by David I | Dec 21, 2017 | Developer Relations, DevRelate |
The Developer Relations Conference will feature speakers from Google, GE, VMware, RedHat, IBM, Intel, DocuSign, AirBnB, Oracle, Ford and legendary developer evangelist Guy Kawasaki!
Super Early Bird Ends 12/31/2017 – Save $300 on passes by registering today: http://www.evansdata.com/drc/2018/register.php
The Developer Relations Conference brings together the top brass of developer ecosystem strategists, advocates, and developer relations professionals to meet, exchange ideas, forge partnerships, and share insights on developer ecosystem development.
Evans Data’s 14th Annual Developer Relations Conference
March 26th-27th at the Crowne Plaza in Palo Alto, California
See conference details at http://www.evansdata.com/drc/2018
Sessions and activities during the conference will include:
- Keynotes delivered by top developer relations executives
- Hot Topics round table discussions
- Newly added networking events for attendees
- Expert panel of developer relations professionals
- 2 highly focused tracks on devrel strategy and devexperience
- Live on stage developer focus group
- 4 Interactive workshops
Register today to save $300 on passes now: http://www.evansdata.com/drc/2018/register.php

by David I | Apr 13, 2017 | Developer Outreach, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
During one of the Evans Data 13th Annual Developer Relations Conference Sunday Boot Camp sessions on Best Practices (featuring developer programs and features from boot camp attendees), three specific developer program sites were called out by several of the attendees. In addition, we also had the opportunity to have two of our Boot Camp faculty members on hand to talk more about their developer programs, sites and features.
Ford Developer Program
Scott Burnell, Ford Motor Company Global Lead, Business Development & Partner Management, spent a few minutes talking about the Ford Developer Program and took questions from the attendees. Scott covered several of the Ford developer program offerings including:
- SYNC® AppLink™ – AppLink is a suite of APIs that provide the ability for mobile developers to extend the command and control of a mobile application to the in-vehicle Human Machine Interface (HMI).

- Smart Device Link (SDL) – an open-source POSIX-compliant technology platform on which the Ford AppLink product is built and allows it to communicate between applications running on a mobile device and our SYNC in-vehicle software.
- https://developer.ford.com/pages/sdl
- POSIX-compliant technology platform
- Deploy to Linux, QNX, or other popular embedded operating systems
- Communicate with any mobile device OS such as iOS or Android.
- OpenXC – a non-production open source interface, designed to attract top developers to experiment with DIY projects in Ford vehicles (with or without SYNC).

Ford TDK
ThingWorx Developer Program
Michael Aglietti, VP of Developer Programs at ThingWorx, got up next and spent a few minutes going over the ThingWorx developer program, specific aspects that are unique to an IoT company and took questions from the attendees. Michael covered some of the ThingWorx offerings including:
- “Begin Your IoT Journey”
- Program is focused to help developers:
- Make – ThingWorx allows you to connect anything and everything including devices, sensors, and systems. By leveraging the power of the platform, you can quickly build impactful solutions.
- Analyze – You do not have to be a data scientist to produce insights as if you were one. Leverage our platform to derive meaningful insights from your data.
- Code – Use the ThingWorx development tools and API’s to quickly connect devices and build secure applications. Leverage existing systems and device clouds for ultimate flexibility.

- REST APIs – Quick starts, How To’s, Cheat Sheets
- SDKs for Java, .NET, C, iOS, Android
- Edge Micro Server (EMS) – Raspberry Pi
- Marketplace – The ThingWorx Marketplace gives you easy access to everything you need to build and run your ThingWorx based IoT application: From extensions and apps that can be downloaded and integrated directly into your ThingWorx application to partners that can help you build your IoT solution or offer certified and compatible products that work with it.

Three Developer Programs attendees said had great Documentation Best Practices
Several of the boot camp attendees mentioned the following three developer programs saying they had great documentation for developers.

Thank You AngelHack, Boot Camp Faculty, Product Marketing Panelists and Attendees
A big thanks to AngelHack for sponsoring this year’s Evans Data Developer Relations Boot Camp. Two big thank you(s) to Scott (from Ford) and Michael (from ThingWorx). And finally, massive thank you(s) to all of our great boot camp attendees for your participation and your feedback surveys. With your help we will continue to evolve the boot camp day to meet your needs. I hope we see you again next year!

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 | Apr 3, 2017 | Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Uncategorized |
I had a great time meeting with all of our great attendees at the 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference, March 27 and 28 in Palo Alto. To end the conference, several of us presented Ignite talks pitching our developer relations programs and technologies we use. If you don’t know about Ignite talks you can find additional information on the Ignite talk web site. Basically, an Ignite talk is a five minute talk using twenty slides that are automatically advanced every fifteen seconds. Normally ignite talks are presented about a wide range of topics, but an Ignite evening can also have a theme. I had four brave souls that volunteered to pitch their developer relations program this year.

The Ignite Presenters
I kicked off the session by pitching the Evans Data DevRelate Community and Academy for Developer Relations Professionals. Felix Sargent, Director of Developer Relations from Media Math, followed me and presented how MediaMath uses Swagger to ensure that their APIs “don’t suck”. Jayson Delancy, Developer Evangelist for Industrial IoT from GE Digital, presented how their developer relations program is measured and how they reach out to developers. Hannes Kuehnemund, Senior Product Manager from SUSE, gave his presentation about who and what is SUSE, their open source developer history and the push to encourage more application developers to participate. Finally, Andy Jiang, Developer Propaganda from Segment, started his presentation with a blank slide saying that they currently don’t have a public developer outreach program but are working on one and then went on to show how developers can use Segment’s solutions to help companies collect, unify, and act on their data.
The Audience Votes with their Applause
All four attendee presenters did a fabulous job in their presentations. At the end of the talks, the audience was asked to applaud for their favorite Ignite talk. I used the NIOSH Sound Level Meter App smartphone app from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). NOISH stands for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The app allows you to measure noise in your environment giving you an instant reading as sell as recording the peak level.
The final audience applause sound meter result picked Felix Sargent from Media Math as the winner. Congratulations to everyone who took part.

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 | Feb 23, 2017 | Developer Community, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, Essential Features |
Larry McDonough, Director of Product Management for the Developer Ecosystems at VMware, is giving a cool looking talk at the upcoming 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference (March 27 & 28) in Palo Alto California. The full title of Larry’s talk is “DevRel Judo: Leveraging your company’s organizational structure to build a stronger Developer Relations team”. Larry has given talks at several of the past conferences and is an intelligent and engaging presenter.

DevRel Judo
Developer Relations is traditionally a centralized function, but what if you don’t have a dedicated DevRel team? Can a decentralized DevRel team succeed? This presentation will highlight the dynamic and sometimes rocky journey that VMware has traveled regarding Developer Relations and the pros and cons of a decentralized structure. I’ll talk about identifying and understanding developer personas, sharing standard developer relations functions across business units, managing resources and clarifying responsibilities, the importance of relationships with the product teams, and of course, constructing analytics to measure shared progress and success. The purpose is to help you strengthen your DevRel teams by exploring your own company’s structure, it’s impact on your success and how you can leverage it’s strengths to improve developer outreach.

VMware {code} covered in this week’s “Learn the Secret Sauce of Developer Relations Programs” DevRelate Webinar
VMware’s developer program, VMware {code} was one of five spotlight programs that I covered in this week’s DevRelate webinar, “Learn the Secret Sauce of Developer Relations Programs“. I also had the opportunity to ask Larry a few questions about VMware’s developer program and developer outreach.
Here are my questions and Larry’s answers.
Q: What are the top three benefits to your company in having a developer relations program?
Good for Us: Health of our ecosystem. Our DevRel program, launched last year, is called “VMware {code}” and it’s main mission is to make sure developers new to our platform can easily get started, learn about our SDKs and APIs, and get connected with the larger VMware community.
Good for Customers: Adds value to our solutions. As a virtualization platform company, we can’t be experts in every vertical market segment. For areas where there are gaps in our solution coverage, or that require specialized vertical segment expertise (like disaster recovery, security and anti-virus, etc.) our partners have opportunities to complete the solution story for customers.
Good for Developers: On-ramp to “Partner” status. Partner engagements at VMware are taken very seriously, and it’s a big leap from a member of a free developer program to our TAP (Technology Alliance Partner) program levels. TAP Access is $750/yr and TAP Elite is $7,500/yr. These programs provide a lot of business value to partners by enabling special integrations, technical support, and customer leads.
Q. Where does the VMware developer relations team/program live inside the company’s organization?
It’s distributed; but there’s a central organization called “ROCS” for R&D Operations and Central Services that’s responsible for hosting and managing all the centralized developer and partner infrastructure that’s used by all the other groups. This is the group where I work. We manage our developer/partner portal, developer and partner programs, partner product certifications, compatibility guide, and coming soon, a centralized marketplace micro-service. Business units are responsible for keeping their developer content up to date on the developer portal. All Developer Marketing, Events, Newsletters, blogs, Slack and social networking is handled out of Digital Marketing. And lastly, all partner go-to-market (non-technical) engagement is handled out of our Partner Alliances team.
Q. How many applications have been created using the VMware SDKs/APIs?
The number of apps is very hard to measure. We have over 100k SDKs downloaded per year and a lot of development is for on-prem purposes. Our Office of the CTO has a site they call “Flings” where a lot of really cool apps are highlighted: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/ It’s not part of VMware {code}, and it’s all built by VMware engineers. But they’re very popular and I’m exploring how to integrate these with VMware {code}
Q. I noticed that the VMware Developer Center and VMware Code are now one and the same. What were some of the reasons for combining them together?
Great question! The main driver is to centralize developer outreach infrastructure. The previous VMware {code} site was a simple WordPress site maintained by our Digital Marketing team. They are really good at community building and hosting events, but they didn’t have any core developer goodies to offer like SDKs, API explorer, Sample exchange to name a few. Developer Center had those, but no market resources to get the word out, organize events, and build community. It just made sense to merge. This has been a goal of mine for 2 years. Together, we’ve now get the strength/weight to strongly encourage the Business Units to build their developer outreach on us and not recreate their own thing. This is where all the micro-site work comes in this year.
Q. Are there any other key performance indicators statistics that you track and provide to VMware management to keep them informed and supporting how the developer program is doing?
Our big focus this year will be member registration and developer engagement. I’ll be tracking how these track to our social media efforts and actual events. Of course, we track closely SDK downloads and community engagement as well.
Q. Is there anything else that you’d like to add about the VMware program its uniqueness and where do you see developer relations and developer outreach going in the future?
We’re going to continue to invest in the DevOps area since that’s a big ecosystem surrounding our products. We’re also going to be encouraging a lot more open source engagement.

Larry McDonough Bio
Larry McDonough is the Director of Product Management for the Developer Ecosystems at VMware. He has previously presented on his work in numerous topics affecting developers including Developer Relations & DevOps, Developer Evangelism, Home Automation/IoT, Mobile App Security, and Android Development. Larry has a BS in Computer Science from University of California Riverside and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management.
Follow VMware {code} on Twitter
13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference
To see Larry’s talk, six keynotes, additional sessions and network with developer relations program managers and experts, register for the 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference taking place in Palo Alto, March 27-28, 2017 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. You can find the full conference schedule with information about all of the keynotes, sessions, speakers and the all day Sunday DevRel Boot Camp (March 26, 2017) on the conference website at https://evansdata.com/drc/.
Register for the Conference
As a thank you for reading the DevRelate blog, use code DRCSocial17 to save $100 off your conference pass!