After staring at the JDs of Developer Relations(DevRel) Engineers for hours and doing a quick check of my own transferable skills, I started this week researching into specific DevRel roadmaps and resources.
Out of the 4+1 DevRel key responsibility areas (Advocacy, Education, Community Support, Content Creation and Feedback Loop), I selected the following core pillars to focus on first:
Pillar#1. Technical Writing:
Documentations, articles or blog posts; Like how you would learn to write the first 'hello world' in any programming language, I started to build a consistent writing habit in developer-centric language.
Whether it's Developer Education or Content Creation, knowing this always helps.
Pillar#2. Public Speaking:
Whether you're making a tutorial, giving a quick demo or presenting your product to developers - knowing presentation techniques like storytelling, engaging your audience through a 'hook' and handling Q&A helps you communicate your message effectively in public settings and is a very important part of DevRel.
Pillar#3. Community Metrics:
Instead of measuring system performance or uptime like a Software Engineer, this pillar is learning how to measure 'human interaction'. This is the part that gives you accountability with leadership. This may involve tracking things like community growth through retention rates, developer engagement through forum participation and content impact through views on technical tutorials or documentation.
If you're just starting like me, here are some of the resources I found really helpful:
Courses/Guides
Communities
Developer Relations Foundation on LinkedIn
Any other pivoting engineers who are also going through a similar experience, feel free to share any resources or follow along as I write while I learn.
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