In November and December of 2023, I didn’t know what to write about for the DevRel Digest. When I find myself uncertain about what to do next, I turn to community for inspiration. Community is not only one of the core responsibilities of Developer Relations, it is also a value we practice amongst each other. In turning to my peers for inspiration, it became obvious what to write about: The community itself.
So I wrote about nine “DevRel you should know” for 2024 in two parts. With 2025 already underway and lots of major developments in the field and in tech at large, this next iteration of “DevRel you should know” feels more important than ever. In order to understand why I’ve decided on this particular evolution, I’ve provided the following context.
A quick look back before a look at the future
AI anxiety
While AI and its most notable players have been in development for a while, it wasn’t until the December 2022 launch of ChatGPT that the technology became meaningfully accessible. By January 2023, the OpenAI-based chatbot had become one of the fastest-growing consumer software applications in history. At the same time, Developer Relations experienced significant downsizing and layoffs, prompting many to wonder if the practice of DevRel was in its final long-anticipated and much-written-about death throes.
While the breadth and ambiguity of DevRel elude explicit success metrics and definitive business value, DevRel’s lack of uniformity and standardization might also be the key to its adaptability and resilience. Combined with a diversity of practitioners from typically unconventional paths to tech and its roots in community, Developer Relations might be the best equipped to survive tech’s ever-shifting landscape.
With the anxiety of AI, our role as advocates for developers might become more significant than ever.
Content, clarity, and company-specific needs
Content remains one of the most effective methods of reaching developers. With mainstream search engines becoming more and more polluted with ads and low-quality, inaccurate AI-generated content, the art of technical writing is critical to a product’s success. The point of content for developers should be to make the developer’s life easier – whether that’s presenting a novel solution to the problem they are working on or providing clear documentation and quickstart tutorials to get them up and running with as little friction as possible. Bad content dilutes brands; good content builds trust. Being able to discern quality in content will always be part of a successful DevRel program.
High quality content requires clarity not only in its presentation, but in its objectives as well. These goals are where DevRel can collaborate with company organizations that may seem at odds with the empathy and authenticity of a developer audience. With the layoffs of 2023 and the lethargy of the job market in 2024, DevRel had to reconcile with “aligning with the enemy” (AKA marketing and sales) in order to evolve. But this doesn’t have to be a compromise. Understanding a specific persona’s marketing funnel can help Developer Advocates gain insight into what kind of efforts to focus on for brand awareness; insight into what actually closes a deal can help a Developer Relations program refine its messaging. In both cases, there is an opportunity to see what success looks like and how to measure it.
Perhaps one of the silver linings of the “death of DevRel” is its renaissance, in which both companies and DevRel practitioners are asking themselves, “Does Developer Relations make sense for this company at this time? What does the company need and how can a DevRel program meet that need?” DevRel has been making a comeback, this time with a lot more discernment. The State of DevRel Report for 2024 reflects this, with respondents reporting more hiring than in the previous year; however, there was also an increase in expectations for head counts to decrease as company reorganizations became more prevalent than in previous surveys.
In other words, DevRel was still volatile in 2024 as companies figured out how best to reach developers.
With this in mind, how should we think about Developer Relations in 2025? To answer this question, I sought out the wisdom and experience of two prominent members of the community who have gone above and beyond to help raise us all up. They kindly donated their time to me for this post, offering perspectives and insights that will resonate with many working in tech right now.
DevRel you should know: Wesley Faulkner and Erin Mikail Staples
Wesley Faulkner is one of the most visible and active members of the DevRel community. A self-described “technology nerd,” Wesley started his career as a hardware technician for Dell, receiving annual promotions and steadily leveling up from tech support for desktops to tech support for government and education, finally moving over to servers and storage before leaving the company. It was easy to be successful because he was good at what he did, but there was a yearning for something else. “A lot of the movements that I made were usually out of frustration,” he tells me. Those movements would end up including social media management, marketing, community, and moderation at a variety of companies.
From the outside, such a career path may seem a little unconventional, but for Wesley, it led him right to where he needed to be. “It was a friend of mine who knew of my background – knew my technical background, my marketing background – that said, ‘Hey, we're doing this thing called DevRel, would you be interested?’ I interviewed and I got the job,” Wesley says, summarizing it as “an evolution of everything I had done beforehand.” But it wasn’t until his attendance to DevRelCon in 2019 that Wesley realized he had found his calling. “I was like, ‘I'm home,’” he says.
“Luckily that was generally the start of the Golden Age of DevRel where salaries went up, demand went up, and I felt like I had more agency, more control.”
Echoing a sentiment many of us are feeling right now, he adds, “Things don’t feel that way now.”
Erin Mikail Staples shares a similar career journey. Erin started with aspirations to work in politics. “My first internships were all in nonprofit and policy and court reporting and not techy things,” she tells me, and like Wesley, she experienced restlessness. “I naturally got really annoyed with the news industry.”
She decided to pursue something more creative. She started working at an agency with an interest in advertising. While she was there, she found herself working in the Shopify ecosystem and her natural curiosity led her to peel back the layers to the code underneath. “I was the person in my friend group that did the MySpace, LiveJournal, and Tumblr templates,” she says – an experience I think a lot of us of a certain generation can relate to.
Voicing another sentiment that resonates deeply with me, she adds, “Bring sparkle gifs back to the internet please.”
Erin next worked a little in progressive tech and then went to grad school to study the impacts of machine learning and algorithms. It was there that she attended a talk from a speaker about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and experienced a deep sense of disillusionment. Her adviser convinced her to not drop out of the program, offering her this reframe: “If you can't take down the system then how do you empower the individual?”
From there, Erin’s curiosity and sense of community led her to a COVID-inspired “weird viral moment” in which she was named a “virtual mall CEO.” That’s how she ended up as a head of an open source community and upleveling her technical chops. It was only natural for her next step to be developer relations at Orbit.
“Chaos,” is how she initially describes her career to me. Chaos is exactly the kind of qualification you need to succeed in a role that varies so greatly from company to company.
Neurodivergence and the best and worst of DevRel
22% of DevRel practitioners identify as neurodivergent, mirroring the 10-20% of the global population considered to be of the same identity. This suggests that DevRel is particularly suited for neurodivergent people and that DevRel is one of the more inclusive roles in tech. Which makes sense given the breadth of what DevRel includes.
Both Wesley and Erin identify as neurodivergent; Wesley has dyslexia and ADHD and Erin has OCD and ADHD. As someone diagnosed with ADHD myself, I recognized the many experiences we have in common.
“I was very impulsive,” says Erin of her experience in school, “I would get up and walk around in the class. But I had learned that teachers wouldn't get me in trouble if I got good grades … so I would speedrun through my work and then wander the halls.”
There can be many professional challenges to being neurodivergent. Wesley says, “They don't fully understand how I knew the dominoes were going to fall that way because I set them up that way,” adding that his unconventional approach is often questioned. “They say, ‘Well, why are you putting that there or why are you doing that or why are you doing this?’ They may not understand, but to me it's clear.”
“And that's the restrictions that I fall under time and time again.”
When I ask Wesley if he feels that his neurodivergence has helped or hindered his work in Developer Relations, he simply says, “Yes.”
Similarly, Wesley names “the ambiguity” as both the best and worst parts of DevRel. “This is a two-sided coin,” he explains. When it comes to DevRel, “there is a lot that's not known and there's a lot that's not settled. I love being able to explore those areas where there is a potential to make change, to set a course and to make impact without being criticized about how I did something but rather that I did it … I like making order out of chaos.”
Erin says the worst parts of DevRel are when “people perceive you as less of an engineer … I hate feeling like I have to prove my worth to have a seat at the table.” She adds, “There's this whole notion of going deep versus going wide in education. And I think in DevRel, you have to go very wide.”
“And that doesn't mean we can't keep pace with someone going deep, but I think in DevRel you have to be a number one super user of your product” because ultimately, as a VP of engineering told Erin, “I don't think any of these developers at this company could give a live product demo tomorrow.” But Erin could.
Which is where she finds context switching and pattern matching – two typical traits of neurodivergence – useful.
Wesley credits his way of thinking for his success in DevRel, saying, “In order for me to make things make sense in my mind, I really fall back on first principles thinking – understanding the basics and then building up from there … I just follow where the data takes me and what makes sense from the feedback that I'm getting. Which means I constantly rejigger or re-tweak based on what I'm hearing, what I'm getting.”
This sort of “systems thinking” is what helps Wesley ask the right questions. “If someone's telling me, ‘Hey, let's do a blog series,’ I say, ‘Well, are there going to be ads? How are we promoting it?’ All the pieces,” he says, adding, “I'm able to try to get everything in – sequenced and in pieces so that it makes sense. So that I know that when I step out with my left foot, there is something for me to step on. And when I step out there with my right foot, there's also something for me to step on.”
This kind of thinking is useful in other ways. Erin says she feels like she is in “a much more problem solving role [in DevRel] where I'm influencing products and I'm influencing how we communicate and I'm influencing how we talk to people – which is a very cool thing … It's very creative. I get to learn a ton of new things – which is so much fun.”
What to focus on for DevRel in 2025
I asked Wesley and Erin for their advice on what DevRel should focus on in 2025.
This is what Wesley has to say:
“I think to each their own. We have different focuses. This is the thing that I would say that I lean into. I focus on problems and then try to focus on solutions.”
“DevRel has not talked about the definition [of DevRel] and how it's being owned by other people who aren't necessarily DevRel practitioners. So that's why I joined the steering committee of the DevRelFoundation to help with fixing that problem.”
“I hate the way companies operate and how they treat people. I'm writing a book, creating a brand new work structure that doesn't even exist yet to fix this. I'd say that if people want to follow what I'm focusing on, it’s to think bold and go ahead and take on the big things that you think will withstand the test of time. Then leave your artifacts to show that there's another way.”
“Even if you don't think that it's going to be successful, let people draw upon your work, draw upon your energy. If it's not [the right solution] now, then make sure that the people in the future have what they need to to have the evidence that other people believe that this is the right thing to do.”
In other words, trust your intuition, test your hypothesis, and document everything just in case it happens to be the foundation that someone else can use to complete a vision for a better way.
Erin offers some practical advice for “a better way”:
“Get good at products and understand business models … Having done my research on independent business models I can tell you that every time I've been laid off, I have predicted it. This is because you learn about what starts happening. And so you understand how your company makes business and what percentage of your company gets from different inputs and outputs.”
“Understand the business model and then also understand the product. One of my professors did educational design for Apple. He taught a class on UX for education and accessibility and he made us use screen readers. We would go into class with our laptops and he’d be like, ‘Great, turn your screen off and use a screen reader with headphones.’” We used different adaptive technologies to understand that 1) Not everything can be universal so 2) How do you maximize that and what are the product decisions that go into fueling these types of things?”
She adds, “And don't be scared of talking to sales!”
In summary, understanding business models and user experience can go a long way in not only serving developers, but in serving yourself and your value at a company – and sales can be your greatest ally in understanding the business model.
Combatting uncertainty with community
I found myself searching for a job (again!) at the end of 2024 and into the beginning of 2025. The world of tech is much different now and it feels like there is a lot more at stake. When I wrote about “the return of DevRel,” I felt hopeful and optimistic about this work. Now I am not as confident and I need community more than ever. I know I am not the only one.
To this point, Wesley shares a little inspiration. He says his love of technology was inspired by the vision he saw in Star Trek, saying, “Like a lot of sci-fi addicts, what I loved about Star Trek is not just the future [it presents], but this kind of evolution of humanity into this good space … And I wanted to be part of that evolution, both with technology and this kind of racial and gender dynamic in which there was harmony.”
He sees that evolution and harmony in DevRel – a group of people from diverse backgrounds and experiences who love technology and want to share that love with others. Reflecting on his experience at DevRelCon in London in 2023, Wesley says, “It felt like it didn’t matter what team we're representing, it didn't matter what company we worked for, it still felt as if we were all connected. People change jobs all the time, but we all felt like we still could come home to each other.”
Wesley also admits to feeling disillusioned. He says, “If you do the right thing, if you're a very moral, ethical person, that doesn't mean that you'll win in the end. That's not something I would like to be true, but it doesn't bear out to be true.” What has prevented him from losing all faith is community.
Not surprisingly, both Wesley and Erin are members of many different communities. Erin finds her sense of belonging from places like the NY comedy scene, online fandoms, the subreddit for her neighborhood that she moderates, the dog park she regularly visits with her pup, Q, and even former teammates from her time as a swimmer in college that she’s maintained contact with. For Wesley, his communities include his friends and family, his neighbors, the various DevRel-related online networks on Discord, LinkedIn, and Slack, the listeners of his podcasts Radical Respect and Community Pulse, and even the temporary communities he experiences when giving talks and connecting with audiences.
Wesley talks about the “reinforcement” of community he feels whenever he learns someone has found his work or his voice valuable. “That's kind of my love language. And as long as I feel I can still [provide value], it makes me feel good.” In other words, knowing that he’s made some positive contribution to the world – big or small – is what continues to motivate Wesley.
At DevRelCon, he gave out challenge coins that on one side read, “Integrity, resilience, accountability, perseverance, community” and “Community of leaders and community of learners” on the other.
Wesley says, “These are the principles that I try to live by when I talk about DevRel.”
You can learn more about Wesley Faulkner on his website.
You can learn more about Erin Mikail Staples on her website, as well as on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Instagram. She currently works as a Senior Developer Experience Engineer for Galileo, a platform for enterprise gen-AI evaluation and observability.
Many thanks to Wesley and Erin for their generous contributions to this post. If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a coffee.
Events and resources and other notable things
- Check out the new DeveloperRelations.com website and leave your feedback here.
- Love this LinkedIn post on testing.
- Check out this upcoming Write the Docs meetup in San Francisco on March 19th.
- Need help understanding agentic RAG, one of the newest developments in the AI space? Look no further than this blog post I wrote for Vellum AI, where I try to break it down into accessible language.
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