Finding a balance between core business and serving your industry and the professionals through your expertise pro bono has been a challenge for many companies.
Giving back to the community is hardwired into our DNA. The most obvious examples are the 27+ editions of our State of the Developer Nation reports, showcasing the key, emerging developer trends for over 15 years and a wide collection of free industry analysis reports, openly available on our Research Space.
Then, of course, we also had DevRelX.
How DevRelX started
DevRelX did not start as a standalone effort. Around 2017, we had long worked with developer marketing and relations professionals, helping them understand developers through our research. At the time, DevRel was a very niche, emerging role, in need of a definition and a standardised set of responsibilities and requirements for the role. Naturally, this lack of given requirements created a lack of definition for the expertise required for the roles. Was it a marketing role? For some companies, yes, for others not at all. Was it a product role? For some companies, yes, for others not at all. You can see what I’m getting at. How do you know what you need to be proficient at in such a fluid role?
It was our founder, Andreas Constantinou, along with the attendees of the Future Developer Summit and Nicolas Sauvage, who got together to gather the leading experts in the industry and create a book that would help newcomers in the field and seasoned veterans understand what is required from a developer marketing or DevRel pro. You can find more information on the book here.
This book was the first resource offered. However, books are much slower to update with new information as it comes along. This is why we started a podcast series. Also, we ran webinars to present new data and trends as they came along.
Now, all these resources were scattered around the web, but they were all addressed to the same professional struggling existentially. It was only natural that the handsome geniuses behind SlashData’s marketing team (myself included) decided to have all these resources in one place. And how about adding a few more stuff? Like job openings and an events calendar.
Thus, DevRelX was born.
The DevRelX Community
DevRelX started as a hub. A one-stop shop selling nothing. Instead, sharing freely free resources. It was constantly updated with new content, resources, interviews and videos.
Something was missing, especially since a pandemic had joined the equation.
It was missing the human factor. People could visit the website to get answers, but could they learn from each other or find solutions to common problems? Not really. What we needed was…a community! A place for people to come together, learn from each other and connect.
We provided the space and shared data and insights - what we know best. The community was growing as more people joined and shared resources. It became a place for learning and interaction.
The DevRelX Summit
How about we bring everyone together for an event, then?
We had been hosting the Future Developer Summit as a private, in-person event for years. Now that the community was growing and events were going online, there was no sense in not opening it up for those hungry to learn and connect.
Thus, the DevRelX summit was born, bringing together people who had knowledge to share, wanted to meet each other, chat, and have a fun, learning day. You can catch up on the Summit presentations on our YouTube channel:
The Closing of DevRelX
“Wow, you make everything sound so nice and movie-like; why is the community closing?”
Awww, I am much flattered, but if there’s one thing I have learned about community building, it is this: it needs to be a strategic priority, and it needs people to help it grow and evolve into what the community needs, and not what the company supporting it needs it to be.
We are also evolving; we are growing to take on projects from “the road not taken”. This evolution forces us to take steps that bring us farther away from the core of the DevRelX community and its whole essence.
SlashData will focus on what we know best: researching and understanding the world as it changes. Then, producing insights and transforming data in a way that helps everyone else understand it, too. Rest assured that we will continue to serve the industry through our data.
We will continue to be a resource to help you and the leaders in the technology space get the data and insights they need for strategic decision-making. Come to us with your questions and challenges; we will always have an open door to explore how we can help.
We owe a massive “thank you” to everyone who took this journey with us. We are grateful for the lessons learned and the people we met.
See you all out there.
PS. Not all is lost. We will keep sharing and updating the most important resources that our community loves:
DevRelX resources that will still remain available
The DevRelX newsletter will continue bringing joy to its subscribers until the end of the year (at the very least). Then, it will be moved to the SlashData newsletter.
Data & Insights
Developer Marketing & Relations Communities
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