TALK OVERVIEW

Sustainable developer relations

We have a problem. Developer relations, as many people practice it today, is unsustainable.

We shouldn't be flying half way around the globe each year or working every hour in the day. In this talk, Matthew will look at four of the causes behind this:

* The ongoing hunt for ROI: developer relation programmes are expensive and it’s tempting to feel you have to be everywhere at once to show just how hard you’re working.

* Fear that the opportunity window will close: the investment will run out or the competition will win the market if you don’t speak at that conference 3,000 miles away on your dog’s birthday.

* Peer pressure: we might not mean to, but we’ve created a culture where airport pictures and tweets about jet lag have normalised burn-out and also shown our non dev rel colleagues that this is what is expected.

* Dev rel still isn’t well understood: mostly, though, it’s that there isn’t a common playbook for dev rel (maybe we need several) and so dev rel professionals don’t always know what to do and management/colleagues have outsized expectations of what dev rel can achieve.

He'll then talk about how we can make a better developer relations plan that enables us to have a work-life balance, get great results for our employers, and build rewarding developer communities.

@matthewrevell