These two fantastic new episodes of the Fireside with Voxgig podcast centre around developer communities. Community building is a beautiful and fragile art. It’s one of the few areas where “fake it till you make it” doesn’t really work out. The only way to foster a strong community is through authenticity, and with authenticity comes vulnerability. This can be a bit scary, but the reality is that if you want the benefits and support of a strong community, you need to be a much truer version of yourself than you might be used to. That said, it’s not an unrealistic goal to want that big, active base of engaged supporters - you’re just going to have to work for them. Luckily, that’s what Carter Rabasa and Jono Bacon are here to tell us all about.
Community Through Events
Carter Rabasa is the founder of the CascadiaJS conference series. He tells me about his journey to DevRel, and we take a trip back in time to consider the history of Developer Relations from the early days to now. He talks about how his curiosity and ability to question things made him a much better developer advocate than a coder. In developer advocacy, you have to be a generalist, you have to be interested by everything generally rather than one thing specifically. You need to have empathy, and a desire to connect with and understand people, and let’s not forget, the patience to deal with the less than perfect parts of people.
How Formality Kills Connection
Jono Bacon returns to the podcast for round 2! This time he’s here to speak about the subtleties that go into community-building. How do you hit the growth you want when you’re starting from scratch? Well Jono has some interesting thoughts on the formality of community events. When people are in constant “work mode”, how can they form any meaningful connections? He gives some great advice on how to shake things up and get people talking like humans, and not robots.
Check out Jono’s Community Leadership Core accelerator if you want to learn even more in an environment dedicated to your success.
Bonus resource on community building
The last Wednesday in September we enjoyed the Dublin DevRel meetup where I facilitated more informative talks, this time from Anil and Andy. Check out their experiences and wisdom in the meetup videos available here on the meetup website and YouTube.
Andy Piper talks us through how to make the most of Mastodon Version 4.2.0
Thanks for reading and see you next week!