A year as a Developer Advocate
In 525,600 minutes
how do you measure a year in the life?
— Jonathan Larson, Rent
As of May 2023, I have been a developer advocate for an entire year! 🥳🎉
I feel so lucky that I get to do this job. Some days I wish I’d done it earlier, but then I don’t because I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love working in this team so much.
Compared to my first 6 months, this period was more dominated by events. I enjoy the variety so far.
Events and sponsorship
Last year, the DevRel budget was part of the company’s overall marketing budget. In 2023, the DevRel team had a dedicated budget solely under our control.
I ended up helping with planning, selection and curation of our dev events for 2023. I spent more time doing this than I anticipated, and it was fun to see another side of the business and talk to organisers.
Between the last update and my one year anniversary, these are the events that I took part in (more to come):
- Codebar
- Contentful was the Gold Sponsor at this year’s codebar Festival in London. The keynote was included in the sponsorship but we decided to give it away.
- We helped codebar Paris find a recurring venue and covered food for their workshops with our friends from Algolia.
- Helping a non-profit and people getting into the industry is one of the most rewarding part of my job. I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true.
- WASM I/O
- I’ve always been more of a “generalist / hybrid” developer, so I wanted us to get into atypical communities for a headless CMS. Or, as Harshil puts it, “go where people don’t know us.”
- The sponsorship was last-minute (my fault) but it turned out really well. I definitely want to partner with this conference again.
- CityJS
- Harshil, myself and a few other Contentful folks had a booth at CityJS London. We gave away a giant lego set, met loads of people, including some that I’m still in touch with to this day.
- You’ll be seeing us at more CityJS Conferences. We’ll be in Athens and Berlin. Come to see us!
- Contentful Meetups
- As of my one-year anniversary, organisation is in full swing for our first Contentful meetup of the year. The event will be in Stockholm at Valtech’s beautiful courtyard.
- We’re planning another event in London which will coincide with the Contentful Storylines Tour. Come around!
I also attended a bunch of great developer events in the US and Canada.
Content
I produced a fair amount of content too, and I’m definitely finding my stride.
- Podcasts
- I was a guest on 2 more podcasts, and one of the episodes I recorded back in December went live.
- I’m about to record 2 more episodes with my largest podcasts to date (Smashing Magazine!).
- Blog Posts
- I helped review a bunch of articles for the Contentful blog.
- I’m currently writing a big article about Astro.
Outside of work, my first article for Smashing Magazine was published in December. It’s an intro to command-line data manipulation and I’m super happy about it. It’s niche and broad at the same time, and most importantly, evergreen.
12 days of Contentful
This was my personal initiative and I’m so happy I got the support to launch it. It was a fun experiment and pretty much looks like an MVP.
It gives us a good foundation for what to expect for Christmas 2023, if I’m allowed near the website again.
Less coding
At conferences, people often ask me why I decided to “stop coding” by doing DevRel. I was always surprised at that because I still write code, even if it’s obviously less than regular developers.
That said, apart from releasing a new code project nearly every day in December, it’s true that I didn’t do a lot of coding during the last 6 months.
What I learned
I learned a lot more than I can think of right now, especially around DevRel as a discipline.
Great design makes great content
It feels obvious but I think great design really makes developer content shine. All the design details that go in everything that Vercel launches or the Astro CLI make a massive difference.
Booths are a skill
I had to do conference booths both as an sponsor and as an attendee, and it’s definitely a specific skill.