Diving into Developer Relations with Jamie Barton! 🥑

Behind every great developer product is someone who works in developer relations, so let's understand more around what these mythical beings do!

Hi everybody - this week wraps up another Google I/O where my colleagues shared a bunch of cool things we are working on, especially for developers! This dovetails nicely with today’s topic, which is around developer relations.

Here is the thing: Behind every great developer product is someone who works in developer relations. To dive deeper into this topic, I talked to one of the most effective developer relations engineers (aka DevRel’ers) I know, Jamie Barton:

You can watch the full interview above or listen to it on your favorite podcasting platform such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and more by going here.

Top 3 Highlights

Every single time I run into Jamie, I end up learning something new and/or have more clarity on something I’ve always known. Below are my top three takeaways from our chat:

1. How to get started in developer relations? (43:28)

A large part of developer relations is creating content. The hard part is to just get started. If someone has a problem, try recording a video to help them out. If you have something you want to open source, open source it and interact with the community as a part of it. Initially, activities like these will be difficult and uncomfortable. In time, with practice, they will become much easier.

2. Jamie got started in the Flash / Swish community (6:04)

Like so many of us, Jamie got his start fiddling with things in Flash. More specifically, he was part of the Swish community:

He posted on the forums, wrote content, and got hands-on-training in what would eventually lead to his career in developer relations, where many of these activities are needed.

3. The “Relations” part of Developer Relations? (26:28)

Successful people in the developer relations community genuinely like to help developers. It is a great way to build relationships. When we are stuck with a technical problem, we always remember the person (or persons) who helped us. This positive association is huge not just for the DevRel’er who helped but also for the developer product they are associated with.

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this chat with Jamie and found his passion for helping others and turning that into a career really addictive.

Lastly, please like or retweet this interview to help Twitter’s algorithm show it to more people.

See you all next time!

Cheers,
Kirupa 😎