by David I | Apr 14, 2017 | APIs, Developer Community, Developer Community Interactions, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Evans Data, Internet of Things, Programming, Women in Computing |
Susie Wee, VP and CTO of DevNet Innovations at Cisco Systems, gave a presentation at our recent 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference. The following is a recap of her session, “Our Journey to a Growing Developer Program”. [David I note: the graphics used in this blog post were not part of the presentation slide deck]
Susie started her session by asking the audience a few questions to understand who was attending and what they wanted to get out of her talk. A great way to start any presentation in order to make any “course corrections” to help the audience.

Susie mentioned that the Cisco DevNet developer network started about 3 years ago. Before that time Cisco had a series of APIs and SDKs for developers but no real developer program and community. What Cisco had was more of a partner community to resell Cisco products. Certifications were offered for the partners. You could ask a couple of questions about the early outreach to developers: why does Cisco have a developer program and isn’t Cisco a networking hardware company?
She explained that Cisco DevNet is a developer community and an innovation ecosystem. Technologies that are available to developers include: Internet of Things, Software Defined Networking, Cloud computing, Collaboration technologies (many developers will recognize Cisco Jabber), Security solutions, Data Center offerings, DevOps solutions, Services and Open Source.
As part of Susie’s talk and also the main focus on the upcoming DevNet Create Conference (May 23-24, 2017 in San Francisco, CA), one of the main themes follows the sentence template of “Where Applications Meet xxx”. Developers who build applications should be able to easily fill in the “xxx” with some of the following: Infrastructure, Things (IoT), Places, People, Design, Architecture, Microservices, Deployment, Security, Analytics, etc. Between the apps that are developed there are interfaces to connect those apps to, well, everything! That is part of what Cisco provides beyond their traditional networking solutions.

Susie explained how Cisco DevNet focuses on helping developers:
She mentioned that DevNet has more than 415,000 members, who work in more than 24,000 companies, provides 252 learning labs, provides 80 active APIs and more than 170 yearly developer outreach events.
Key to the success of Cisco DevNet are a laser focus on solving three key challenges: how to operate as a developer program, provide a clear value proposition for developers, and continue to grow a fiercely loyal developer community.
One of the stories that Susie mentioned was how DevNet attached itself onto the popular Cisco Live conferences that are help throughout the world. They put together all of their developer learning materials and created a DevNet zone on the side of the main conference. Attendees walked past the area and started telling their friends that there are cool learning labs over in this corner of the conference area. The buzz started to spread among attendees that there was a lab where you could develop software to integrate with Cisco technologies. John Chambers and his Cisco management team stopped by and saw what was happening in the DevNet theater and hands on lab. Now, at Cisco Live, the DevNet zone is the busiest section – Cool!
DevNet – 5 Lessons Learned
Susie shared the 5 lessons that they’ve learned during DevNet’s journey:

5) Operate like a startup and build up your developer credibility
4) Play to your strengths and build a technically talented “extended” team
3) Make your developer members heroes inside their companies and also in their communities
2) Help your team be wildly successful and ensure that your community has a heart
1) Innovate, Innovate, Innovate.
Innovate or Be Left Behind

Developers have to solve big problems. A developer program’s mission is to help developers build innovative solutions for their companies and their customers. Your developer program has to continue to provide innovative features, content and tools that will help your developer members create innovative applications. Our industry moves forward, fast. Developers move forward, fast. If your developer program does not innovate to keep up with developer needs, your company and your developer program will be left in the dust.
Thank you, Susie Wee and Cisco, for being a part of our 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference.
Additional Information
Cisco DevNet – https://developer.cisco.com/
DevNet Create Conference (May 23-24, 2017 in San Francisco, CA)
Susie Wee’s session live stream replay is available on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ciscodevnet/videos/1962907540605184/
Session Title: DevNet: Fostering innovation where applications meet infrastructure
Session Description: How did a networking company start behaving like a software company and build a thriving developer community? How is DevNet achieving scale by engaging a broader internal and external community? The mission of Cisco DevNet is to provide developers with the tools, resources and code they need to create innovative, network-enabled solutions. But it’s more than just the technologies – DevNet is fostering innovation to help developers create seriously cool stuff. Join Susie Wee as she shares the successes, challenges and lessons learned in building a successful joint developer and innovation program, as well as what’s next for the DevNet community.

Susie Wee – VP and CTO of DevNet Innovations at Cisco Systems
Bio:
Susie is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of DevNet Innovations at Cisco Systems. She is the founder of DevNet, Cisco’s developer program for infrastructure and application developers, which catalyzes innovation by the developer ecosystem. DevNet covers the breadth of Cisco’s portfolio including networking, cloud, data center, security, collaboration and IoT. The innovations from DevNet improve end user experience, the operational experience and developer experience with the network. Under her leadership, the DevNet community has grown to over 400,000 developers in less than three years.
Prior to her current role, Susie was the Vice President and Chief Technology and Experience Officer of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group where she was responsible for driving innovation and experience design in Cisco’s collaboration products and software services, including unified communications, telepresence, web and video conferencing, and cloud collaboration. Before joining Cisco, Susie was the founding Vice President of Experience Software Business and CTO at Hewlett Packard, and Lab Director at HP Labs. Susie was the co-editor of the JPSEC standard for the security of JPEG-2000 images. She was formerly an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits, Systems and Video Technology and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. While at HP Labs, Susie was a consulting assistant professor at Stanford University where she co-taught a graduate-level course on digital video processing.
Susie received Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators award, ComputerWorld’s Top 40 Innovators under 40 award, the Red Dot Design Concept award for augmented collaboration, the INCITs Technical Excellence award, the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame award, and was on the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. She is an IEEE Fellow for her contributions in multimedia technology and has over 50 international publications and 57 granted patents. Susie received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
by David I | Apr 12, 2017 | Developer Community Interactions, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Webinar |
Your developer program website is the underlying foundation for your developer outreach. This is where you will provide almost everything from the APIs you publish to SDKs and tools, forums, blogs, contests, online training and all the other essentials for your developer program. Since this is the gateway for your program and it is going to represent your company, your technology and your program to developers everywhere, it’s got to be good. Many developers access a developer program site via a mobile device, so be sure you use the principles of Responsive Web Design (RWD) to render a site that works well on desktops, tablets and phones.
In this webinar, David I will take you on a tour of a bad developer outreach program. You’ll see some of the worst practices of developer marketing, developer relations, deliverables for developers, SDKs/APIs, content, social media, videos and more. I could take webinar attendees on a tour of some of the worst examples of technology company developer programs, but I won’t. Instead, I have created a fictitious company, “Eureka Digital Works”, that has a developer relations program that has some serious problems. Come to this webinar and learn about the prescribed fixes to rescue the program to attract more developers.
Webinar Agenda
1) Developer Program: Eureka Digital Works
2) Sixteen signs you have a bad developer program
3) How to fix the developer program
4) Q&A
Webinar Dates/Times
The webinar repeat on multiple days and times. Choose the date and time that fits your schedule. (note: the US is now on Daylight/Summer time)
Wednesday, April 26
7am PDT (Santa Cruz) | 9am CDT (Chicago) | 10am EDT (New York) | 2pm GMT | 3pm BST (London) | 4pm CEST (Frankfurt)
10am PDT (Santa Cruz) | 12noon CDT (Chicago) | 1pm EDT (New York) | 5pm GMT | 6pm BST (London) | 7pm CEST (Frankfurt)
5pm PDT (Santa Cruz) | 8am CST (Beijing Apr 27) | 10am AEST (Sydney Apr 27)
Thursday, April 27
7am PDT (Santa Cruz) | 9am CDT (Chicago) | 10am EDT (New York) | 2pm GMT | 3pm BST (London) | 4pm CEST (Frankfurt)
10am PDT (Santa Cruz) | 12noon CDT (Chicago) | 1pm EDT (New York) | 5pm GMT | 6pm BST (London) | 7pm CEST (Frankfurt)
Register Now to Reserve your Seat: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/5099661755397864450
Who Should Attend
- Managers & Directors of Developer Programs
- Technology & Developer Evangelists
- Business Development Managers & Directors
- Product Marketing Managers & Directors
- Marketing Managers
- Product Managers
- Research Managers
- Corporate Communications Managers
- Heads of Developer Marketing
- ANYONE who deals with developers!
Webinar Registration Link
Note: The webinars repeat on multiple days and times. Choose the date and time that fits your schedule.
Registration Link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/5099661755397864450
Presenter
David Intersimone “David I”, Vice President of Developer Communities, Evans Data Corporation

by David I | Mar 20, 2017 | Developer Community, Developer Community Interactions, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Essential Features |
Next week, at the 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference (#DRC2017), I will be giving a talk titled “Assessing a Bad Developer Program and Prescribing Fixes to Rescue It”. DRC2017 takes place March 27 and 28 in Palo Alto California at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. In this session, I will take you on a tour of a bad developer outreach program. You’ll see some of the worst practices of developer marketing, developer relations, deliverables for developers, SDKs/APIs, content, social media, videos and more. I could take attendees on a tour of some of the worst examples of technology company developer programs, but I won’t. Instead, I have created a fictitious company, “Eureka Digital Works” that has a developer relations program that has some serious problems. Come to my session and see how I’ve prescribed the fixes to rescue it.

Examples of Bad Developer Outreach
Here are a few signs (in no particular order) that you might be part of a bad developer community and the outreach that should be avoided in your developer marketing, developer relations and developer community.
- Too much sales and marketing in a technical newsletter
- Ads in technical white papers, technical articles, uses cases, and developer blog posts
- Developer outreach emails that contain more sales information and less technical information
- Webinars that are advertised as “How To(s)” but contain mostly sales pitches
- Quick Start Guides that contain too many pages and steps
- How To articles that are more than 5 pages long
- How To videos that are hours long
- Developer Community site that is full of large sales and marketing ad banners
- A Developer Conference that is more sales and marketing and less technical
- Lack of developer tutorials on the developer community site
- Missing or out of date documentation for APIs and SDKs
- Unskilled, Untrained, non-engineer staff answering technical questions on a developer community forum
- Lack of or slow response to critical bug reports
- The developer feedback black hole – asking developers for suggestions, road map items, etc. but not accepting any of them
- Lack of new, timely content, blog posts, events, videos, and other staples of a well run developer relations program
Developers and Developer Relations Professionals – send me your less than best practices examples
Calling all developers: if you have a list of things on your worst list for developer outreach, send me an email and I will add them to my list. Calling all developer relations professionals: if you have things you have tried that caused your developer community members to push back, send me an email and I will add them to my list.

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | Nov 2, 2016 | Developer Community, Developer Community Interactions, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
One of the places where I read developer and programming related news is on the Reddit Programming user generated news links. One particular developer relations focused new item pointed to an October 18, 2016 Medium article by Yvo Schapp, “The rise of Developer Advocates and its impact on the dev community“. In the article, Yvo mentions his concern about how developer evangelists for technology companies might be affecting the developer community in ways that are not conducive to a healthy developer conversation. Yvo said, “more worryingly the rise of Developer Advocates leads to them more-and-more shaping online discussions regarding Bigtech’s product to their advantage. Critiques from developers on blogs, forums or Twitter are paraded by an official reaction of Bigtech of which dissident voices are quickly drowned out.” He asked for developer program evangelists to reply to his post about developer community interactions. He asked a specific question (you can read the article for the complete context), “Would Developer Advocates down vote these kind of articles so they wouldn’t gain more attention?”.

Reading Yvo’s post about developer community interactions, I felt compelled to reply
I have been a developer cheerleader, developer relations manager and now VP of Developer Communities at Evans Data Corp. My first daily priority is to stay in touch with developers (listening, reading and communicating). Each day I also stay on top of development technologies (best practices, platforms, languages, frameworks, architectures, methods, future directions, etc.). Finally, every day, I try to write code (mostly these days for POCs and tech demos).
I will add information to conversations, including those that might be negative towards a product or company. I can’t remember a time when I stopped or deleted a conversation (except if a post or comment contained spam, profanity or personal attacks). I will up vote articles and comments that I think add value to our developer world.
One of the luxuries I now have at Evans Data is access to the 18 years of developer research. My 46+ years in software development, 31+ years in developer evangelism and the deep Evans Data research allows me to help every company. I am working with companies that already have a developer relations program. I am also working with companies that don’t have (but should have) a developer outreach program.
I am lucky to be a part of a community of developer relations professionals committed to helping move software development and developers forward.
Developer Relations Professionals – how do you help guide developer community interactions?
I’d like to hear what you think about the article. How do you interact with developer conversations on your community sites. You can post your comments on Yvo’s Medium article. I would also love to have you send me an email with your thoughts.
David I.
VP, Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Twitter: @davidi99