Matteo Collina has a superpower
How to hire developers with a broad, platform-thinking approach? Matteo's superpower can help! Hint: it's got everything to do with Open-Source...
Sometimes in your career as a programmer you get to work with somebody really amazing. For me, that person is a former colleague, Matteo Collina. Matteo is the maintainer of a whole load of open source in the Node.js community. But you may know him from a particularly great project which is Fastify, which is one of the fastest web servers written in Node.js.
Matteo has just launched a start-up, Platformatic, and in this podcast we talk about his approach to developer relations: how he has used his legacy in open source to build a team of “platform thinking” developers - it’s where his superpower kicks in!
Richard Rodger: Okay. So, if you've started an open-source project, if you've worked on open-source projects that are platforms like Node.js, you learn to take a platform perspective on things. You understand that every decision means a lot; you have to think about backwards compatibility. I've always had a lot of challenges, when I try to onboard developers, to communicate the thought process, platform thinking, thinking about respecting existing users, thinking about future user sensibility. Because a lot of developers just want to solve the problem in front of them.
Matteo Collina: I know.
Richard Rodger: Which is absolutely correct in – normally; that is, don't waste time and money, solve the problem. But I've always struggled to teach platform thinking.
Matteo Collina: I have a superpower. I am hiring people from the open-source community. I am cheating badly here. So, if you just hire people from the open-source community. I've done a few phenomenal hires for people that were already part of the community, maintainers themselves. And that was phenomenal; it works beautifully.
Richard Rodger: And then you already get – you already have people who have experienced those challenges who've had to think about those problems.
Matteo Collina: Pretty much, yes.
Matteo has also built an audience with the startup he has just created. We talk about a key strategy for building a developer community, which is to have a really good plugin model. I know this sounds like a technical solution to a people problem, but sometimes solving people problems involve having a good technical foundation. Plugins allow you to create a community because it enables ease of contribution.
We then talk about one of the trickiest things to get right when you're building developer relations, which is where to put the developer relations team. Do they report to marketing; do they reportto the CTO. Do they have their own little department? We get right into all that stuff.
We also talk about a tricky little subject, which is something that I've had trouble with in the past, which is that all the other developers in your company look at everybody in the developer relations team and see them having great fun at conferences. How do you deal with the professional jealousy that that causes?
And finally, we conclude with a few little tips about how to survive at conferences. In particular, Matteo has this really cool technique, which he calls sailor sleeping, which if you speak at conferences, you're going to find really useful.
To listen to this conversation, go to Fireside with Voxgig here or search for it wherever you get your podcasts.