Devrel, with Christina Warren (GitHub) - S04E05

05/25/23 • 37 min

In this episode, we speak with Christina Warren, senior developer advocate at GitHub about all things Developer Relations (or “DevRel”). We talk about what constitutes a “typical day” in DevRel (if such a thing exists), how to get started in the field, and the types of skills needed. We also discuss how to measure success in DevRel, the importance of advocating for the user, and where exactly DevRel ends and product begins. You’ll hear about how Christina sees her role as a bridge between the community, product engineering, and the developers using the product, as well as where video fits into it all.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT CHRISTINA WARREN

Christina Warren is a senior developer advocate at GitHub who works in DevRel, helping to connect GitHub’s developer community with its engineers. Prior to working for GitHub, she was a senior cloud developer advocate for Microsoft. With a background in journalism, she creates a lot of video content and is responsible for GitHub’s weekly YouTube show The Download, where she presents the week’s most insightful news for developers. You can find her on Twitter at @film_girl and on GitHub at @filmgirl.

Highlights:

Christina Warren: I think that developer relations should be part of product and engineering because it is a really core part of that. That said, to be successful, DevRel needs to be cross-functional so some companies have it under marketing. For their purposes, that might make sense. I think that it makes sense for it to be part of product and engineering. But I think that it's cross-functional insofar as I work with people on basically every different team at GitHub. That's one of the things that's great about GitHub is that they have a really good understanding and appreciation of the value that we can bring because we can help the product teams and the engineering teams create assets for their blog posts. We can help them with their message. We can highlight things because we are on the ground all the time. We can go, “Hey, hey. This thing happened and this is causing problems. Do we want to get ahead of this? And how can we make something better?”

— [0:15:02 - 0:15:49]

Christina Warren: The way I see my job — and I can't say this for every person in DevRel — but the way I see my job is my title is “developer advocate”, but I'm not advocating for GitHub. I'm advocating for GitHub’s users. I'm advocating for our community. That's really what I'm trying to do. Because I think that by advocating for them, that's how GitHub can be most successful. But, of course, not everybody and not every company might see it that way. They might see it as, “Oh, your only job is just to praise and talk about how great we are.” I don't see it that way. I think that to be really successful, you need to be transparent, you need to be honest, you need to be authentic. That includes when there are situations where you might screw up or when things might not be right because I think that that's what builds trust.

— [0:16:24 - 0:17:07]
Let us know what you think on Twitter:

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https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev too...

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT CHRISTINA WARREN

Highlights:

— [0:15:02 - 0:15:49]

— [0:16:24 - 0:17:07]
Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev too...

Previous Episode

Shell scripting, with Steve Lee (Microsoft) - S04E04

In this episode, we speak with Steve Lee, principal software engineer manager on the PowerShell team at Microsoft. We start with what PowerShell is and why its object-based approach is interesting, then get into what it was like open sourcing a project at Microsoft back in 2016. We discuss the transition to using GitHub and what it's like managing an open source project at scale, bouncing community with features, bugs, and requests from users, alongside Microsoft’s goals. We also talk about PowerShell and its relation to AI, before we get some insight into what we can expect from it in the near future.

Things mentioned:

ABOUT STEVE LEE.

Steve Lee is the principal software engineer manager on the PowerShell team at Microsoft. He’s been with the company since 2000 when he started out working on Internet Explorer for Unix. More recently, his team was responsible for PowerShell Core 6, the open-source cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) version of the object-oriented scripting and interactive shell, developed on GitHub.

Highlights:

Steve Lee: I think the way we position PowerShell, it’s really a ‘glue language’, and not intended for developing full applications. Now, I do know that there are folks in the community who built very complex systems on PowerShell script and we’ll support them by all means, but it's not intended for that purpose. It’s really for— What we use within our team is really like, you're trying to test out some new .Net API. It's actually much faster to write it in PowerShell script with a few lines of code than running C# that you would have to compile and do that work. So it makes it very easy to test out new things, prototyping before you commit to writing critical proper development code.

— [0:08:46 - 0:09:22]

Steve Lee: Everyone probably saw how Bing and ChatGPT has integration. So that’s something— AI is on top of everyone's mind. And that is something that we've actually been looking at for a while. So I'm not sure if anyone is aware but, we had — even before ChatGPT, even before some other popup ones that came out, like Stable Diffusion and stuff like that — we were looking at AI several years ago before things were ready. And we actually have a plug-in model. So PSReadLine is a model that we use as the way to present the interactive experience for PowerShell users. And so one thing that we did back in, I think 7.1 — which should have been probably, what, two, three years ago — is we added a predictor plugin, so someone could actually build a predictor in C# and be able to present that through PSReadLine to the user.

— [0:27:27 - 0:28:13]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

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https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Next Episode

Frontend platforms, with Matt Biilmann (Netlify) - S04E06

In this episode, we speak with Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify. We discuss what it was like deploying code before Netlify, whether there is about to be a fragmentation in the JavaScript ecosystem as React gets more opinionated, where state and data fit into the Jamstack model, and how you might reach developers with a new project today. You’ll hear about the evolution of Netlify’s model, the Gatsby acquisition, and how Netlify has succeeded at staying on top of the fast-changing landscape.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT MATT BIILMANN

Matt Biilmann is the CEO and Co-Founder of Netlify, a cloud platform that helps people build, deploy, and operate websites, web applications, and web stores swiftly and with ease. He has a long history of building DevTools, content management systems, and web infrastructure. Matt has been an active participant in open source and contributed to many well-known projects, including Ruby on Rails, JRuby, and Mongoid. Since launching its private beta back in March 2015, Netlify is now used by 3.5 million developers and is one of the fastest-growing web development platforms in the world.

Highlights:

Matt Biilmann: I really believed that we would move away from that model and move to a model where we would decouple the actual web experience layer into its own layer that web teams can build and deploy independently, and hopefully much faster. But I also saw at the time that there wasn't any tooling or infrastructure or workflows around that. So early on, when we started Netlify, there wasn't even a name for this web building. We had to come up with the term “Jamstack” to describe this idea of building the web experience layer on its own and typically seeing the backend split into all these different APIs and services, like all the headless CMSs that’s really become mainstream now.

— [0:03:58 - 0:04:39]

Matt Biilmann: Right now, what we're seeing happening around generative AI is probably going to change a lot of how we interface with computers over time, right? It’s already almost at the edge where you can imagine stitching a few tools together, and you would be having this kind of conversation with a program, rather than with a human. I think as that starts to happen, that will start to massively redefine how we consume content and commerce and so on. It will probably change a lot of what it means to build a website.

— [0:17:09 - 0:17:41]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console