[Weekend Drop] Why Invest in Developer Community? GitHub OCTO Speaker Series

• Video: https://octo.github.com/speakerseries/swyx
• Blog Post: https://codingcareer.circle.so/c/dx-blog/technical-community-builder-is-the-hottest-new-job-in-tech
• Slide dec: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WGCfellGTboDwtM_D9uMwsHtD0qCFeBv6AYNUSxlDLg/edit?usp=sharing
• My talk at Heroku's conference where I met Idan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_w1YWCHXFg

Timestamps

• 00:01:17 Intro presentation on Why Dev Community
• 00:16:15 Discussion between Idan, Brian, and Swyx

Transcript

swyx: [00:00:00] Hey everyone! On weekends, we do long form audio from one of my conversations with people. 

[00:00:06] And a few months ago, I published an article on why technical community building is the hardest new job in tech. And it got a lot of traction. In fact, some of the other weekend drops on this podcast are related to that. Podcasts, but I was invited by the GitHub office of the CTO to talk about it. 

[00:00:25] These are two people that I knew from prior engagements before. Idan Gazit. I actually  met at the Heroku conference. When I spoke aboutNetlify CLI and Netlify Dev. And then Brian Douglas, BDougie , it was the dev advocate at Netlify before any of us were dev because another fi. So he kind of pioneered and originated the role, which I stepped into. 

[00:00:46] And both of them are just very well. The tunes to dev community. So I thought we had a really good conversation. About it. So the first part of this talk basically is me presenting a few slides on the, my thoughts on dev community. And then it was just a freeform discussion between. Myself and these two experts at GitHub. so enjoy 

[00:01:17] Idan Gazit: [00:01:17] Hello, welcome to the Octo speaker series. My name is Eden and I'm with Gibbs office of the CTO. We look at the future of development, developer experiences and try to figure out how to make development faster, safer, easier, more accessible to more people and more situations. All I find jazz today we're trying something a little different.

[00:01:43] Our guest is GitHub Star, Shawn Wang, better known by his internet handles Swyx and we'll also be joined by Brian Douglas, AKA B Douggie, who is a developer advocate and educator, and my colleague here at get hub. So, excited for that. I first met Swyx at a conference in the before times before the Corona, almost two years ago when he was giving a talk about state machines for building CLIs.

[00:02:07]I knew of him in the context of his famous learning in public essay. And the talk that he gave was a fantastic demonstration of that diving into an area where he had relatively little expertise and making sense of that territory and jumping back out to explain it to the rest of us after his talk, he can.

[00:02:28] To me that he he's actually a refugee from programming, Excel for finance. And I think coming out of that background, Swyx excels at finding that place of empathy for developers in the middle of the unglamorous, the hard parts of development the parts that we don't like to show off to one another, because they don't make us look smart.

[00:02:49] They don't make us look, look cool. His work normalizes, the feeling of I'm stupid right now, which is very much a part of every developer journey and with which I identify very, very much. I think that's what makes his thoughts on community building so relatable and so topical developer facing businesses have to find a way to channel empathy into action.

[00:03:13] And Swyx is figuring that out in all of its messiness in public for us to see and learn from. And in fact the reason I reached out to invite them onto the show is this recent post that he wrote called technical community builders. And looking critically at, at how that's different from the way Deborah has done today.

[00:03:30]And I think this is a very interesting take on the future of, of, of this business function for developer facing businesses.  Okay. So before I bring him on I'll remind everybody that we have a code of conduct it's really important to me that chat is a place where everyone feels welcome. So, please make sure to make that possible.

[00:03:47] And without further ado I would like to welcome Swyx and be Douggie. Hello. 

[00:03:52]swyx: [00:03:52] Hey, Hey, Hey  

[00:03:54] Idan Gazit: [00:03:54] Swyx, you're, you're out in Singapore and it's like the middle of your night. Thank you so much for coming in and joining us for, for, for this talk. 

[00:04:02] swyx: [00:04:02] Oh, it's my pleasure. Yeah, I mean, I work specific hours specific time anyway, so, this is I guess the start of my day. 

[00:04:10] Idan Gazit: [00:04:10] Okay, well, good morning to you then.

[00:04:12]Doug, 

[00:04:14] Brian Douglas: [00:04:14] I'm doing perfectly fine enjoying my normal time of the day, 

[00:04:19] Idan Gazit: [00:04:19] the north, the morning. That includes the day star. Fantastic. Swyx you said that you wanted to give a little bit of a, an upfront a mini talk about this before we dive into this discussion. Why don't I bring you on.

[00:04:35] There we go. Okay. So like enlighten us. 

[00:04:39] swyx: [00:04:39] I can't, I can't actually see the screen cause I just have my slides full screen. So just pause me if there's anything I just wanted to, I guess, set some context for people who may not have read the post. You know, I think you and I, and, and Douggie, like we, we've all talked about community for a bit, so we may have more context than others.

[00:04:58] And so I just wanted to, you know, whip up a few slides just to set some context and then we can actually talk because I'm very inspired by what GitHub does. And I'm definitely learning a lot from what you know, you guys do for, for community. Okay. So why invest in developer community a little bit?

[00:05:16] I feel like this is a bit obvious, but, but the reason I write, like I would normally never write something like this because it just seems obvious. But the reason I write about it is I do a lot of conversations with startups and Sometimes for investing sometimes just to give dev REL advice sometimes, you know, marketing or whatever other network I can offer to startups.

[00:05:38] I, I often do that. But in, in the past week or so, like at least when I wrote that book blog posts in one week, I had three conversations that all ended in can you help us find somebody to build developer community? And I was like, okay, this is, this is not just like one-off thing. This is a trend.

[00:05:53] A lot of startup founders are feeling and there's no one really dedicated to it. There, there are people of course, but it's not like a, an industry trend yet. So I decided to write a blog post about that. And that's, that's why, I guess we're here today to talk about going on. Wait, wait, communities becoming more of a thing.

[00:06:12] Always has been a thing, but it's becoming more of a thing and maybe professionalizing as well. So a bi...