#100daysofdevrel

Day 11 #100DaysOfDevRel COMMUNITY Building an engaged developer community takes consistency. Small actions daily like responding to questions, sharing resources, and amplifying community members pays off over time. That said, a thriving developer community isn't built overnight. It takes patient relationship building, quality engagement, and an openness to feedback from the community. At @Vaadin we do this on our socials like @hillaframework , our youtube channel and our Discord . If you build business applications involving java we'd love to have you sharing with us in those spaces.

Day 4 #100DaysOfDevRel Use your product pt1 As a dev 🥑,I want to build an MVP demo in public with one of our flagship frameworks, @hillaframework to familiarize myself and appreciate it's features. So far I've created the initial project with this command npx @hilla/cli init --preset react-tutorial hilla-todo (only requires Node 18+ and JDK 17+). From there, I built the data model, added a repository interface for my CRUD operations, and made a first pass at connection functionality. Here's the project structure so far (take note of that frontend folder or run the command and see what you get 😉). #buildinpublic

Day 18 #100DaysOfDevRel Slightly nerve-wracking walking through these slides in preparation for my talk @connect_js on this cool AI tool @marcushellberg built with our framework @hillaframework. To practice, I'm recording into voice recorder and playing it back (I always sound uber-cringe to myself 😅). By tomorrow, I'll upgrade to actually filming myself without looking at the camera so I can see how I stand/look/etc. Practice makes better!

Day 1 #100DaysOfDevRel KNOW YOUR COMPANY Have you ever purchased an item, loved it, and immediately wanted your friends and family to know just how good it is? You may experience a similar feeling when you land a devrel position that’s a great fit for you. Determining that fit is critical and what this post centers on because when you do produce content and talk to devs in the field, you want to believe in what you represent and be happy to talk your company up! This is precisely what I did recently. I made a strategic decision that I wanted to work at a company full of #java experts, building java-based software, and of a size where my impact would be quantifiable and intrinsically felt. That significantly narrowed down my short list which is a positive because aligning myself (resume/talking points) had already been taken care of. I’m happy to have found such a company in @Vaadin. I did the requisite research from the company website, youtube, and social media postings and discovered a “happy herd of nerds”, passionate about their products and services - just the type of place I wanted to be. After a sensible progressive interview process, they decided the same. Knowing your company or future company is more accessible now than ever. Many tech firms release white papers, publish blogs, and in some cases have open source software that you can fork/clone and try out on your own. This can be an invaluable resource for you to determine on the front end is this software something you’d enjoy representing. It has the added benefit of giving you a jump on presentation material should the interview process progress to that stage. The deeper you can get into the docs and demonstrate understanding, the better (thanks @Bdougieyo!) Unless you build it yourself, seldom will you find a perfect match of company, product or service. Doing your due diligence is one way to get as close as possible. {Tomorrow: Know your role} P.S. This is an abbreviated post from the original that was mysteriously lost in the X ether. Lesson learned

Day 2 #100DaysOfDevRel KNOW THE ROLE Talk about variety! Developer Relations or Developer Advocacy roles can be as varied as the companies that have them. From understanding the nomenclature to the organizational structure they fall in, anyone interested in devrel as a career option would do well to figure out how it’s done at your company of interest. Hats off to @Jlengstorf for sharing and @blackgirlbytes for reminding me just how important knowing what your potential company is looking for in their devrel hire. It may differ considerably from your expectations! How can you learn this information? Not on day-in-the-life videos for sure! As with the company, you can learn a ton attending meetups and conferences taking advantage of the many developer advocates there and engaging in conversation about their day-to-day activities. Tech Twitter as of late is a digital water hole for devrels of all stripes. I gathered a List of nearly 200 of them here: . Follow the list and learn ✅ As a devrel, your activities may include one or more of the following: Writing blog posts Writing technical documentation Writing social media posts for the company or *as* the company Producing video content for the company website, youtube, and other platforms Webinar, meetup, and conference talks Manning conference booths Building apps and demos of varied complexity utilizing the company software/APIs Managing company APIs incl. writing production code Engaging w/developers in @Github Issues, Github Discussions, Discord, Slack, and social media Other things When you reach the interview, you’ll want to get clarity around which of these will be expected of you. It’s also highly beneficial to gather understanding around how impact is determined for your role. That’s always the north star for any position and losing sight of that can have you down the unforgiving road of high activity/low productivity. {Coming Monday: Day in the Life @Vaadin}

Day 23 #100DaysOfDevRel Wear the hats! As a developer advocate, it’s quite common to find yourself engaged in a wide variety of tasks in any typical week. Here I’m editing a video for @vaadin’s first YouTube short.

Day 30 #100DaysOfDevRel OFFSITE CHALLENGE {the @Vaadin way} How’s this for an offsite, drive to a snow and ice-capped island, work out of a cabin for the day, walk out on the frozen Baltic Sea, build a fire, drill, fish, eat lunch. (maybe not in that order 😉)

Day 8 #100DaysOfDevRel Raise your hand 📰BIG NEWS! Starting today, I'll be one of the "voices" behind the @hillaframework , one of my company's X accounts. Do me a solid, head on over there and follow the account to see what we're doing with React 👀. Yes, this is a open and honest plug as I'm looking to triple our follower count. As a devrel, be willing to raise your hand. Have an ear and awareness on how what you bring to the table can be best utilized for company wins as well as that of your own. Pay attention to where help is needed as you perceive it from online communication, meetings, and customer feedback. Pending how your team is organized, there may be enough flexibility for you to take on challenges that aren't technically in your job description but carry the potential to add substantial value to your firm. Be willing to raise your hand.

Day 14 #100DaysOfDevRel At @vaadin I'm learning a technology I never heard of one month before interviewing which combines a tech I've used with one I've only glanced at. That technology is the @hillaframework and if you're at all in the space of business application development, you may want to take a peek. I've been learning by doing and building and can honestly report the level of simplification I'm seeing whether it's backend method calls or built-in components has been refreshing. Day 14 TLDR, it's a lot easier to believe in your product when you're an actual user. {{had a code review today and simplified the section below by at least 50% 👍🏾}}

Day 34 #100DaysOfDevRel As I put the finishing touches on my talk for the Dallas Software Developers meetup this week, I appreciate choosing a company whose products I can truly stand behind. What @vaadin has planned for this year alone in our release roadmap is mind-blowing. I'm eager to hop around and share the good news. BTW, did I mention our frameworks, Flow and Hilla are both open source? If you're a java dev it's worth a look ;-)

Day 7 #100DaysOfDevRel Self-Direct! As a developer advocate, not all of your days will be strictly organized like clock-in, task1, task2, task 3, clock-out. Many times, you will have multiple short and long term concerns and it's strictly up to you to prioritize in a way to get things done. Whether you utilize time-boxing, pomodoro, or any number of productivity apps, it's vital to organize yourself in such a way that deliverables are getting out the door as expected while making suitable progress on other tasks that may have more prolonged due dates. A conference you've been accepted to speak at may be months out ... until it's not! For me, Google calendar is everything. I use it for events, meetings, focus time blocks, and tasks starting with a monthly view, then narrowing to week and then day so nothing gets missed. It's not critically important which system you use, so long as you have one.

Day 6 #100DaysOfDevRel Celebrate Community! Often, the role of the Developer Advocate is associated with public-facing activities like conference talks, Youtube videos, blog articles and documentation. Behind the scenes however, a devrel may be found monitoring Github issues, participating in product design meetings, and even gathering feedback from social media posts. (Credit @nathankpeck for a thorough article on this It takes just a little creativity to mesh some of those ideas successfully. For instance keeping an eye on community members who are building applications utilizing your APIs/software/etc. Frank Delporte is a great example of such a community member, utilizing @vaadin to build out his UI for a @Java and @pi4j Raspberry Pi project. The fascinating conference talk is below. Join me in giving Frank a digital high five 🫸🏾🫷🏾

Day 22 #100DaysOfDevRel Give that talk! Honored to step in for @marcushellberg and share a well-received talk on building an AI-enhanced business application with @hillaframework. @connect_js was truly a blast!

Seeing this is a frequent topic of conversation these days, starting tomorrow I’m kicking off #100DaysOfDevRel. Tell a friend 😉

Day 19 #100DaysOfDevRel Book that conference! I'm elated to be speaking next week at @connect_js. When I'm not speaking you can find me at the @vaadin booth - I'd love to meet more X friends IRL!

Day 21 #100DaysOfDevRel TRAVEL DAY! For many developer advocate positions, some amount of travel is part of the job and pending the person, may be part of the perks! Today I’m off to the @connect_js conf where I’m giving a talk and learning to man a booth. Conferences are an awesome way to connect directly with developers en masse and share tons of value while gaining valuable insights.

Day 32 #100DaysOfDevRel COLLABORATE! @Vaadin maintains its home office in Turku Finland. It also has a remote workforce that spans the globe. Accordingly, once per year we host “Vaadin Winter Connected”, an opportunity for all team members to meet IRL, collaborate on initiatives, have some fun team building and launch with renewed excitement into the new year. This week I’m excited to participate in my first Vaadin Winter Connected event.

D84 #100DaysOfDevRel D28 #30DaysOfRust Wrote CLI for a task manager. The UX needs improvement and I realized how ";" impacted the return value. #LearnInPublic

Day 35 #100DaysOfDevRel Travel day 🛫 Off to represent @Vaadin at a Java meetup , à la mini conference, organized by my main man @DThompsonDev. This will be my first meetup as a Devrel and I’m really looking forward to it.

Day 36 #100DaysOfDevRel Night of Java tech meet up is about to start here in Dallas, Texas and I already made a friend who wants to go from using python for his LLM projects to Java. That’s a friend of mine! Time to talk @vaadin ✅