Meet up news first
Have you registered for the August 30th online Dublin DevRel meetup yet? Check out our speakers, Omotola Omotayo and Carla Gaggini, then register at our dedicated site.
We have a new sponsor too! Welcome to Contentful - a founding sponsor.
How’s your mic technique?
From the pitfalls of rote memorization to microphone technique - presenter, public speaker and voice actor Trish Lynch talks us through some common sense ‘dos and don'ts’ of speaking in front of an audience. The rest of us can take heart in Trish’s reassurance that even she experiences stage fright, and that (clearly) it can be overcome.
There are a number of valuable tidbits here. Trish’s wealth of experience translates to a deep understanding of the psychology behind audiences. Are we saying you should purposely add mistakes to your speeches to make you seem more “relatable”? Not exactly - but it turns out that it might not be such a crazy idea.
When listening to Trish, what comes to mind is the power of saying yes, and what can result from taking the opportunities that come across your path- you never know where they might lead! For Trish, it led from being an attendant at conferences to being the one speaking on stage, and getting a part on a TV pilot because it was raining and no one else showed up to the audition.
Post-covid the challenges for speakers are slightly different, and from Trish we can learn how to give our audiences the best experience possible, and how virtual speaking can still connect with people oceans apart from each other.
Open Source Start up - simple, right?
This week I chatted with Jonathan Reimer to the podcast. Jonathan and I dive straight into his company crowd.dev, where they are working hard at building an open source developer data platform that they hope will help customers get a clear picture of how developers engage with their brand, their tools, and the developer community in general.
Continuing on theme from Emily Omier's episode recently, we discuss the magic word "profitability". With over five thousand open source products on the market, not everyone can
bank on being the next Red Hat - so how can the rest of us do it? Few people would know better than Jonathan and the team at crowd.dev, as not only do they specialise in finding revenue opportunities for open source companies, they’re an open source company themselves.
Like many of us, Jonathan stumbled into the world of developer relations, meetups and open source products somewhat by accident. With a background in economics that became a career in sales and marketing, Jonathan realised that developers had a huge influence over the products their companies ended up purchasing. If he wanted those developers onside, the product had to be open source - from there, he founded crowd.dev and the rest is history.
He also informs me about a system called ‘accounts-based marketing’ that crowd.dev has had a lot of success with. How do you prove that your services are either making or saving money for a business? Accounts-based marketing is a new way for companies like crowd.dev to get proper attribution from customers, and display the value they add to the companies they work for.
For anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of life as an open source company, this one's for you.
Thanks for reading and catch you next week with more meetup, DevRel and podcast news!