DEV Community: Alex Moreno

DevRel books

Alex Moreno — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 08:18:26 +0000

Read more about my journey on devrel in my blog: https://alexmoreno.net/

Anyone can share recommendations for someone trying to break into a #devrel or developer relations role?

Here goes mine:

First two obvious:

The Business Value of Developer Relations
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781484237472?gC=5a105e8b&gclid=Cj0KCQjwg8n5BRCdARIsALxKb96d-GzenZomeJ4lyURhnBov3YSz5xIMx-uxs7Ir9o41Vu4YewUvfEAaAtIHEALw_wcB
Developer relations the essential guide
https://www.devrelx.com/book

Then two great readings that I'll explain on a latter article why I loved reading them

The Product Marketing Manager role
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Product-Marketing-Manager-Responsibilities-Technology-ebook/dp/B076S6WN3L
Product marketing debunked
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Product-Marketing-Manager-Responsibilities-Technology-ebook/dp/B076S6WN3L

What is a Developer Advocate anyway?

Alex Moreno — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 08:37:01 +0000

Read more about my journey on devrel in my blog: https://alexmoreno.net/

bootstrap, Angular, Symphony, Java, Python, PHP7, Drupal9, VUE, ReactJS, GatsbyJS,…. have you noticed that our world is getting more and more complex?

In the old days you wanted to build something. You simply had to chose a language, maybe a framework on top of that language, and that's it, you were in business. Those days are gone, for good or for bad.

The amount of technologies and solutions that appear everyday is staggering, but is not necessarily a bad (or good) thing. Is just a mirror of what is happening out there.

Software is eating the world, and more and more Software Engineers are needed. And on top of that, a lot of clever people re-imagine the way we, Software Developers, Engineers or however you want to call them, work every day.

See the missing piece? Every other industry have powerful ways of sending those tools out there for the common knowledge. They have tools and mechanisms to talk in the same language that professionals talk in those industries. It's mainly under the umbrella called Marketing.

However in our beloved software development discipline there is no easy way to achieve that (And no, sales departments are not the best way to approach this problem).

On top of that, Marketing and Advertising (as well as sales) is not normally a world that is well received in the software circles. The most common approaches that we get to see as software developers are from recruiters, which are not always best behaved or even well informed about "the product" they are trying to commercialise (yes, note that "the product" is ourselves, sigh).

That's where developer relations comes into play. Known as well as devrels, developer evangelist or developer advocates, they are normally software engineers or software developers that hoard interests beyond those of just software, like marketing, but of course they have gained experience in the software industry across the years, and can show a passion for what said industry. They are keen to master and discover tools and languages, and they love to talk and write about those exciting discoveries. As a colleague of mine told me recently, they need to be a "peoples person".

As I started the article, the Software Industry is growing incredibly fast, and more and more tools appear every day. My prediction for the software advocate role is that this is just the beginning of something that will get to grow in both, numbers and importance, as companies need to find a way to make their tools known in a growing sea of solutions.

If you are interested on this follow my twitter at https://twitter.com/morenodotnet. I talk about this and other many things, like Open Source, Drupal, PHP, Software Development, etc…

Reduce your terminal prompt size in Mac/Linux

Alex Moreno — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 14:34:00 +0000

I really hate how much space the terminal in Macos eats.

That's eating some times like 60 to 80% of my terminal space, which on itself (the terminal) I like to keep small.

Easy solution though, edit your ~/.bashrc and add this line at the end:

export PS1="[..]/\W:"

Then using source against that file should get your changes:

source ~/.bashrc

And you can always use pwd, as you can see in my terminal, for whenever you need a reminder of the whole path where you are.

Much better, isn't it? :)

Stress and cherry pick free hot fix deployments

Alex Moreno — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 12:05:26 +0000

Git is an amazing tool, incredibly flexible and extremely capable. It’s a shame that Linus Torvalds will be remembered mainly by Linux, because in fact git is probably a much more used tool than Linux itself.

Regardless of that, git flexibility also imply that sometimes we can over complicate things, and one of the scariest things is the releasing process and the scariest of all scenarios: the hotfix.

Well, fear no more, I have a better solution for you for those hotfix releases.

The recommendation from git itself is normally to do a cherry pick. However, and in my experience, that results in uncountable headaches and problems with conflicts and what noes, and scare the most senior of the developer, not to even mention to hand this over to a less experienced member just when the senior is on holidays (hey, security releases, I’m looking at you).

A better approach? Well, something native to git itself and closer to the way we are used to work daily: branches.

The approach we’ve been taking since a few projects is to create a release branch, say release-v1.0. Once that branch is created, then you can create a tag from that branch. The advantage? Huge. Whenever you need to do a hotfix, you won’t need to over complicate with cherry picking or what else, you simply open in your preferred tool a PR against the release branch, and simply create another release from that branch.

That approach allows you to continue working on develop, keep a version of your prod safe in that release branch, and if the worst happens, you can simply open a PR against it, cut a new release tag, and the release to prod (of course testing first in stage).

I’ll work on some graphs to make this process more clear… if there is any interest on this :-)

What do you think about this approach? Feel free to leave your opinions.