Intro About Tejas

Tejas is an International speaker, who has previously worked as DevRel in various companies. He started working as a DevRel in 2017; he says during that time most of the focus of the DevRel team is to go to meetups or conferences and talk about the tools/technologies they use and share ideas on how they can be improved or used.

Don't treat DevRel as Marketing or Sales, it's about educating the developers.

DevRel is MultiModel

DevRel looks so glamorous in 2022, it was not like before. It's not just those travel pics, it's much more than that. Previously when there are meet-ups/conferences (ignore the product launch conference like Google I/O or WWDC), they were focused on sharing ideas as mentioned before. All the existing product users will be coming together and sharing their best practice, that is how the practice was previously. Nowadays it's more of the marketing and we are forgetting the Education part.

Education can be in various forms

1. Coding the demos

2. Content

   1. How to use product articles

   2. Speaking at conferences/Meetups

   3. Conducting training sessions / Creating youtube videos

3. Community Management

DevRel = Code + Content (Writing/speaking)+Community

Remember the target audience for the DevRel is going to be developers. It is important to speak/know their knowledge. And also it's not mandatory to be a developer to become DevRel. We can start with anything and down the line, we can learn other things and enhance our skills.

How Can I get into DevRel

Example of how a developer can become DevRel

Think you are a developer now, and you want to get into DevRel. Currently, we will be having the skill to write awesome code. From this, we can easily contribute to the content writing part.

On day to day basis, we all will be facing a lot of issues with using certain technologies or languages. We might have fixed the issue in some way, others might have fixed it in some other way. We can easily share about it in

• StackOverflow if we come across the question

• Write a blog post and share it publicly

• Conduct workshops

Example of how a Content Writer can become DevRel

When we are content writers, we will be very good at writing content and understanding how to reach easily to other humans. You can help developers with following

• Write Product(SDK/API) updates and send E-mail campaigns

• Create Short Video tutorials

• Check forums and share answers with help from your team

Have Empathy & Be helpful

It is important to be helpful and have empathy for others when you plan to become DevRel. It is a very important trait to be DevRel.

You must be helpful to others both online/offline. When people reach out to you try to help them with what you can. The issue that they face will be much smaller for your terms but it might be big. Have empathy and understand how they may be feeling at that time. One of the tasks of DevRel, when they are in booths, is to listen to the customers about the products, understand how the developer faces the issues and share it back to the team.

When in 2020 the whole world went into lockdown mode, and most of the education part happened online. People conducted a lot of workshops, and sessions to tell about the product, previously (in 2017-2019 ish) these things used to happen via Email/booth at Conference. Figure out the various ways you help others.

Build True authentic Relations

When you are in DevRel, you will be meeting lots of people on your journey. You will always be learning from others be it fresh graduates out of college or Top Executives. Start engaging with them casually, don't expect anything in return. Building very good relationships with others will help down the unknowingly. Maybe they will become your mentor or mentee someday or you will be getting an interview call from that person for their team or you can also work with them to build some online courses or share the blog space for guest authoring. There are lots of ways it can turn beneficial, so work for the beneficial part work on building trust and authentic relationships.

Enjoy and don't Stress

When you are in DevRel at a young startup or small company chances are there to feel overwhelmed which will lead to burnout quickly. The first thing we should take a step back and plan on the goals, say what we are going to achieve by the end of the month/quarter/year.

You should work more on things that you enjoy. Assume if you love writing blog posts, then you should start writing more of them. You should not care whether someone checks your blog post or not, or whether there is heavy traffic to your website. You should just focus on writing and make sure you improve on it day by day. After sometime when you are comfortable switching to doing other things you can work on it.

You should work on the things what you love; you should not optimize yourself for what companies want; companies will hire you for the depth knowledge you have. - Tejas

Quick Start

In case you are planning to become DevRel, don't worry the market is still young and there are lots of opportunities available. Knowing your strength is a must and from there we can build slowly. The quickest way to start may be by following

• Talking at local Meetups => I started talking at the Local Mozilla community it helped me a lot.

• Applying to Conferences

• Working on some Open source projects related to certain things which people want more