Fireside with Voxgig

Carter Rabasa is Head of Developer Relations at Courier and joins Richard in this Fireside with Voxgig chat. This starts as a history of developer relations, but exposes a question, a gap; who were the devrel leaders in the API/cloud era? The activity of developer relations as it is recognised today could be argued to have begun from 2010 onwards and perhaps GitHub is the genesis of this stage. Th...

Here at the Voxgig podcast we’ve decided that we’re sick of talking about DevRel all the time. So we’ve decided to switch it up with something completely different for this episode - DevOps! Marino Wijay joins Richard to talk about operator relations, and his work for solo.io as a developer advocate. Solo helps companies unite their services into functional applications using Kubernetes and cloud-...

We’ve invited Rohit Ghumare to speak with us in this episode of the podcast, not just to ask him about his impressive Twitter following (although this will come up), but also to find out how he organises his time as a community organiser and developer advocate. As Richard knows all too well, startups require everyone to become a multi-hyphenate. But even in bigger organisations, with a whole team...

What even is positioning? Isn’t it that thing you do when you’ve already established your company and you’ve kind of already got everything figured out? According to this episode’s guest, Robert Kaminski: Absolutely Not! Robert is the co-founder of Fletch PMM, where positioning is their bread and butter, and he’s here to tell us about his belief that positioning should be one of the first consider...

There’s a large population of technical writers in devrel. And a big number of these technical writers don’t necessarily come from technical backgrounds. So how do they do it? In this episode, Richard has a fascinating discussion on this topic and more with developer evangelist, Pavan Belegatti. Pavan transitioned from a marketer to a highly skilled technical writer. He’s a self-taught developer a...

Technical writing is an essential element of countless products and services. So why is appreciation of it on the decline? Our guest, Chris Ward (or Chris Chinchilla as you may know him), is a talented writer. Not just of technical content, but also of fiction and music! He’s here to kick our writing brains into gear with a simple piece of advice: just start. Richard agrees that he needs to hear t...

Content warning: laugh out loud moments and irreverent attitude to “boring” insurance companies. In this episode Richard chats to a very positive blast from his past. Taariq Lewis gave Richard work when Richard needed it many years ago. They’ve each gone on and had several start ups and overcome lots of entrepreneurial hurdles since then, but that core decency informs not only this episode but Taa...

Rory Madden, Co-Founder of UXDX, joins Richard on this episode of the podcast to talk us through his journey to creating one of the most dynamic, barrier-free conference series’ in tech. UXDX (UX being user experience, DX being developer experience) was born from Rory’s frustration when he couldn’t figure out how to implement innovative solutions in the companies he was working in, and he was alwa...

Joe Pettersson joins the podcast, to talk all things devrel at banked.com. Banked is a global payments network, and if you’ve ever tried to order anything online, you’ll know that the payments systems used by various websites are far from perfect. Banked is on a mission to fix that. They want to get users through payments systems as smoothly as possible. As Joe puts it, the payments industry is bi...

Danielle Krage is back on the podcast to give us some more invaluable speaker advice. We first had Danielle on Fireside two years ago, so we’re eager to hear her thoughts on what’s changed for speakers in the last two years, and what could be coming up next. She tells us all about her company, The Remote Speaker Coach, and her journey to founding it. While working on education projects, Danielle k...

Did we get Salma onto Fireside just so Richard could learn how to begin his Twitch streaming career? It's possible! Salma Alam-Naylor is a live streamer, software engineer and developer educator. She streams on Twitch under the moniker “whitep4nth3r” - and she dives into the backstory around this name in the episode (we think it’s great, for the record). Salma gets into it about live streaming, co...

Today, Richard speaks to Maria Ashby, developer advocate at Kubeshop. She talks all things Kubernetes, community building, and how developer monoculture is a thing of the past. Back in the days of an early version of Voxgig, Richard and the team got a crash course in Kubernetes which left more questions than answers. If Maria's work with Kubeshop had been around then, that might not have been the...

Have you ever wondered what marketing people think of developers? As it turns out, it’s very positive, at least according to Anna Redbond, CMO of Flagsmith. Anna joins us to talk about the world of marketing in a technical space. As someone who works with words, how does she market towards people who work with numbers? Anna and Flagsmith find ways to bridge the divide with their work helping compa...

The first thing to know about Zach Peterson is that he’s a hardware guy. Richard is not. Can this divide be bridged by a friendly Fireside chat? Well as turns out, bridging the divide between these two industries is pretty essential for the tech world at large. It may seem obvious, but you can’t really have one without the other - until they learn how to install Twitter in our brains that is, and...

This time we welcome Jonathan Reimer to the podcast. Jonathan and I dive straight into his company 'crowd.dev', where they are working hard at building an open source developer data platform that they hope will help customers get a clear picture of how developers engage with their brand, their tools, and the developer community in general. Continuing on theme from Emily Omier's episode last week,...

From the pitfalls of rote memorisation to microphone technique - news anchor, presenter and anxiety coach Trish Lynch talks us through some common sense ‘dos and don'ts’ of speaking in front of an audience. The rest of us can take heart in Trish’s reassurance that even she experiences stage fright, and that (clearly) it can be overcome. There are a number of valuable tidbits here. Trish’s wealth o...

Tune in for an in-depth chat about how companies can improve their revenue through fully understanding their open source project and software. Emily speaks truthful sense. This is a tough message for the overly optimistic among you. As Richard so rightly points out – knowing the right thing to do vs doing it are two different things! Emily outlines the many, many ways a company can leverage open s...

Richard talks to Natalie Gray, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Codurance. Natalie is a former colleague and an expert community builder, previously with Voxgig and now with software consultancy Codurance. In Codurance, Natalie and her colleagues are inherently linked to the Software Craftsmanship manifesto– a mindset to software engineering. Can your software scale with your business? Natali...

Continuing our commitment to bring you voices rom across the DevRel ecosystem, this week Richard is joined by Louise Ogilvy, recruitment specialist for all things developer related. Louise defines roles clearly, helping companies and start-ups creating developer tooling to get from idea to market. She recruits for the entire product cycle: Product, build and go-to-market. What has Louise noticed i...

This week’s podcast-as-a-resource is focused on your technical content strategy. Richard talks to Adam DuVander, Principal Consultant at EveryDeveloper. Are you developer first or developer enabled in the way you sell software. Discovery is Adam’s bread and butter. He helps companies understand how to be discovered in the first place – so what are developers or developer advocates trying to solve...

Recently, guests have mentioned the public speaking side of the DevRel role, especially as in person conferences are back! So we've dipped back in to our archive to bring you this VERY helpful episode from March 2019. Here, Richard speaks to Oisín Lunny, professional public speaker, master of ceremonies (MC), radio presenter and journalist. He has hosted and moderated events and given keynote pres...

We celebrate our 100th episode welcoming back Andrew Grill to talk about Digital Curiosity. Are you allocating enough time to think about what’s happening, trends and the future? Andrew’s new book, coming out later this year, is titled Digital Curiosity. Yes we are at the top of the hype cycle on AI (Generative AI in particular) it is hype that is prompting and causing government action. This is n...

This episode is almost a case study in how askui.com engages with their developer audience. Johannes Dienst is the Developer Advocate and Apoorva Tiwari is the Community Manager with askui. How to get a developer to install and run the askui tool? And they’ve run a remote, online, hackathon overall several days…. There’s a revelation and an innovation here that is worth learning from. Reach out to...

You won't need coffee after this! Plug in to Richard & Tejas's chat and soak up the energy. Richard and Tejas cover fresh ground in today's episode. Watch out for the discussion of DevRel vs DevSell. Tejas talks us through the difference. And he gives wonderful insights in to an often under valued need – how to pace yourself at conferences. To be able to do this is crucial for physical and mental...

Richard first encountered Steve DeveloperSteve Coochin when Voxgig experienced first hand Steve’s and Lumigo’s incredible developer relations and developer support. So did Richard get lucky or is this just how Steve rolls? Turns out – it’s just how Steve rolls. Getting an answer to a problem is central to Steve’s work ethic, and he’s pretty good at it. And this dedication to solving problems has a...