I am noticing a trend with DevRel teams changing how they work. There are more YouTube videos and less conference. The whole game is changing and I am changing with it. I am not quitting, but I am refocusing on new areas.
Episode 78 of this developing story.
Now, this podcast is brought to you by my YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is where I have been shipping videos for the past. What nine months now at this point it's been a lot of fun and I definitely want you to check it out. youtube.com/robot. This conversation coming up about my developer relation experience.
Actually came from my huge YouTube account. Technically what I'm doing now is I'm livestreaming from Twitch because YouTube itself is a, it's an awful place to live stream. So I am no longer live streaming from YouTube. I will not live stream only exclusively from Twitch. So definitely find me Twitch that TV slash B-Dog EO and I like robot youtube.com/iowa, where a bot is Maya, my YouTube.
But without further ado, I'm going to talk about developer relations. It's a, here we go.
I never wanted to do Deborah. One of my main reasons for not wanting to Deborah is because I did not want to take a pay cut. That was my biggest concern, but then also all I wanted to do is to learn how to code. I just want to get level up and code become a senior engineer. And when someone approached me and said, Hey, you should do dev REL.
I was like, yeah, nah, that's not for me. I'm not trying to get do marketing or whatever. And that's what I always start Debra was this marketing you sponsor a conference get on a podcast, you start talking like, speeds and feeds or. Walking people through documentation.
And that wasn't really, for me what I like to doing is teaching people what I just learned yesterday. And I didn't realize that's actually what Debra is. Eventually I got to that point and I got the dev role because all I wanted to do is actually just give a conference talk, actually talk about this on my podcast.
If you don't know about my podcast, definitely check it out. It is on a YouTube doc. Actually, I got a chat link right here. Actually, what was I getting at? Oh, my story that Debra, I just wanted to do conferences talking like I did one conference talk. I loved it. I wanted to do another one. And at that time, once I did the first conference talk, then Netlify reached out.
Invited me into interview. Got the job. Yeah. Did engineering. And the thing about that with high is they pulled me him and they said, Hey come work for us. We've got tons of seniors. We'd have times they only had a handful of senior talent, including Matt Billman and the CEO. And I was able to learn from them directly.
And that was a selling point for me. They're like, Hey, we're going to teach you everything you need to know. If you want to level up and go and networking and in Coobernetti's and Docker and all that other stuff, and we'll teach you everything. They ended up teaching me everything. I knew everything I do today.
I ended up learning like JAMstack stuff. I write Docker files. I learned that from the CTO of Netlify who previously worked at Docker. He taught me everything that I needed to know about Docker. I didn't, I had no idea how any of that worked. And I got to all that, like firsthand because I just leveled up.
So yeah, what I'm getting at is. I took that job because they were going to level me up very quickly. Previously, I was working a block was a great job, great company. I noticed that block financially was not doing well. I noticed that the bootcamp space was going turning a corner around, like it was getting legitimate, but also is getting flooded by other competitives competitors in the market.
And I left block being an online bootcamp solution for people who, when I learn how to code remotely, I left them. Mainly because I yeah, I just saw the writing on the wall. So I was like, I started, I just started interviewing at that point and none of those jobs they interviewed for it, I got, but the job I got was the one that reached out to me directly, which was fi and I had just happened to be a user.
And I talk about that a couple of YouTube videos ago. So again, check out the YouTube channel about growing your career as a developer. That's the the video. But what I'm getting at is that if I sold me on learning what they also wanted to get out of me, it was my blogging, my podcasting, my, I had fear of getting on stage, but I guess my presented fearless experience of being on stage and sharing, like they weren't all that out of me.
So they basically said, Hey, they didn't get, they didn't call it dev REL either. There's Hey, if you just be our, our, I don't know how to explain it, but it was basically, they wanted me to be their dev role person. But they were still letting me to write code and all that other stuff. So what I'm getting at is I guess sorta got bait and switched.
I became an engineer at LFI and then probably three months in actually three weeks in, I started JAMstack radio, the podcast, and then three months in, I was writing blog posts every week. Cause I would basically redo Netlify as UI. And then from that UI actually. Actually, I don't need to share your, you can get netlify.com.
I would redo the UI. And then from there I would basically write a blog post of how I learned something in react and what happened was create react app got shipped. And that summer that I joined I ended up writing a blog post in career, how to deploy. React apps to Netlify in 30 seconds.
And we had just shipped like the deployed Netlify button. So we were all about getting people to just use Netlify very quickly. So that got picked up six months later, the react team. Re purchase up because they were getting the Gatsby was turning a corner and becoming more like a valid solution for satisfied generation.
The react team, put their docs on Gatsby and then also put that on Netlify and that was like one of the biggest. Open source projects to leverage Netlify outside of somebody's. There were some other like Hugo, Hugo being another stack site generator, put their stuff on Netlify, but they weren't at the level at the time.
They weren't at the level of reacts. Like people knew Hugo, if you were in the go community people didn't know he'd go the way they do it today. So what I'm getting at is I ended up just being in the right position at the right time at a lot of situations. And that sort of propelled myself into doing dev REL.
So I say all this, because I think Deborah is changing. I don't think Deborah is going to be blog posts. I don't think dev roles can be commerce socks. What I think Deborah was going to be in the future is this it's going to be live coding on Twitch, and it's going to be making YouTube videos. And if you're not doing live coding on Twitch or doing YouTube videos in six months as a dev REL person you better be very good at what you're doing already.
Because I think Deborah was going to be changing because we're not doing conferences. Sorry we are doing conferences, but most conferences are asking for what prerecorded talks, what is that? Or YouTube video. So as soon as the first person who goes viral on their actual. YouTube S talk at a conference is going to change the game.
I hope it's going to be B, but I don't know if I'm going to be that good that fast, but like, when I prerecorded my next prerecorded talk, I'm going to be editing that thing and providing like bells and whistles. And honestly, do I have, yeah. Even having the. The soundboard as well. Like those are things that are going to be the essence.
Like even the switching, imagine when you go to share your code, which is I'm preempting myself to what I want to talk about in a sec, but will you go to sharing your code? As as good a live code. If you don't have an experience that looks like this I think it's going to, it's going to change.
So yeah. Yeah, you have to be cutting edge. And I, Henry you're sitting in the chat, we had the conversation. It's always about thinking different. It's always about being on the cutting edge. Like you think about what is Apple doing? That's different. The only thing they did, they created an iPhone that can, so by my last year of college, 2007, 2008 my last year.
They created this iPhone and we thought like this actually. And they basically just changed the game. When it comes to phones, they didn't reinvent the smartphone. They just changed how you hold and interact with them. Imagine changing how you interact with conference talks. So like when your talk is going up and you're doing all this live switching and animation, like the one person I do highly recommend, if you aren't falling, he is doing all the stuff that you want to know.
And OBS, he's just like giving everything away from free. And if you're not already subscribed and I should ring that bell as well you should be following Scott Hanselman because the stuff he's doing and his presentations right now he would be the one that kind of changes the game. All right.
That is a podcast episode. If you are interested in joining me and having conversations, I'm actually working on a little special project that will be live streaming pretty soon. I'm actually going to be calling it issues with Brian, and it's going to be a. Revitalization or what I used to deal with mutual fund back in the day where anybody can come to me with a problem and I will pair program with you to solve it.
I love doing this back in the day because it gave me an opportunity to see new things and try new code. And so I'm just opening it up pretty soon. So if you're not already in the discord, I'm going to do announcements end of this discord pretty soon. Trying to get people to share their issues and hopefully book some, a pair of programming sessions in the future.
Look forward to that and look forward to another podcast in two weeks. All right, bye.