Q&A: Why the Developer Relations Foundation is forming

Developer relations (DevRel) is an important role within the development space, acting as a liaison between a company making development tools and the developers actually using those tools.

Recently, the Linux Foundation announced its intent to form the Developer Relations Foundation to support people in that career.

On the most recent episode of our podcast, we interviewed Stacey Kruczek, director of developer relations at Aerospike and steering committee member of the Developer Relations Foundation, to learn more.

Here is an edited and abridged version of that conversation.

How do you define the role of developer relations?

Developer relations is really the practice of elevating developers and their world. We’re all about helping the developers, helping them solve their problems. But more importantly, part of my role and the importance of it is also to be the voice of the community to the company. So it’s important for us to be able to recognize that the developers are the influencers of much of our technology business today, and so my role as a DevRel lead is to help elevate them and share in their pains, glories and challenges, and help them solve those issues, if they have them.

I always like to sort of describe myself as the PR person for developers, if you will, promoting them, promoting the importance of them, their value to the organization and their value to the community.

Why did the Linux Foundation create the Developer Relations Foundation? Why did they see a need for that?

The importance of developer relations is really to add business value. When you think about the journey of a developer and when they first experience your company, your products, your tools, and solutions, they’re really starting their discovery period. At first, they’re discovering what your tools are, the advantages of them, and as a DevRel leader, it’s my job basically, to help them along that journey. I help them down the path from discovery to engaging with us to sharing their feedback.

So it’s really about the developer being the influencer. And I’ve seen a lot of this personally at Aerospike, and we’re having a lot of conversations with developers and architects about evaluating our tools, our products, providing us feedback, and even coming in and evaluating our community.

And oftentimes, more than not, there’s a misunderstanding of what DevRel is. Each company has their own placement of a DevRel team or practice that really depends on the needs of the company, and that can be customized to them, but from a developer relations standpoint, it’s still all one in the same. 

And the major benefit of forming this foundation is to create some synergy and some common best practices, common terms that we all can share as a wider global community, to elevate the practice and practitioners in DevRel. So the major benefit of forming the foundation, why we did this is that it’s really to promote participatory governance. That means that no single company can monopolize the project or dictate its direction.

So our focus is on that community-driven governance. We’re taking and absorbing all the feedback of all of the DevRel practitioners across the globe. We’re ensuring that all of their contributions are reviewed, they’re all based on their merit and their expertise, and moreover, we’re creating a trusted, credible, and export resource to all of those professionals in the field. It will help promote best practices, what it means for businesses, and how we can add value.

What can DevRels do to elevate the development profession?

So really we have to look first at the challenges that some of this has faced. And I just want to tie in my own personal experience with this. I’ve been in this for over a decade. And when I initially came in, I came in as a technical marketer to a developer relations team, and I had the experience of sitting with five experienced engineers on the Android and Google development platform. And then we actually sat in the sea of engineers. So I always like to attribute my role as being the loan marketer in the sea of engineers, and they kind of kept me afloat. 

The beauty of that relationship, and what it really gave me, personally, was just really inspiration. There was a lot of collaboration. I became their voice to the broader customer partner ISV community, but more importantly to all the developers, I was helping them elevate their expertise. 

I think at that point, DevRel was sort of a newer thing. It had been around for a while, but people really didn’t understand it. I was thankful during my time at Zebra Technologies that we had that experience with them. It ignited my passion for helping developers in the long term in DevRel, and I soon moved into creating the first developer marketing strategy for that company, and then I really wanted to take on more as an individual for that, in terms of helping elevate DevRel as a practice, because dev marketing is just one component of it. 

When we look at it long term, there’s a reason for having a foundation. There’s actually a DevRel survey that just came out, and a large portion of developer advocates who responded to the survey stated that they felt like they needed a professional practice in one space, one community of where they could go to and share their experiences, but also learn from others. Because a lot of what I’ve learned in DevRel, I’ve learned from peers in the industry, and that’s been so important and so crucial for my learning and my development. So it’s not only the engineers, it’s also the other DevRel professionals. And when we were dealing with Covid for so long, I was fortunate to be included in many groups of DevRel advocates and professionals that would hop onto a Slack or a Discord channel, and we’d just start talking about the challenges of DevRel and how we were all dealing with it, especially during that challenging time. 

What emerged from that was the thought that we really need a foundation. We need an association of some sort that’s inclusive, and it includes our wider developer relations community and allows them a voice to be heard. 

We all bring our own personal expertise into it, but what we also bring is the ability to share with each other and collaborate. And that’s the beauty of DevRel. That’s what I love so much about it.

What is the ultimate goal, beyond bringing the community of DevRel together and having people share and exchange ideas? 

The broader developer relations umbrella as I’ve experienced it, we’re talking about community at the very core. You need to have a community in order to grow your business. And so that’s where it really starts. And then the various branches of that are related to developer experience. What kind of experience are they having? Are your tech docs easy for them to find? From a developer marketing standpoint, are we communicating the right messages? Are they technical? Are they authentic? And then we talk about developer success and education. We want to educate them just as much as they educate us. We want to make sure that we’re providing them the right tools, and we’re setting them up for success. 

And so these various components under the DevRel umbrella become so important. This foundation will essentially help define some of these areas and provide more clarity, but being that it’s open to the community, and it’s a community-driven project, we’re going to get varying viewpoints and opinions and it’s going to create this, this awesome catalog of knowledge. And then, by partnering with the Linux Foundation, they offer global credibility and they offer this robust governance structure that supports long term sustainability. 

Now, we’re an intent to form a DevRel foundation, so we’re still in the area of exploration and learning, and we do have a mission statement that we’ve created in collaboration with the community that we’ve shared. Everything is open and out there. We have a wiki page, we have a GitHub, and we welcome anybody to participate and communicate with us. 

We have weekly community calls across the globe, and many developer relations professionals are joining us on those calls and sharing their experience and their knowledge. We assign topics for the week, we review our proposals of how this will roll out, and the idea is that as a steering committee, we’re there to help guide the ship, we’re guiding the boat through the sea, and we’re going to help them stay on target, if you will. 

The project itself, the foundation, it really is going to rely on contributions from the community, individuals, supporters of the organization, and they’re going to provide expertise, guidance and content.