When I joined DevRel Uni Cohort 7, I thought I was signing up to learn how to talk to developers. I came out understanding something bigger: how building, learning, and sharing are all being rewired at the same time — and why putting your work into the world matters more now than ever.
The thread running through every session
What struck me most was how deliberately the whole cohort was framed around one question: what does DevRel even mean in the age of AI? It wasn’t a side topic. It was the spine.
Bianca Buzea opened the cohort with exactly that — building, teaching, and learning when AI is changing all three. Her point stuck with me: the question isn’t if things change, but how fast you adapt. Nader Dabit followed with navigating a tech career in an industry that refuses to slow down, which reframed uncertainty as something to build with rather than wait out. Patrick Skinner showed what shipping at high velocity actually looks like when AI is part of the loop. Hassan El Mghari pushed the idea furthest with “From Developer Experience to Agent Experience” — the notion that agents are no longer just assisting developers, they’re participants in how software gets built. And Francesco Andreoli closed it out on how AI lowers the barrier to entry and changes how developer communities form.
Five sessions, one message: the ground is moving, and the people who thrive are the ones who learn in public and adapt out loud.
How my perspective changed
I used to think of DevRel as a downstream job — you build the product, then you go explain it. The cohort flipped that. DevRel is upstream now. The way you teach, document, and share is part of how the product gets adopted, and increasingly part of how it gets built. When agents can read your docs and act on them, your developer experience and your content quality become technical infrastructure, not marketing polish.
What challenged my thinking
The “Agent Experience” session genuinely unsettled me — in a good way. I’d been thinking about humans as my only audience. The idea that I should also be designing for AI agents that consume and act on what I build forced me to rethink how I structure everything, from docs to onboarding. It connected directly to my own project (more on that below).
How AI changed how I build and learn
This is where the cohort became practical. I built my project, Thinkblock, using AI tooling, and it compressed the distance between an idea and something real I could look at and react to. But the deeper lesson was about judgment: AI did the boilerplate, but I still had to supply the vision, the structure, and the decisions about who it’s for and why. AI made me faster — it didn’t make me unnecessary. If anything, it raised the value of knowing what you’re actually trying to build.
The honest gap I found in myself
Here’s the uncomfortable takeaway: I realized my biggest missing skill isn’t technical — it’s writing. Blogging, articles, clear public communication. The cohort made it obvious that in DevRel, the ability to explain your work clearly and consistently is not a “nice to have,” it’s the job. I can build. I now need to get genuinely good at writing about what I build. That’s the skill I’m taking forward most deliberately.
A personal note
There’s a reason this lesson is hard for me, and I’ll be honest about it. About eight months ago, I was hacked. It made me retreat — I went quiet online, wary of being visible, of putting myself out there again. This cohort is the thing that’s pulling me back. “Build in public” isn’t just a content strategy for me; it’s me deciding not to let one bad experience keep me invisible. I’m choosing to be active again, to share my work, and to stop letting fear of another hack decide how present I get to be. That feels like the real graduation.
Updates on what I built
My project is Thinkblock — an ecosystem bridge connecting African Web2 developers to Web3 through curated, sequenced learning, ecosystem programs, and a vetted job board. The cohort sharpened the whole premise: if agents are absorbing routine implementation work, then the developers who thrive are the ones who understand systems deeply and can move between paradigms. That “bridge skill” is exactly what Thinkblock teaches. It’s live and explorable now.
What I’m taking forward
Three things: adapt faster than the change, write as seriously as I build, and stay visible even when it’s scary. Cohort 7 didn’t just teach me DevRel — it gave me a reason to show up again.
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