DevRel Book Club

Welcome to the DevRel Book Club from DeveloperRelations.com. Each month a DevRel professional will join us to share a book that they've found useful and DeveloperRelations.com members can join the Discord to take part through questions, comments, and maybe even joining the livestream itself.

There are relatively few books on community management that draw on academic research. Building Successful Online Communities, from MIT Press, is a collection of papers that provide practical, evidence based insights that will help anyone working in developer relations. In this opening episode of the DevRel Book Club, Joe Nash joins Matthew Revell and Ramón Huidobro to discuss how this book provides some of fundamental guidance necessary to building developer communities.

• 00:58: Introduction to the DevRel Book Club idea.
• 03:15: Welcome to Joe Nash!
• 04:30: Joe explains why he chose this book for the DevRel Book Club.
• 07:47: The morality of designing communities.
• 10:14: How the structure of the book works, including "design claims".
• 15:00: The design claims in the book are essentially amoral. It is up to you whether you use them.
• 19:06: This book provides research to back up and dispute many of the truisms that crop up in DevRel.
• 26:20: Asking for referrals before welcoming new community members
• 31:15: Performance contingent entry tasks can be hard to scale
• 39:58: Does the research in this book apply to developers just as much as the general population?

Watch the video on YouTube, if you prefer: https://youtu.be/D60MqHFJO-c Join us in the DeveloperRelations.com Discord to take part in the discussion.

Blogs and, later, social media created business opportunities that would have been unviable without the potential for a global audience. Using community building, amongst other techniques, entrepreneurs have been able to reach customers through a shared interest. In Superfans, entrepreneur Pat Flynn shares the story of how building a personal following affect the success of his [...]

Events, whether in person or online, are an essential part of many developer relations programs. But are we doing them as well as we could be? In this episode of the DevRel Book Club, Suze Shardlow shares how Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering has influenced her approach to events. If you prefer, catch the video:

Tessa Mero shares how The First 90 Days has helped her shape her DevRel career towards leadership.