Two Podcasts
I have been part of startups, technology, DevRel and Open Source for a long time. I’ve written a book on Microservices. I’ve lectured. I’ve organised events and spoken on countless stages. So it’s no surprise that the knowledge transfer part of DevRel is of real interest to me. The Fireside with Voxgig Podcast is my way of sharing other peoples’ knowledge and experience with our growing DevRel audience. As it happens, the last two episodes have been very much about discovering, solving and communicating about issues in software.
It’s possible we generated more questions than we answered in this episode. This was straight from the practice of developer relations. Sid is the VP of Developer Relations at APIMatic which has ben around about eight years but has a start-up energy. Sid’s role is to improve their explanation and communication of their SDKs and APIs.
This includes a glorious description of a date format fix got softly rolled out to “hide” technical debt through a SDK. And as for a steering committee on API governance? API versioning? You have come to the right place! We believe we are moving to a world where attitudes to APIs and SDKs have matured. These discussions on specifications and documentation is valuable. Meaningful, better feedback from customers through specification mocking. But at the heart of everything is the developer experience so your software will be adopted and loved.
Michiel Mulders is a wonderful example of a creative developer, driven to share knowledge and committed to quality documentation. He delivers a module on documentation and technical writing at DevRel University, free online course dedicated to Web3 DevRel.
In this episode, Michiel and I have a thorough exploration of documentation philosophies, approaches, tools and analytics for content engagement. Listen up here, understand the real benefits of paying attention to your documentation creation and its use.
Lots of food for thought here, but also practical steps and proven tools described to help get you started on your overdue Documentation Improvement Project!
One Meetup
Last Wednesday, April 26th, we had the 3rd Dublin DevRel meetup. These are online meetups which allow us to showcase voices from all over the world and all along the DevRel experience curve. Last week saw the hugely experienced and interesting Jason St-Cyr, Developer Relations Leader at Sitecore open proceedings with a beautifully designed talk supported by amazing slides (an example in our cover image for this newsletter) dedicated to explaining the career progression and management that DevRel and developer teams should aspire to. He was followed by the energetic and open Kelvin Omereshone, DevRel and JavaScript Engineer with Treblle. Kelvin LIVES coding in public and his YouTube channel (like his over 1500 subscribers!)where he develops and follows his own learning journey is super inspirational for anyone starting out or seeking to learn new things in tech.
The May 31st Dublin DevRel Meetup has been announced and our speakers will be David Neal and Liran Tal. Find out more and register here:
Event
On Tuesday May 2nd, Voxgig’s COO Sinead Quealy attended the TechFoundHer event in Dublin, hosted by the unstoppable community builders, Vicky Twomey-Lee and Mairin Murray. Both Vicky and Mairin have been gusts on the Voxgig podcast previously, so I’ve had the pleasure of discussing community building, diversity in tech and event organising with them, so it was no surprise that Sinead found a lot to be positive about last Tuesday. Find out more here and at https://techfoundher.com/