Insights on Developer Relations: Hear it out from a Pro!
Stories from a DevRel frontline, narrated by Kanishk Khurana
Developer Relations, commonly known as DevRel, is a field that bridges the gap between development and community. A DevRel professional's primary goal is to foster a strong relationship between a tech company and the developers who use its products. They ensure that developers have the necessary tools, resources, and support to succeed. Refer to this blog to explore more.
To shed light on this fascinating role and find out what actually a DevRel role looks like, I interviewed Kanishk Khurana, the DevRel Lead at Fleek and a seasoned expert, who shared his journey, insights, and experiences in the field.
Journey in DevRel
Kanishk Khurana's journey into DevRel began with a strong foundation in coding, starting from QBasic and moving on to Python and Java during his schooling days. His curiosity and passion led him to self-exploration and self-learning through online resources and community contributions. He actively participated hackathons and did freelance work. Later, he transitioned from Java to JavaScript and eventually to Solidity, marking his shift from centralized to decentralized systems (this was his first step towards web3).
As a passionate developer, Kanishk identified major issues in the developer ecosystem, such as the lack of documentation, the need for simplified developer education, and the importance of gathering feedback on developer tools. These challenges motivated him to transition from being a developer to a DevRel professional, and on the onset of his career he majorly worked on solving the above challenges in his organization.
He attributes much of his growth to the communities he engaged with, emphasizing that he considers himself a product of these communities.
Life as a DevRel at Fleek
At Fleek, Kanishk's role revolves around documentation and building new features. He shares that Fleek recently wrapped up three hackathons and a mega hacker house in Brussels, focusing on building a developer ecosystem that encourages continuous innovation on Fleek's platform.
In the past months, Fleek's ecosystem has grown rapidly and hence, the responsibility as a DevRel isn't confined to any particular vertical.
(btw this isn't how a day in a DevRel's life look like)
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics in DevRel
Kanishk emphasizes the importance of KPIs and metrics in guiding and providing value to a company. He says that "DevRel professionals stand at the center of the company", and these metrics have helped him identify a broader developer market for Fleek. Key metrics include:
Developer Happiness and Feedback: ensuring that developers are satisfied with the product. This involves actively gathering the feedback from developer community, addressing their challenges and continuously seeking areas of improvement for the product.
Coordinating with Product Teams: working closely with the product team to define and track relevant metrics. This is crucial to deliver and interpret the developer's feedback to the product team so that necessary improvements can be made.
Community Engagement: Organizing activities to actively engage with the developer communities. This involves hackathons, conferences, etc.
Feedback Mechanisms from the Developer Community
Kanishk highlights the importance of effective communication channels for gathering feedback:
Discord: One of the most engaging and effective platform for queries and getting personalized feedback from developer community.
Feedback Forms: Using tools like Typeform and Google Forms to collect the feedback of the attendees, developer or participants after the conclusion of any community initiatives, conferences, or hacker houses.
Direct Conversations: Talking to users and spectators directly to gather insights on their experience with the product/technology.
Open Source Contributions: Encouraging the developers to contribute to the project on GitHub by raising a PR is another way to gather feedback and areas of improvements for an open source project. This acts as a direct pathway of communication.
Coordinating with Product and Other Teams
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
In a remote setup, Kanishk stresses the need for "overcommunication." He believes in asking questions, addressing challenges, conveying the full picture, providing context to the product team when interpreting the issues faced by developers, and showcasing solutions to foster better discussions.
Challenges faced as a DevRel
Challenges are what make life interesting, overcoming them is what makes them meaningful.
Most of the challenges as a DevRel vary, depending on the community lifecycle stage. Kanishk identifies a few key challenges that he has witnessed in his career:
Educating Diverse Knowledge Levels: Catering to people with varying levels of knowledge and focusing on different learning strata.
Example, you might have to educate a bunch of developers about who are proficient in solidity but you might also have a few newbies in the circle who have just learnt javascript. Hence, creating a funnel is very crucial while focusing on the developer education in the space.
Creating Perpetually Valid Resources: Developing resources that remain relevant for different learner segments, such that even at the time of revisiting these resources in later period of time, you do not face any difficulty in catching up with the content.
Maintaining Coding Skills: Balancing community activities along with focusing on coding/buildling projects is one of the major challenges witnessed by DevRel pro's. If you're engaged in a lot of community activities for prolonged period of time then it may cost you your technical skills. hence, its important to brush up your coding skills regularly!
Balancing Technical and Non-Technical Aspects of DevRel
As mentioned above, being a DevRel can be difficult sometimes (but even challenging to be a good one)!
Kanishk maintains a schedule to learn new things and follows a balanced routine in order to manage his tasks, meet deadlines and contribute equally towards technical and non-technical aspects of his role.
Now, you can surely balance the non-technical aspects of the DevRel role, seek help and make the things happen (such as, creating a strategy for a developer engagement initiative, or review the product's feedback). The main challenge arrives when you have to balance the technical aspects of your role alongside the management related tasks!
He suggests that picking up some personal projects and making at least one commit every day can help you maintain a good habit of coding everyday. Here's a great advice, if you have no idea what project to work on after working hours, simply practice Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA). Now you don't have to deep dive into the Leetcode hard, solve the easy problems to keep your problem-solving and coding skills handy.
Work-Life Balance
Balancing work and personal life is a struggle and tradeoff for any DevRel professional.
He mentions, "life isn't perfect. Not everyday can be perfect. But you can find a perfect moment in a day or create one!"
Kanishk believes that while life and days may not be perfect, finding perfect moments in a day and doing what you love are crucial for maintaining balance.
Advice for Aspiring DevRel Professionals and Web3 Enthusiasts
Kanishk offers valuable advice for those transitioning to Web3 and also for the people to aspire to create their careers in Developer Relations:
Get the Fundamentals Right: the very first and crucial step in order to get started with web3 is to understand the basics! you should have a clear and deep understanding how blockchain technology works, how the ecosystems are built and how this space has been evolving technically.
In order to grow as a developer, you can easily get started by building a basic decentralized application (dApp), compare it with centralized web apps and understand how it works.Engage in On-Chain Activity: Once you've set your foot in the world of web3, your journey begins! one of the best ways to get the most out of the ecosystem is engaging yourself in on-chain activities more.
Connect with Builders: Talk to people who are actively building on-chain. This can also get you the answers you must've been seeking.
Final Message to the Audience
Kanishk leaves the audience with an important message:
"Get your commits done today."
Whether it's a small contribution or a significant one, every commit on GitHub matters.
Conclusion
Kanishk Khurana's journey and insights provide a comprehensive look into the life of a DevRel professional.
From building strong foundations in coding to contributing significantly to developer communities, Kanishk's experiences highlight the importance of documentation, feedback, and community engagement in Developer Relations.
As the field continues to evolve, we need more DevRel professionals like him as the Developer Relations plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between technology and its users, ensuring that developers have the support and resources they need to succeed.
I hope this blog shared the insights into the DevRel career!
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