I am a connector of people at heart, personally and professionally. I love digging into the strategy of how to build and foster developer communities and have been doing so for 10+ years.
Andy has very solid advice! There are definitely many different paths that can lead to DevRel. I, for instance, have a journalism background and have never been a developer professionally. Other folks have theater backgrounds, or customer support, marketing, product, or completely unrelated-to-tech backgrounds.
Besides what Andy mentioned, the other thing I encourage folks to do is take DevRel for a "test drive" before they fully commit. In other words... ask your marketing team if they need any technical content for the blog, or if they could use some help staffing the booth at an upcoming conference. Look into upcoming CFPs (conference call for proprosals) to see if there are any conferences that sound interesting, and then brainstorm topics with your team to see if you have a talk that might be interesting to give. Attend local meetups and engage with the organizers -- perhaps they need extra speakers there!
Andy has very solid advice! There are definitely many different paths that can lead to DevRel. I, for instance, have a journalism background and have never been a developer professionally. Other folks have theater backgrounds, or customer support, marketing, product, or completely unrelated-to-tech backgrounds.
Besides what Andy mentioned, the other thing I encourage folks to do is take DevRel for a "test drive" before they fully commit. In other words... ask your marketing team if they need any technical content for the blog, or if they could use some help staffing the booth at an upcoming conference. Look into upcoming CFPs (conference call for proprosals) to see if there are any conferences that sound interesting, and then brainstorm topics with your team to see if you have a talk that might be interesting to give. Attend local meetups and engage with the organizers -- perhaps they need extra speakers there!
I go a little more indepth on this topic in a recent blogpost for OpenSource.com: opensource.com/article/19/3/develo...