I have been a developer for over four years, writing code on a daily basis but I never knew what DevRel was until I joined a mentorship program. I had been engaging in developer discussions, helping people understand technologies I used often, and mentoring junior developers in the tech space. Little did I know I was already doing DevRel. I just never realized it could be another source of income if embraced as a career.
So you might be wondering what exactly is DevRel?
What is Developer Relations?
Developer Relations (DevRel) is the practice of building relationships between a company and the developer community that uses or could use its products.
Think of it this way: imagine a company that builds a code editor as an alternative to VS Code. Because VS Code already exists, this company needs to create awareness around its tool and convince developers to give it a try. This is where a DevRel person comes in. They stand as a bridge between the company and the developers who could benefit from its tools.
But it goes beyond just awareness. A DevRel person can be an educator, a community builder, or a technical advocate someone who represents both the company's product and the real needs of its developer users.
The 3 Pillars of DevRel
1. Developer Experience (DX)
Think of this as the content and education side. A Developer Experience practitioner makes the product easy to use, intuitive, and well documented. They create technical materials that help developers solve problems and adopt the product writing blog posts, recording video tutorials, and building sample applications that show what's possible.
2. Community
This is about building spaces where developers connect, share ideas, and help each other. A strong community means developers don't feel alone when they hit a problem. This pillar involves managing forums, hosting meetups, and running hackathons fostering a sense of belonging around a product or technology.
3. Advocacy
Advocacy works in two directions. Externally, it means sharing knowledge speaking at conferences, publishing content, representing the product in public. Internally, it means bringing the community's voice back to the product team: collecting developer feedback, flagging pain points, and pushing for improvements that actually matter to the people using the tool.
How to Become a Better DevRel
As I mentioned at the start of this post I had been drifting into DevRel without realizing it. Mentoring junior developers, helping people understand tools in community discussions, speaking at events all of that is DevRel in practice.
So what's the foundation? Know your product deeply.
Before you can teach, you need to genuinely understand what you're teaching. Before you can recommend a tool, you need to have used it and be able to explain clearly why it's better than its alternatives. Before you can advocate for developers inside a company, you need to have felt their frustrations yourself.
When you have that depth, everything else flows naturally you can educate without struggling, organize events with clear goals, and help people fix real issues they run into with a product. DevRel isn't a performance. It's earned credibility.
What a DevRel Person Does Day-to-Day
A typical day in DevRel can look very different depending on the company and role, but here are the core activities:
- Writing — Drafting technical blog posts, tutorials, and guides that help developers understand and use the product.
- Evangelism — Speaking at tech conferences and meetups to spread awareness of the company's technology.
- Community support — Answering technical questions and guiding users across Discord, Slack, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and GitHub Issues.
- Feedback loops — Listening to community frustrations, identifying bugs, and carrying that real-world data back to internal engineering and product teams.
- Building demos — Creating sample applications, open-source templates, and SDKs so developers don't have to start from scratch.
- DX testing — Testing new features before they launch to ensure the documentation is clear and the developer journey is frictionless.
- Media — Recording video tutorials, hosting tech podcasts, or going live to demonstrate and discuss the product.
- Running hackathons — Organizing online or in-person challenges that get developers building with the product.
There's more, but these cover the core of it.
Why DevRel Matters
Here's the thing most people miss: developers have enormous influence. They choose which tools get adopted at their companies, recommend platforms to their peers, and can kill a product's reputation in a single tweet if the experience is bad.
DevRel builds trust with developers at scale. One great tutorial can convert thousands of users. One genuinely helpful response in a Discord server can turn a frustrated developer into a loyal advocate. That kind of trust is hard to buy through advertising but it can be built through consistent, honest, developer-first engagement.
Companies that invest in DevRel tend to build lasting communities around their products. Look at Stripe, Twilio, or Vercel their DevRel efforts are a big reason developers talk about them the way they do. The tech might be good, but the relationship is what keeps people coming back.
DevRel vs. Marketing vs. Engineering
People often confuse DevRel with marketing or assume it's just a developer who learned to tweet. Here's a simple way to think about the difference:
- Marketing speaks to buyers. DevRel speaks to builders.
- Engineering builds the product. DevRel explains it, advocates for it, and gathers the feedback that shapes its future.
DevRel is the bridge. They carry developer needs into product decisions, and carry product updates back out to the community in a language developers actually trust.
Conclusion
DevRel is one of the most human roles in tech. It blends technical skill with empathy, communication, and community and the best DevRel practitioners are often people who were already doing it without a title.
If you've ever answered a question in a developer forum, written a tutorial to help someone avoid a problem you struggled with, or spoken about a tool you loved at a meetup you already understand what DevRel is about. You just might not have been getting paid for it yet.
That's changing. Developer-led growth is becoming a serious go-to-market strategy, and companies are starting to recognize the value of people who can genuinely connect with developer communities. If this resonates with you, it might be worth exploring DevRel as more than a side habit.
I'd love to hear your thoughts have you been doing DevRel without realizing it? Drop a comment below.
This article was written as part of my DevRel journey. Follow me for more content on developer communities, tools, and the business of building in public.
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