved!
KH: You’ve mentioned “D2D”. What’s this new program you’re talking about?
HB: I can’t say much more about this program just yet! I’ve been hearing feedback from the community and I’ve been working for y’all in the background. It’s my mission to deliver more value in our spaces to help you get unstuck faster, and have more opportunities to connect with internal BigCommerce folks and others in the community in creative and productive ways.
KH: What’s the best part about managing the BigCommerce Developer Community?
HB: Goodness, there isn’t just one!
Seeing how helpful and involved the members are taking the cake. I also really do feel like I’m making an impact here, on both the inside and outside. I know that I’m not always available or able to answer some of the questions that are asked by devs and partners, but the work I’ve been doing to help address this in the shadows I feel will start to pay off soon.
Next to that — finding and working with so many like-minded people at BigCommerce has been awesome. Branching out and creating new relationships with other BC-ers is something that has taken some time in my role, as I didn’t seek this out much when I first started. As I’ve grown in my role and met people like you, Katie, who reminded me of the power relationships have in the workplace and finding more advocates for our community members from teams outside of our own, has become one of my favorite parts of my role.
Have more questions?
We love hearing from our community members! If you have questions, comments, or anything in between, please reach out to us! You can reach both Heather and me in our Developer Slack space (if you’re a developer and aren’t in our Slack space, let’s change that! Follow this link to apply!), you can comment on this article, tweet at @BigCommerceDevs or @Katie_Hoesley, or email devrel@bigcommerce.com.
Top comments (1)
Thanks for this recap, Katie 💙
For all the readers, I'm also available here, on dev.to -- so reach out anytime!