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    DevEducate: The Art of Teaching Developers at Scale

    Discover how to engage and market to developers without being sales-y through developer education. Listen to interviews with experts and leaders in the DevRel space so you can uncover the strategies and tactics that will help you blow away barriers to developer adoption.
    en11 Episodes

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    Episodes (11)

    An Agile Approach to Developer Content | Shruti Kuber | Ep 11

    An Agile Approach to Developer Content | Shruti Kuber | Ep 11

    This week on DevEducate, Shruti Kuber from Restack joins me to talk about how her startup uses an iterative, collaborative approach to planning developer video content that works for their small team – and why starting with a niche audience is helping them create content that is getting noticed.


    Talking Points

    • Why personas and niching are critical for an early-stage startup
    • How a small team can approach content planning
    • Where top-down and bottom-up input meet during planning
    • Figuring out how to make boring content more interesting
    • Where to start with building a community from scratch


    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “To create content, it's very important to initially define the personas because when you define who you're making the content for you can understand their pain points better because there's a lot of content available for everything, right?” – Shruti


    “Everybody needs our product so… our personas are ‘everybody.’” – Kamran


    “Choosing a niche is like choosing the tip of an iceberg to focus on. You actually dive underwater and you see that’s there’s a huge, massive amount of information – a subculture almost.” – Kamran


    “With startups nothing is the same. Two weeks later you have a different thing going on – so it’s definitely not possible to set up a persona and then say, okay, this is what you’re going to work on for the next six months. Definitely not possible.” – Shruti


    “Even with the persona set, there’s still intent that you need to consider. For lower intent, you are creating awareness type of content and then as go towards the end of the funnel, you’re targeting people with very high intent.” – Shruti


    “With trial and error, we figured out that one-month sprints work out really well for us. And then depending on the kind of content we want to do, we come up with smaller content we can produce more often.” – Shruti


    “I would definitely say the kind of conversations you have after the content has been watched is the measure of the success.” – Shruti


    “Opinionated pieces are much more helpful for people than just saying, oh, it depends on if you wanna do this, do this. If you wanna do this, do that.” – Shruti


    “If you search for certain topics on YouTube, you’ll find people with their hoodies on, head down, looking at the screen, mumbling something for 45 minutes. And they’re definitely not appealing.” – Shruti


    “Leading indicators might be likes and subscribes or page views and things like that. But it takes a while for the lagging indicators to show up, which would be comments either in person or on the content itself, or people sharing content.” – Kamran


    “If you see my Slack, I’m part of like, a MILLION Slack channels and these are usually communities for the tools that I speak about.” – Shruti


    Links

    From Developer Fashion Lines to Onboarding Games | Ivan Burazin | Ep 10

    From Developer Fashion Lines to Onboarding Games | Ivan Burazin | Ep 10

    In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Ivan Burazin to talk about his creative approaches to developer marketing – from designing custom fashion to an API onboarding game. We discuss why adopting a bottom-up motion to attract developers is tough for a traditionally sales-led organization, how to break through the noise, and what it means to design an onboarding game experience for developers. Ivan was Chief Developer Experience Officer at Infobip at the time of recording and is now the CEO and co-founder of Daytona.io.


    Talking Points

    • What does Ivan do as a Chief Developer Experience Officer?
    • Why B2B sales-led tech companies need to get creative with their developer marketing
    • How Ivan justifies pushing the boundaries of creative marketing to stakeholders
    • Balancing needs between sales-led and developer-led motions
    • How games can help developers learn the API and SDK
    • How a game differs from the “traditional” developer experience
    • The challenge of gaining attention from developers
    • Does headcount matter when doing creative marketing?


    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “How do you get the word out about the problem you're solving to developers without ‘marketing’? How many communities can a developer be a part of? How many Slack groups can you have before it falls apart and you're not looking at them anymore?” – Ivan

    “[Developers] have a home. They're never going to go to InfoBip.com because there's nothing for them there. They're not going to read marketing material because they're not interested. It's: does it have the feature set that I have? Is the documentation good? And how can I sign up, and how long does it take me to get to my first sort of hello world.” – Ivan

    “The way I look at it is like we can create the best sort of experience, you know, onboarding, documentation, sign up, whatever, but if no one knows you, no one's gonna come.” – Ivan

    “There are two things that you have to break through to get developers to sign up and to use your services: you have to be better than competitors, and you have to educate them that you actually exist.” – Ivan

    “What can I do that's sort of over the top – because there's just so much noise in the dev space.” – Ivan

    “If you're just gonna do what everyone else does, it's gonna be really, really hard to compete.” – Ivan

    “If you count how much revenue comes from bottom up, comparable companies to Infobip generate anywhere from 40 to 50%. These end up being upgraded to account executive and managed accounts and whatnot. But they originated from the developer and self-service.” – Ivan

    “Constraints breed creativity. In order to compete when you have less resources – that can be an asset. You can look at it as an opportunity to get much more creative with what you do.” – Kamran

    “Yes, if you want to build an RPG, then it's probably gonna use some graphics, but you can also do different types of styles that don't require a ton of graphics.” – Kamran


    Links

    Play some of the games I’ve made

    Telling Delightful Stories for Developers Through Doodling | David Neal | Ep 9

    Telling Delightful Stories for Developers Through Doodling | David Neal | Ep 9

    In this week’s episode, we unpack the transformative power of illustrations in developer education with David Neal. Discover why hand-drawn doodles are more than just eye candy—they're a delightful way to make complex topics accessible and engaging. We also delve into how doodling affects storytelling and authenticity and how David’s work at Okta has led to a long tail of engagement. David also shares actionable tips on incorporating art into your workflow, and we speculate on where AI-generated art fits.


    Talking Points

    • David’s integration of doodling in developer education.
    • How doodling creates authenticity for audience engagement.
    • Overcoming dry and boring product narratives with storytelling
    • Anecdotal and metric evidence for the impact of David’s doodles.
    • Starter recommendations for drawing and illustration.
    • The role of AI in the future of art and illustration.


    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “I knew within the first 10 seconds that it was a game changer. I could see the reactions on people's faces and their engagement, the excitement that they had looking at these silly illustrations.” – David


    “In the realm of technology, when we are talking about some new framework or product, that can normally be dry and boring if you just stick to the facts and features.” – David


    “[Doodling] is more human and more authentic than the clean, pure lines of graphic design.” – Kamran


    “My encouragement to folks is that drawing is a skill you can learn. It's not some kind of natural born talent.” – David


    “You could create illustrated SVGs that you animate as part of your talks or as part of your documentation or as part of your webinars and anywhere else that you're making developer content.” – Kamran


    “You want to delight your readers or your viewers or your audience. And I think that's what unique illustrations allow you to do.” – David


    “[At Okta], we found a measurable difference with social media engagement. We saw higher clickthroughs, and we found that people sharing that content was much higher.” – David


    “ChatGPT is not going to replace your customer interviews. It's not going to replace talking to developers and getting out there.” – Kamran


    Links

    Entertaining and Educating Developers Through Music | Dylan Beattie | Ep 8

    Entertaining and Educating Developers Through Music | Dylan Beattie | Ep 8

    In this week’s episode, literal developer rockstar Dylan Beattie joins me on DevEducate to talk about writing parody songs for developers, handling live performances at conferences, and creative ways to incorporate music into developer content and education.


    Talking Points

    • How Dylan combines his love of programming with music
    • Parallels between programming and music
    • How music and learning science are related
    • Working music into developer marketing and education


    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “You could get a laptop, open it up, open up Garage Band, record a song, stick it on SoundCloud, and the rest of the world can hear it today, for free.” – Dylan


    “I think a lot of developers are also musicians and there's something about working with an intangible abstraction.” – Dylan


    “My kids are young and I see them every day learning songs in kindergarten and preschool just to learn stuff and remember it.” – Kamran


    “What you do is you find the people who think like you do and have shared experiences and get excited about the same things you get excited about.” – Dylan


    “Music is another element that sometimes is a good way to tell a story.” – Dylan


    “The day that you play the guitar for money when you don't wanna play is the day you start to hate it. And once you start to hate it, you will never get it back.” – Dylan


    “The idea costs 1 point. Writing the lyrics is 10 points. Making the music is 100. Making the video to go with it is 1000. And then getting it to a point where the rest of the band know the material and you are on stage at a show in another country with the video all queued up and you’re ready to go? The idea is not the hard part.” – Dylan


    “There’s something very, very primal about music.” – Dylan


    “Come back when we have Roady AI cause that's actually gonna solve a real problem.” – Dylan


    “If you take the idea of music and you take the idea of learning and then you marry it with programming education, there's so much stuff that you could probably do there. It might just depend exactly on having the right kind of creative use case for it.” – Kamran


    “Someone at Ubisoft Montreal who was an audio engineer and who knew how to play music actually recorded an entire concept album that was in the style of an 80s heavy metal band called Star Lord.” – Kamran


    “If I hear a snippet of any of Alexander Brandon's soundtrack from that game, there's a moment when I'm like, ‘Ah, that was an amazing holiday.’ And then I'm like, that wasn't a holiday, that was a computer game that you played.” – Dylan


    Links

    Engaging Developers with Edutrainment | Dale Meredith | Ep 7

    Engaging Developers with Edutrainment | Dale Meredith | Ep 7

    This week Dale Meredith, cybersecurity expert and recovering Batman addict, joins me on the show to talk about how to engage developers with “edutrainment”, how to work in branding with developer content and education, and how he came to own Wayne Enterprises.


    Talking Points


    • Ways branding can be incorporated into developer content
    • What branding really means (hint: it's not a logo)
    • How do you figure out if developers respond well to your content?
    • Keeping developers engaged instead of falling asleep
    • Why Batman is the perfect character for Dale’s brand of education


    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context

    “I've sat through live courses as well as online courses before where I'm just like… bored to death and I'm like, get to the point!” – Dale


    “[Branding] is every single touchpoint your customer or your learner has with your marketing or sales material. It's how it makes them feel.” – Kamran


    “When it comes to a developer relations program within a product business, we sort of leave it to the individuals that are writing and we don’t really talk about how we could incorporate our brand and our positioning and our marketing strategy and flow it into our developer education.” – Kamran


    “When we can associate an emotion to learning, it sticks with us longer. And so if I can get you to laugh, you're gonna remember it.” – Dale


    “I've had students come back to me in the past and say, ‘You know what? I was taking the exam, the question came up and I actually laughed out loud because I remembered what it is you said. And it made me remember immediately what the answer was.’” – Dale


    “The best way for people to learn is not to drill the information in over and over and over, but to create.” – Dale


    “I just love catching people off guard. I’ll on purpose teach the wrong thing and be like, I'm just kidding you folks. You know, just to get their attention. Because they'll be like wait a minute, that's not right.” – Dale


    “I've actually purchased the name Wayne Enterprises here in the state of Utah. That is one of my business names.” – Dale


    “If you wanna learn something, teach it to somebody. It'll force you to learn it.” – Dale


    Links

    Developer Content That Lives Through the Seasons | Jason Alba | Ep 06

    Developer Content That Lives Through the Seasons | Jason Alba | Ep 06

    This week on DevEducate, Jason Alba joins me to discuss evergreen content – what it is, what it's good for, how it applies to different formats, and why it's not really the panacea you'd expect it to be.

    Talking Points

    • What is evergreen content?
    • How evergreen impacts content maintenance
    • Keeping track of content over time
    • How issues in content can affect your brand unexpectedly
    • What kinds of content make sense to be evergreen

    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “Evergreen content is something that you can put out and hopefully it stays relevant for a long period of time.” – Jason


    “I don't think I could have 37 courses if my content wasn't evergreen. There comes a point where you have so many courses that you're updating every year that you can't put out new content.” – Jason

    “It was very frustrating to create something that I knew that my very smart audience would come back and be like, this isn't relevant anymore.“ – Jason


    “I wrote this book and by the time it came out I was flipping through it and I was like, oh, this is outdated. Like, there's things that need to change in here.” – Jason


    “If you are talking about an economy of scale here, like yes, your team can churn out 3000 articles on all these different topics, but now you're also creating 3000 articles worth of debt that you're gonna need to pay.” – Kamran


    “Let's say I reference a company and then the CEO does something horrific. And now everybody hates the company and it looks like I've endorsed it, right?” – Jason


    “Even though everything is relevant, like the how-to and the concepts and all that stuff is relevant, the video doesn't match what their current experience is on my system. And they're immediately gonna say, oh, well this isn't the same system. Do you have anything that's up to date?” – Jason


    “We're all lazy. We don't wanna put in the effort to actually go find the content that you're trying to [get me to] look at.” – Kamran


    “I cannot emphasize how much [scripting] made my courses magnitudes better, like multiples better, because I could spend time working on my script.” – Jason


    “You could have a regular kind of a standard operating procedure where you do an audit to go through content again every so often, once a quarter or something to make sure that it's still accurate.” – Kamran


    “There are certain things that people just need to know without you telling them every single step.” – Jason’s former boss


    Links

    Educate Tomorrow's Buyers with a Developer Content Program | Erik Dietrich | Ep 4

    Educate Tomorrow's Buyers with a Developer Content Program | Erik Dietrich | Ep 4

    This week on DevEducate, Erik Dietrich joins me to discuss what goes into creating an effective developer content program. We cover types of developer content, driving awareness, what he’s seen working with technical brands, what DevRel has to do with Disney, and how to measure brand marketing in a way that gets us closer to understanding content ROI and profitability.

    Episode Link: https://deved.rocks/4


    Talking Points

    • Working backward in developing a content strategy
    • Figuring out where to put focus through experiments
    • Why driving “awareness” isn’t good enough
    • What early-stage founders need to avoid
    • When it makes sense to be an expert when creating technical content
    • The ultimate metric to measure that goes beyond views, leads, and conversion
    • Avoiding the 3 most common mistakes in content marketing


    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “I think a lot of us start with the article in mind, almost like if you’re a developer, you start thinking of the solution first. But what we really need to ask is why are we writing an article?” – Erik

    “I always think of content in terms of who is it that you want to read this piece of content, and then what are you hoping that they’ll do next?” – Erik

    “If you’re really in it for the long haul, take somebody who right now is too junior to be your customer and then fix that. Over the next year, they’re going to consume content you produce until they are ready to become your buyer. And if you do that, the marketing funnel is kind of easy because they just trust you so much.” – Erik

    “A lot of technical founders in the early stages will tend to view marking as, ‘I create a bunch of content where I explain how awesome my solution is.’” – Erik

    “Disney is brand marketing personified. The day that your kid is born, you put them in a onesie with Mickey Mouse on it.” – Kamran

    “The nature of the content you create and the channels in which you create them are really going to be informed by laying out how somebody goes from, ‘I have never heard of your brand before’ to ‘I want to become a customer.’” – Erik

    “The way you use content in your marketing is so variable that it can feel like boiling the ocean. So there’s a tendency to just say, well, this is almost unknowable so I’m just going to focus on the tactics.” – Erik

    “Run an experiment and fund it enough to get statistically significant data out of it, but don’t let it go on in zombie form for too long if it’s not working.” – Erik

    “If you’re in the developer world making developer tools, it’s pretty common that you are going to be creating a category, meaning you are building something that nobody has an elevator pitch for just yet.” – Erik

    “One of the things that's very much not lost on me is just what a tough problem it is to solve getting good data about your marketing.” – Erik

    “Brand awareness in particular is a very long play that’s really hard to measure and you’re almost just taking it on faith from a lot of veteran marketers that like, ‘Hey, this will wind up being a good idea,’ you know?” – Erik

    “A lot of people would say developers are a very skeptical audience so you need developers that are marketing to them. And I would say that’s true if the premise is instructive.” – Erik

    “Performative content is when you are putting content on the site and there’s really no target audience in mind because you are not really talking to anyone. The paradigm is, ‘Look at me, look how smart I am, look how smart our brand is, you should do business with us.’” – Erik


    Links

    Creators & Guests

    • Kamran Ayub - Host
    • Erik Dietrich - Guest

    Building a Developer Recording Haven | Xavier Morera | Ep 3

    Building a Developer Recording Haven | Xavier Morera | Ep 3

    What does it take to get started recording professional video content? In this episode, Xavier Morera joins me to share his journey to becoming a full-time Pluralsight author and what ultimately led to building his own recording studio – and what Vin Diesel has to do with it.

    Talking Points

    • Xavier’s journey from Microsoft trainer to full-time course author
    • What the entry-level to pro hardware looks like for recording
    • What going from a home office or closet to full-blown studio looks like
    • Pro tips on reducing video and audio recording maintenance
    • Why hiring a theater actress can improve your speaking
    • Ways to improve the quality of your home office right away
    • How a studio can be turned into an investment and an asset

    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “There's always going to be someone in the room who doesn't know what you know. So it's always going to add value when you teach someone something.” – Kamran


    “In my earlier courses, my laptop was really noisy. I had to put my laptop on the floor, under the desk, and get some long cables so I could put a monitor and a keyboard on top.” – Xavier


    “If you're thinking about doing video recording, you'll have to pay attention to your equipment. And you might have to adjust some of the hardware that you're using.” – Kamran


    “I updated a course that was three years old and because I recorded it in that same booth, with that same microphone, when I'm doing the update, I can just drop in new sentences and my voice really hasn't changed so it sounds pretty much the same.” – Xavier


    “If you're a business and you're creating video training you also have to maintain it because your software's gonna evolve over time.” – Kamran


    “When I close everything, I could do yoga or meditation here without hearing even a pin drop.” – Xavier


    “When I was doing earlier courses and I had a full-time job I didn't record during the day cause I was working, but I would just record at night when everybody was sleeping and that was a good time to do it.” – Kamran


    “There’s this theater actress I hired a few months ago. I'm like, I'm 40-something, I know how to breathe. And she was like, no, let me teach you how to breathe.” – Xavier


    “If you had the means to create your own recording studio for yourself or even for your organization, it could be a shared space and you could even rent it out if you needed to.” – Kamran


    “I think the most important thing is… just start. Stop just waiting for the right conditions. Just get a microphone, start recording. It's not like you're releasing something to a hundred million people and everybody's watching what you're doing. Just release something, you'll get someone to like it, then you'll improve it and you get better with time.” – Xavier


    Links

    Xavier’s Links

    Equipment

    Other Links

    DevEd That Sticks | Joe Eames | Ep 2

    DevEd That Sticks | Joe Eames | Ep 2


    Talking Points

    • What is “make it stick” and how does it translate to developer education?
    • What makes effective learning?
    • Effective learning myths
    • What you see people getting wrong when teaching developers (and what to do instead)
    • How to measure learning effectiveness (what are the metrics we might care about)
    • How your teaching methods have changed over time


    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context


    “The quicker someone gets to where they are feeling comfortable with what you’ve built and are effective at it and can implement it, the more likely they are to turn into a paying customer or stay a paying customer and not convert over to something else.” – Joe


    “Compared to your competitors, if you are faster and easier to learn, you are almost for-sure more likely going to have a significant lead and edge in gaining and retaining customers.” – Joe


    “A lot of the things that we think have to do with effective learning are actually wrong.” - Joe


    “Effective learning should feel effortful and should feel hard. If you go to the gym and after your session you walk out and you’re relaxed, if you’re not tired at all – that’s a really good indication you did not do anything useful at the gym.” - Joe


    “Life doesn’t involve us doing the same thing over and over again, and certainly programming doesn’t.” - Joe


    “Follow-along coding is one of my biggest beefs. Programming is not typing – programming happens in your mind as you try and figure out what constructs, what code to actually craft and create. Whether you're typing with a typing language or drag and drop with a language like Scratch – the actual programming happens in your head and typing is just an expression of it.” – Joe


    “When you’re typing along with somebody who’s coding you’re making zero decisions yourself as to what code to write. You are simply mimicking and parroting the code that they write and so what you’re actually getting is typing practice.” – Joe


    “As educators the more you can do to get people to do hands-on the better. You can even just tell them how useless it is to watch this video and that they need to be putting this into practice themselves.” – Joe


    “You don’t actually learn better using your ‘preferred’ learning style, the most important thing is to get the learning in the most effective learning style based on what you are being taught.” – Joe


    “Ask a friend to go through the course, essentially a beta tester, and have them give you some real, true feedback.” – Joe


    “Ultimately YOU [the learner] are the most responsible person for your own education.” - Joe


    “We watch other people do something and we think that somehow it teaches us something and it really doesn’t. It’s the most ineffective way to learn anything.” - Joe


    “Being familiar with a topic isn’t the same thing as gaining mastery over it.” – Joe


    “Popularity is certainly no measurement of the quality of your education.” – Joe


    Links

    Bypassing the Walls Developers Put Up | Todd Gardner | Ep 1

    Bypassing the Walls Developers Put Up | Todd Gardner | Ep 1

    Talking Points

    • How Todd used a local-first approach to grow TrackJS
    • How to think about developer marketing as educational content
    • Why it’s easier to sell to your friends
    • How speaking positions you as an expert
    • How the marketing personas can differ between similar products
    • How humor and storytelling engage an audience
    • Why targeting “developers” is too general

    <Blockquotes>

    Lightly edited for context

    “Build an audience and turn them into your friends because selling to your friends is easier.” – Todd

    “I started with people who I’d take out to lunch with or go get a beer with to understand their problems. It turned out to be a fantastic way of building a dedicated and engaged community here locally where I could get really good feedback… and it’s lasted up to this day.” – Todd

    “I would take a flask with me and I would take a couple of shots of whiskey 15 minutes before I was going to go on stage because my nerves were on edge. I totally understand how terrifying [speaking] is.” – Todd

    “With whatever you’re going to do… whether it be your consulting, being a freelancer, looking for your next job, or your building a product of some kind–at some point you’re going to need to sell it.” – Todd

    “It’s too late to build the audience and try to sell at the same time. You need to have credibility first and then sell second.” – Todd

    “Out of all the people I’ve worked with and talked to, developers are the most suspicious of sales. It’s not that they don’t even like being sold to, they actively dislike salespeople.” – Todd

    “This is the tiptoeing that we need to do in order to be effective at selling software to developers, we do this ‘educational content marketing.’” – Todd

    Developer relations is really about helping developers get better at what they do and if you help them understand how your product helps them make their jobs faster or easier or more effectively then you’re getting the same benefit without seeming salesy.” – Kamran

    You can build it but people may not come – especially if they don’t know about it and even if they do, it might not be what they’re looking for.” – Kamran

    You have to tell a story and you gotta inject humor. I think both those things are really, really important in putting together a talk of any kind.” – Todd

    “[Storytelling] is not something I started out doing and then over time I learned that crafting a narrative just made my talks so much better.” – Kamran

    The world of software developers is not one thing. There are so many smaller groups within that and I think it’s really important to know who you are talking to more precisely than ‘developers.’” – Todd

    Links

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