New Talks in 2023: Identity, Security, and Measuring Developer Relations
It’s 2023, and it’s time for a new presentation repertoire! Here are the talks I plan to create and deliver *new* this year.
How to Measure the Value of Developer Relations
Measuring Developer Relations has been a topic of discussion, debate, confusion, and uncertainty for the duration of DevRel’s existence as a discipline. How do we measure Developer Relations?
Over the course of my career leading Developer Relations (from manager to executive roles), I have seen dozens of articles and presentations sharing philosophies for measuring DevRel, or suggestions for hundreds of different metrics to track. However, there are very few resources that tell anyone exactly how to measure Developer Relations in a quantifiable, wholistic sense.
In this article I share my Keystone DevRel Metrics framework to demonstrate how you can measure Developer Relations and also communicate the business value of DevRel to stakeholders.
Effective Project Planning
While creating new projects and initiatives throughout my career as a strategic leader, I have created the following project framework. All of my projects originate in this format, which clearly defines objectives, problems to be solved, and how the project should be carried out.
Catan 2 Player Variant
My partner and I love to play boardgames, and especially Catan, but for many years, there were only two of us in the household, and Catan — by its standard rules — is not well-suited to only two players. Through trial and error and experimentation with many different adjustments and variations, we came up with a really solid set of Catan 2 player rules. We’ve played this variant scores of times and it has proven to be a fair and fun gametype.
How to Drive Developer Growth and Engagement
To effectively drive sustainable developer growth and engagement for products that serve developers, I created the Developer Empowerment flywheel. When connecting with developer audiences on behalf of an organization, driving developer growth and engagement needs to be cross-functional, measurable, and scalable.
How to Connect with Your Developer Audience
Let’s dig into the developer audience and what developers are looking for when we evaluate products, technologies, and even the very companies that market to us. How can Developer Relations teams form a positive and lasting connection with their developer audience?
Which Department Does Developer Relations Belong In?
The battle over which department Developer Relations belongs in continues to be long and ongoing. Does DevRel belong in Product? Marketing? Engineering? Any of the above? None of the above?
How to Sign and Validate JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
When I started learning about JSON Web Tokens, there were some things that were straightforward to understand — and some concepts that felt like “hidden secrets” of JWT lore. 🧙♂️
This article aims to demystify signing and validating JSON Web Tokens, with little need for security or cryptography knowledge.
Authorization and Authentication for Everyone
Authentication and authorization are necessary for many of the applications we build. Maybe you’ve developed apps and implemented authentication and authorization in them — possibly by importing a third party auth library or by using an identity platform.
Maybe you got the job done, but you really weren’t clear on what was happening behind the scenes, or why things were being done a certain way. If you’d like to build a foundational understanding of what goes on behind the scenes when using OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect standards, read on!
What is Developer Relations?
The goal of this article is to provide an explainer sharing my thoughts on what Developer Relations is, what its core tenets are, and what important questions DevRel works to provide answers to.