Fireside with Voxgig

A two-for-one deal here! A tutorial on how international and card payments work. And then DevRel discussion on APIs and SDKs involved with Open Source projects and bringing in contributors and building the community. The power of Open Source communities as an incredible recruitment channel. Richard also challenges Alex to detail his journey in DevRel, from Mozilla onwards, building DevRel function...

Listen closely and you’ll hear the wheels turning in Richard's brain as this conversation goes on and he gets the how to guide from Megan on community building. They get in to the weeds on community building tools, especially Slack channels, Commonroom webapp and Discord. Megan chats about the “old guard” of devrel, with one of the old guards! This conversation is a true guide to practical communi...

This was another enjoyable episode for Richard where he gets to talk to the Co-Founder of a service he uses, regularly and with great success! Tim Nolet is the CTO and Co-Founder of Checkly, a synthetic testing tool. Don’t worry – Tim explains synthetic in this context. Tim built Checkly through bootstrapping. This was a side project that grew out of control! And of course, developer relations mak...

Michiel Mulders is a wonderful example of a creative developer, driven to share knowledge and committed to quality documentation. He delivers a module on documentation and technical writing at DevRel University, free online course dedicated to Web3 DevRel. In this episode, Richard and Michiel have a thorough exploration of documentation philosophies, approaches, tools and analytics for content eng...

It’s possible we generated more questions than we answered in this episode. This was straight from the practice of developer relations. Sid is the VP of Developer Relations at APIMatic which has ben around about eight years but has a start-up energy. Sid’s role is to improve their explanation and communication of their SDKs and APIs. This includes a glorious description of a date format fix got so...

Richard was delighted to talk to Chris O’Neill, the first Developer Advocate at Stytch for this week’s Fireside with Voxgig podcast. Why? Well, recently Richard and the team at Voxgig had the very great pleasure of using Stytch – and it worked a dream. So to be able to share a practical discussion about DevRel after experiencing the DevRel and the product first hand was rewarding. But apart from t...

This episode looks at how DevRel works at very large organisations. Jason St-Cyr, Developer Relations Leader at Sitecore, one of the largest digital experience providers in the world. With such a large ecosystem, it’s no wonder that DevRel looks different here than in a SaaS start-up! Jason tells us about ambassador programmes, the starting point for his career in DevRel. And he shares his metapho...

Brian Douglas wants to understand where contributions to Open Source projects are coming from. Brian was the first official Developer Advocate in GitHub! Brian is also another example of a degree in something not computer science. With a finance degree, he taught himself to code and is now running his own startup via DevRel role with GitHub, He’s learned the importance of scaling through developer...

In this podcast we talk to people from across the spectrum of developer relations, from vice presidents, to experienced developer relations professionals, public speakers, event organisers and community builders – and to those just starting out on their developer relations career. This week, Richard talks to Lewis Meyers in an open, honest and fascinating conversation about breaking in to the tech...

This episode starts out with a reassuring tale about a rock gig…with more people in the band than in the audience…. So as a conference speaker or community builder, remember that everyone has started out somewhere and not every moment on every stage has been perfect. It all takes practice. Jono takes us through his approach to conference speaking. This is gold. This podcast is dedicated to helping...

Readme Ops. I love it! And wanted to find out more. So Adam Christian, CEO of Stateful kindly joined me to explain the phrase they have coined. Ah, documentation! Imagine a Readme where the samples you run actually work? Runable commands should become runabale – out of the box with Runme. It’s not magic, it’s the passion of Adam Christian and his team at Stateful to address the epidemic of non-mai...

This is another career guidance episode! Julia has a background in law, marketing and now is a successful developer relations guru. Julia generously shares her journey to DevRel in an accessible chat and with an achievable pathway. But be prepared to commit time and effort to community building.

Courtney Stanley, a keynote speaker, MC and meeting planner, talks about why it’s important for virtual event organisers to offer people an authentic live experience online. As virtual experience improves year by year, we reflect on the Fireside Chat with Courtney we had two years ago where she talks about her transition from live events to virtual events and how to make this happen. She has plent...

Fun Fact: Our guest this week is a once-developer who, believe it or not, registered Microsoft’s first Github account! Martin Woodward has been helping first Microsoft and then Github build, sustain and support their respective open-source communities. There are a lot of highlights in his long distinguished career as he is now the Vice President of Developer Relations, #DevRel has influenced him t...

Motivation, Advocacy, and Leadership are the three themes for this week’s #DevRel podcast. This time around in our #DevRel podcast series, Richard Rodger speaks to Colm Doyle. We bring up some big tech company names such as Microsoft, Apple, Open-air, Slack, and Facebook and zero in on what it takes to making #DevRel work. One of the most important things, in that regard, is leadership. Colm is an...

Be warned: this podcast contains kindness and care and a decent description of how Guns&Roses are a guide for startups! With that being said - this week, we have an inspiring chat with PJ Hagerty as he brings the spirit of Guns&Roses and Buffalo, New York! PJ is a developer, writer, speaker, musician, and Community Advocate. He shares with us his life story of getting into tech and founding one of...

This week, we decided to revive the 2018 podcast with Andrew Grill as we bring up public speaking, the rough journey of becoming a public speaker and such. If you are in DevRel you are probably a public speaker, or want to be one. Listen to Andrew for some great advice. Andrew Grill calls himself a ‘practical futurist’. He is a professional writer, blogger and conference speaker—which means he get...

When we talk about Developers' Relations, we often talk about the three Cs: Code, Community, and Content. This week's podcast talk makes a turn at bringing those three together. Service design helps us achieve that with its principles for DevRel strategy. Delivering and designing a service is critical in making your DevRel coherent. In this podcast, John Lynch who is a Service Designer breaks down...

A how-to guide on building a community and successful event creation! Spoiler alert: it takes work, commitment and patience. Vicky Twomey-Lee is a diversity in tech & community veteran. You need community BEFORE you have an event!

So, you're a developer, but you feel you need a change of role, but not industry. Well you've come to the right podcast today! In this episode we talk to Alvin Bryan, Developer Advocate at Contentful and a coach at Codebar, a really interesting initiative to help people learning to code and starting out in various languages. Alvin generously and openly walks us through how he moved from being a fr...

Breaking out of the DevRel bubble - our conversation with Joan Mulvihill, Digitalisation & Sustainability Lead at Siemens. We discuss the big company perspective and how large organisations need help innovating and dealing with developers. We also discuss the openness so valued by developers and embraced by Siemens to tackle sustainability and every other challenge and responsibility facing their...

Daniel Bryant is the Head of Dev Rel at Ambassador Labs. In this fast paced conversation, Richard and Daniel discuss several aspects of developer relations and developer advocacy. From changing attitudes to swag through to the art of positioning (hat tip to April Dunford) via open source, real vs pretend community and the recurring question of where developer relations sits in a company or is a sa...

In this week's episode, Richard talks to Suze Shardlow, marketer, coder, published tech author, speaker and event emcee! Suze is the Developer Community Manager at Redis. In this conversation Suze offers really great insight in to the relationship between sales and DevRel and how you have to be really careful in your organisation not to position DevRel as just another part of the sales funnel beca...

In this repeat from 2019, Orla speaks to Matthew Revell, founder of Hoopy, and DevRelCon, an important event on the DevRel calendar. This year, DevRelCon is in Prague from Dec 6th, but this interview, carried out before the pandemic, gives wonderful insight in to Matthew's own interest and pedigree in events, but also the genesis of DevRelCon. Listen to Matthew's perfect description of developer r...

In this episode we are in a detailed conversation with Eoin Boylan the CTO of Evervault, a company that does encryption as a service. This is a Developers Relations how-to guide! We discuss the challenges of getting developers to use some pretty complex APIs. Eoin speaks to the effectiveness of private Slack channels per client. As a use of Evervault systems in the service of one of our own client...