by David I | May 9, 2018 | Conference, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Education, Machine Learning |
When springtime arrives, developers and developer relation professionals know that it is major developer conference time in the US and around the world. Of course it all started with the annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference, this year in Palo Alto California at the end of March. Most of you know that there are developer events and conferences throughout the year on every continent. At the same time, some of the most important and influential conference,s that impact developer programs and developers, are all scheduled during the months of May and June.
The Grand Slam of Springtime Developer Conferences
Facebook started things off on May 1 & 2 with their F8 conference in San Jose California. This week we have Microsoft Build 2018 in Seattle (from May 7 to 9) and Google IO 2018 in Mountain View (May 8 & 9) in the same week. It was fun to hear Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President of Operating Systems, tell developers during his day 2 keynote that he would end at 10am so that some developers could switch over to the Google IO opening keynote. Apple will complete the grand slam with WWDC 2018 in San Jose from June 4th to 9th.
But Wait, there’s even more for Developers this Spring
Ciscolive! happens in Orlando Florida June 10-14. You might think that Cisco is a networking and hardware company, but they also have a great developer program with DevNet. I attended last year’s event in Las Vegas and the DevNet Zone has a huge exhibit and workshop space and loads of developer sessions during the conference.
DocuSign’s Momentum developer conference takes place in San Francisco on June 20-21, just before the end of Spring. “If you thought replacing paper with eSignature was a win, get ready to go further. It’s time for the modern System of Agreement. Get the insights, inspiration, and networking to take advantage of all that’s possible, next, and new with DocuSign.”
So Much New Tech to Learn. So Little Time. Tons of Developer Fun!
So much development tech to digest in such a short period of time. Let’s summarize them all with: more AI, more cloud, more services, more devices, more IoT, compute at the edge, more serverless, more APIs, more tools and more fun for developers of all types, sizes and locations. I’ll try to cover more in coming DevRelate blog posts.
If you are having a developer conference that starts before the first day of Summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), send me an email with the details.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://devnet.evansdata.org/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
by David I | Dec 7, 2016 | Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
Most active developer relations programs create a lot of content. I’ll call this content your developer relations assets (DRA). Developer evangelists, most valuable professionals, engineering team members, developer support staff, product managers and product marketing managers create their own focused content that is related to a specific topic. This cornucopia of DRAs is placed somewhere on your developer program site and on other Internet properties including YouTube, GitHub, Slideshare, etc. What is a best practice for making it easy for developers to navigate from one digital asset to another? This blog post takes a look at a few developer relations program sites and how they provide links to additional documents, videos, source code, etc. from another digital asset.
Examples of Quick Access to Developer Relations Assets
Last night I attended an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Office Hours at the Cruzio / Santa Cruz Works meeting in downtown Santa Cruz California. Two of Amazon’s local employees talked about the the recent AWS re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas. During the presentation Drew Meyer and Tom “Elvis” Jones highlighted some of the new APIs and services that were rolled out during the conference (130 announcements and new bits). One of the new services that was announced is Amazon Athena. Athena, from the AWS page is “Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.”
This DevRelate blog post is not a plug for AWS or Athena. I am using this example to highlight some tips for how you can help developers quickly navigate to the related developer relations assets for any piece of content or topic that you place on your site. Going to the AWS re:Invent 2016 announcements page, you’ll find an entry for Athena along with iconography with links to additional related developer information. I’ve grabbed a bitmap of the entry and included it below.
For the new service you see a short description of the Product and links to a blog post, the press release, a video and a link to additional information. There could have easily been any number of additional icons/links to more resources for developers to get quickly what you need instead of having to go to “Learn More” and then navigate from there.
The Intel’s Software Developer Zone received a new face lift last month to provide new links to additional developer relations assets and quick navigation. On Intel’s older developer site there was a menu structure that let you choose which development topics, types of tools, and additional resources start your navigation. Now you can choose the Intel DRAs at the top level
or choose a specific development area and see the DRAs for that topic near the top of the landing page.
One final example is the DRA links on each of Apple’s 2016 WWDC video replay pages. On most of the technical session pages you can watch the video, read an overview of the topic, see a list of additional resources containing links to the presentation slides, reference documentation, product information, download the videos and more. The video page also includes a link to show the transcript of the session.
23 Top Content Bits to Connect to Each of your Developer Relations Assets
Here is my list of 23 content bits that you should be able to link to any developer related asset you place on your site. The actual number may be higher or lower depending on what the asset actually is. But, for any major piece of content you put on your developer site, you should be able to provide iconography and links to most of the following assets. If you can only place a few, it might be an indication of areas where you need additional developer content. I’ll leave the iconography designing to the graphic designers.
- Download the Sample Code
- Follow the Tutorials
- Browse the Documentation
- Scan the Developer Use Cases
- Read the Newsgroup
- Look Up Recent Stack Overflow questions (filter using a tag)
- Attend an upcoming Event
- Surf the Web (search using related keywords)
- Read the White Papers
- Check Developer Success Stories
- Peruse the DocWiki
- Get the Slides
- Download the Video
- Play in the Sandbox
- Try the Product
- Buy the Product
- Get Started
- Look at the FAQs
- Download the Product Sheet
- Share with other Developers on Social Media
- Contact Us for Additional Information
- See “Also/Related” (developer site search using tags)
- Rate the Content
Does your Developer Relations Program Link other Bits to your Developer Program Assets?
Let me know how you provide quick access to all of your important technical content for most (if not all) of your developer relations assets.
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
