Show Notes
Timestamps
- 00:01:17 Intro presentation on Why Dev Community
- 00:16:15 Discussion between Idan, Brian, and Swyx
Transcriptswyx: [
00:00:00] Hey everyone! On weekends, we do long form audio from one of my conversations with people.
[
00:00:06] And a few months ago, I published an article on why technical community building is the hardest new job in tech. And it got a lot of traction. In fact, some of the other weekend drops on this podcast are related to that. Podcasts, but I was invited by the GitHub office of the CTO to talk about it.
[
00:00:25] These are two people that I knew from prior engagements before. Idan Gazit. I actually met at the Heroku conference. When I spoke aboutNetlify CLI and Netlify Dev. And then Brian Douglas, BDougie , it was the dev advocate at Netlify before any of us were dev because another fi. So he kind of pioneered and originated the role, which I stepped into.
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00:00:46] And both of them are just very well. The tunes to dev community. So I thought we had a really good conversation. About it. So the first part of this talk basically is me presenting a few slides on the, my thoughts on dev community. And then it was just a freeform discussion between. Myself and these two experts at GitHub. so enjoy
[
00:01:17]
Idan Gazit: [
00:01:17] Hello, welcome to the Octo speaker series. My name is Eden and I'm with Gibbs office of the CTO. We look at the future of development, developer experiences and try to figure out how to make development faster, safer, easier, more accessible to more people and more situations. All I find jazz today we're trying something a little different.
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00:01:43] Our guest is GitHub Star, Shawn Wang, better known by his internet handles Swyx and we'll also be joined by Brian Douglas, AKA B Douggie, who is a developer advocate and educator, and my colleague here at get hub. So, excited for that. I first met Swyx at a conference in the before times before the Corona, almost two years ago when he was giving a talk about state machines for building CLIs.
[
00:02:07]I knew of him in the context of his famous learning in public essay. And the talk that he gave was a fantastic demonstration of that diving into an area where he had relatively little expertise and making sense of that territory and jumping back out to explain it to the rest of us after his talk, he can.
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00:02:28] To me that he he's actually a refugee from programming, Excel for finance. And I think coming out of that background, Swyx excels at finding that place of empathy for developers in the middle of the unglamorous, the hard parts of development the parts that we don't like to show off to one another, because they don't make us look smart.
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00:02:49] They don't make us look, look cool. His work normalizes, the feeling of I'm stupid right now, which is very much a part of every developer journey and with which I identify very, very much. I think that's what makes his thoughts on community building so relatable and so topical developer facing businesses have to find a way to channel empathy into action.
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00:03:13] And Swyx is figuring that out in all of its messiness in public for us to see and learn from. And in fact the reason I reached out to invite them onto the show is this recent post that he wrote called technical community builders. And looking critically at, at how that's different from the way Deborah has done today.
[
00:03:30]And I think this is a very interesting take on the future of, of, of this business function for developer facing businesses. Okay. So before I bring him on I'll remind everybody that we have a code of conduct it's really important to me that chat is a place where everyone feels welcome. So, please make sure to make that possible.
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00:03:47] And without further ado I would like to welcome Swyx and be Douggie. Hello.
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00:03:54]
Idan Gazit: [
00:03:54] Swyx, you're, you're out in Singapore and it's like the middle of your night. Thank you so much for coming in and joining us for, for, for this talk.
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00:04:02]
swyx: [
00:04:02] Oh, it's my pleasure. Yeah, I mean, I work specific hours specific time anyway, so, this is I guess the start of my day.
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00:04:14]
Brian Douglas: [
00:04:14] I'm doing perfectly fine enjoying my normal time of the day,
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00:04:19]
Idan Gazit: [
00:04:19] the north, the morning. That includes the day star. Fantastic. Swyx you said that you wanted to give a little bit of a, an upfront a mini talk about this before we dive into this discussion. Why don't I bring you on.
[
00:04:35] There we go. Okay. So like enlighten us.
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00:04:39]
swyx: [
00:04:39] I can't, I can't actually see the screen cause I just have my slides full screen. So just pause me if there's anything I just wanted to, I guess, set some context for people who may not have read the post. You know, I think you and I, and, and Douggie, like we, we've all talked about community for a bit, so we may have more context than others.
[
00:04:58] And so I just wanted to, you know, whip up a few slides just to set some context and then we can actually talk because I'm very inspired by what GitHub does. And I'm definitely learning a lot from what you know, you guys do for, for community. Okay. So why invest in developer community a little bit?
[
00:05:16] I feel like this is a bit obvious, but, but the reason I write, like I would normally never write something like this because it just seems obvious. But the reason I write about it is I do a lot of conversations with startups and Sometimes for investing sometimes just to give dev REL advice sometimes, you know, marketing or whatever other network I can offer to startups.
[
00:05:38] I, I often do that. But in, in the past week or so, like at least when I wrote that book blog posts in one week, I had three conversations that all ended in can you help us find somebody to build developer community? And I was like, okay, this is, this is not just like one-off thing. This is a trend.
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00:05:53] A lot of startup founders are feeling and there's no one really dedicated to it. There, there are people of course, but it's not like a, an industry trend yet. So I decided to write a blog post about that. And that's, that's why, I guess we're here today to talk about going on. Wait, wait, communities becoming more of a thing.
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00:06:12] Always has been a thing, but it's becoming more of a thing and maybe professionalizing as well. So a bit of context about me, I think you done already introduced me quite a bit. I did change careers at age 30 but I definitely owe a lot of my career change and learning to code. To community, right?
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00:06:27] I joined the free code camp community, the coding blocks slack group and podcasts was also a very big part of companionship through the journey of learning to code, which is a very rough one even for me. And and then of course I also did a bootcamp, which is a paid community, but one that's very, very focused on getting you hired.
[
00:06:46]And that got me into two Sigma Netlify AWS and I work at Tim portal. I think what I'm better known for maybe in the community space is, is my volunteer work in this reacts subreddit where I helped to grow the subreddit from 40,000 developers to over 220,000 before I stepped down I stepped down to basically, cause I started moving my interests to another front end framework spelt and I started that from zero to now it's like eight, eight to 9,000 feet.
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00:07:12]And I also run a paid community for learning in public. So, I wrote a book, people like the book, and then we chat about career related stuff in, in our discord and then also go community. So that's my community credentials, I guess I should preface that. I guess I'm also, I had to put this here because a get hub at GitHub universe did this really cool Octo cat thing here.
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00:07:33] So I just redid my profile as a GitHub look at which is really fun. And I did, I am pretty honored to be invited as a GitHub star which I think is a way that get hub recognizes community members as well, which we can also talk about, like, how do you recognize and promoted? You know, I, I guess your, your, your super fans and, and what does that really do for you?
[
00:07:54]Okay. So, I'll just, I'll just re blast through a few points and then we can, we can set it up for wherever you guys want to talk about. So to me, I think the, the main articulation that I want to have is like community is increasingly the moat of a lot of developer companies. So developers have always self-organized communities like IRC and BB SS.
[
00:08:12]But now companies, entire companies have communities where that's the entire mode like get hub is essentially get a plus a social network. And it's really like anyone can offer get, you know, but it, it, it's it's a V it's very hard proposition to replace a social network. And, and you find that the same for stack overflow.
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00:08:29] There's a question and answer site. Anyone can build that, but you can not build the community. And same for hacker news. So it seems like very. You know, very key modes. And you would think that a lot more companies should be focused on that. But it doesn't seem so at least in, in terms of hiring, when you look at job titles and stuff like that they're more focused on the content creation and marketing, not so much community.
[
00:08:50]And I think that's changing right now and that's why I write about it. So that's the real question, like whose job is it anyway? There are community managers but typically we, we had one in LFI. They're typically focused on giving the forums and social media, like maybe making inoffensive posts or whatever.
[
00:09:08]They can do it. They're capable of a lot more. These, these are just stereotypical tasks that are assigned to community managers and then developer advocates have a bit of community as well. They do a lot of content and outreach to other communities. So it's not so much forming your own community rather than.
[
00:09:23] Let's how do we reach out and present and be a part and meet developers where they are rather than draw people to us, which there is a lot of as well. But the, they maybe don't have as much of a focus on sticking around and making interrelationships customer success is support documentation, solutions, engineering, all these are, you know, community of people who pay you and marketing, mailing lists, webinars, conferences.
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00:09:45] These are all, you know, isolated communities of people who don't yet pay you, but could pay you. And then I think there's also, you know, apart from function functional split, there's also or chart split. And I do find that a lot of people who are directly responsible for community are at the lower rungs of the, of the org chart rather than at the, at the upper rung.
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00:10:04] So it's pretty weird that it's just splintered all over the place. It's not really organized. I don't know. Doesn't seem like a organizational priority in a lot of the. Companies that I've seen. So the, the, the main realization for me is that community is basically part of the product. And in fact, in a lot of companies, it is the main part of the products, but it's, under-resourced compared to the products or engineering.
[
00:10:25]And I think something that is key is like, maybe we should not call it just community management, even though that's a default title. So I offered a few suggestions, like community developer or community tumbler. Tumbler is a word from I guess the circus. I took it from an Alex Holman post blog posts, but essentially a tumbler is someone who gets conversations going in and then pieces out.
[
00:10:47]So a lot of the times community manager does a lot of the heavy lifting. But you need to, in order for functional community to form into something that has many to many interactions, instead of one too many you, you need to get, so you need to have someone to create events where people feel safe and, and and inspired and motivated to, to share and to help each other out.
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00:11:09]My preferred term right now is technical community builder because it's very similar to technical product manager, which is an actual job title at Microsoft and Amazon and a bunch of other places. And it has an emphasis on technical and the, and there's a question of like, must they be technical?
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00:11:24] Of course not, of course you can have very, very good community builders and community managers who are not technical at all. But I think people who are technical have this extra dimension, which they can really empathize with developers on and connect people, solve their, solve their problems right away.
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00:11:40] Basically just, you know, be one of, one of them. Like when you, when you talk to someone who fundamentally empathizes with your problems as a developer, you share more and you, you have deeper discussions. And then the other question is why must the title be different? I posit that it's very similar to, to the once in a lifetime upgrade in status impacts authority and career prospects for ops professional.
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00:12:02] When the dev ops and got started, like dev ops used to not be a thing. Now it's a very highly in demand thing. And that's because it was a rebrand of existing skills that were, that, that were around, but, you know, repackage with, with new technology and a new focus in in a lot of organizations that the, that they realize that they need to invest in it.
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00:12:22]So I think a similar movement needs to happen and you, you can't really rebrand something by calling it the same exact name. So th so that's why, that's why there's an opportunity to rebrand this discipline here. Okay. I'm very influenced by this model from comScore, which is essentially the opposite of what I showed you earlier, where community used to be at the fringe.
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00:12:42]And you used to have all these other, other things in control of community and here, and, and the community led model kind of inverts that where community is at the core of everything. And from your insights from community and building relationships you, you spin out marketing, you spin out products, you spin on sales and so on and so forth.
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00:12:59]And I think it's very interesting migration from periphery to core which. Been told actually is the same thing. That's happening to data science, data science, at least in, in the, in the companies that I've worked with used to be a fringe thing where like it's a bunch of geeks, you know, messing around with their with the analytics to like now it actually is part of the reporting process that generates a lot of product and sales and marketing insights.
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00:13:25]And I think, I think community can, can do that with humans and not, not less, less less data, but you can, you can have a lot of data with, with it as well. So the question is why invest in it? And really, I think my, my fundamental assumption is that traditional marketing and support isn't cutting it.
[
00:13:38]This is the traditional idea of a marketing and sales funnel. You have awareness, evaluation, and conversion, and we as developer relations people definitely biased towards awareness for better or worse. But I think it, it is only one part of the picture and it's very transactional, right. It, you start at the top.
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00:13:53]And then you, you, you come out at the bottom as a, as a salesperson and then, and then you're, they're done with you. I wash my hands off you and I, and you're handed off to someone else. The, the problems here are a few, few fold, right? Like marketing, especially in development. Marketing has extremely long cycles.
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00:14:08]In traditional digital marketing, you need to touch you know, th th the traditional advice is that someone needs to hear about you six to seven times before they even check you out. For me. I know a lot of technologies. I ignore them for a year just to see if they stick around. And if they're still relevant after your, then I check them out.
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00:14:24] So try to do marketing attribution. Impossible. So, very, very difficult. And, and not within any con China performance evaluation timeframe. And then also what happens after I convert, right. What happens after I come out the funnel? Do I feel supported there? Do I, do I grow and succeed and all that?
[
00:14:39]So the solution is to change from mostly transactional finite games to relationship-based infinite games. And this is the bigger picture that I see there's marketing and sales going on here. But then you, it exists within a broader scope of community that kind of catches all the other stuff that isn't really handled by marketing and sales.
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00:14:55]We actually has loaded up the orbit model, which we can, we I'm sure we're going to talk about, so instead of the funnel, which is a very linear approach the orbit model, like kind of is isn't or. So characterize as the people around your company, as a people orbiting your company and they may be in wider orbits, or they may be in closer Orbitz.
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00:15:14] Sometimes they may drop out. Sometimes they may come back in. It's a very infinite relationship model, the way they just constantly orbiting. And you're just trying to draw them closer with more and more gravity towards your, your software or your community. The reason I think it's important for startups in particular is that it's a very big part of crossing the chasm because there's a small set of people who actually picked technologies based on pure technical merit.
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00:15:38] And there's a large set of people who pick technologies partially on merit partially because there's a strong ecosystem. And there's a very, very big steep gap in between that. And people who can help companies cross this gap can deliver a lot of value for, for the companies involved. And, and that's a, that's a really core insight, I think.
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00:15:57] Okay. There's even more reasons. In my blog post, I don't have time to go into all of these, but we can talk about them in a discussion. I don't want this to be a lecture and I will refer and I have the last part on why now. And I'll send people to the blog post if they want to see it, but that's my short little primer for my thoughts on community.
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00:16:15]
Idan Gazit: [
00:16:15] Fantastic. That was a solid, that was a solid introduction. One thing that really strikes me about what you're calling out here is that I can't, I can't highlight another area where there's a business motion. That's so central to success, which is which is so undefined. Like you think about most, most functions in a business like marketing or engineering or product.
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00:16:40] And if I took, you know, 10 random people and asked them, you know, what does this job entail? What does success. Look like, and how does it contribute to the success of the overall business? And I'll get 10 answers that are more or less the same. And here, I think what's, what's special and maybe is in a, in a difficult sense is that I don't think that if I asked 10 people, like, you know, what's the purpose of this business function?
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00:17:05] What does success look like? What does the job entail? What level of talent do we need to hire in order to accomplish this? Well, even, you know, things as boring as, like you say, sort of like, you know, where on the totem pole, like, you know, who, who does, who's responsible for this and who do they report to that level of, of definition?
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00:17:25] I don't think I'm going to get 10 answers that are mostly the same. I think I'm going to get 10 wildly different answers that that don't resemble one another
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00:17:33]
Brian Douglas: [
00:17:33] If I can add to as well. This is something that's come up really recently for me. Cause I, I shipped a YouTube video yesterday focused on like what the future of dev role looks like. So think about community and how that sort of changed even in us being over remote. There's no real like structure.
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00:17:48] I think the everything, everybody can do something to move the needle, but I think the folks who are doing really good jobs is when you look at that, that model of the orbit, the folks as you bring more and more people closer to the nucleus they stick around longer. And I think one thing that Swyx and I had in common is that, well, a couple of things, we had a comment, like I was part of that react sub subreddit as well.
[
00:18:07]We also spent time at Netlify. So like I've saw a lot of the same stuff that Swyx us all and what I agree with everything that he said too as well. And the things that I think I saw successful at notifies that we had a committee. Folks who are just really excited about the product. And we found ways to bring them closer to the inner circle, to the point where there are Netlify employees, who now, who, who came from that community.
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00:18:27] So when you think of like recruiting or not just actually using the product, but if you're looking for your next advocate, it should come from the community that's already existed.
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00:18:35]
swyx: [
00:18:35] Yeah. I, one of the points that I made was that if hiring is your biggest problem just like 99% of other startups or companies in general, it doesn't have to be startups.
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00:18:46]Then building a strong community helps you source very, a much higher quality of employee than you know, just picking any random developer off the street.
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00:18:53]
Idan Gazit: [
00:18:54] I mean, yeah, like there's, there's in the post, you actually highlight that there's this sort of litany of, of of benefits. And I don't remember all of them off the top of my head, but I remember as I was reading through the post.
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00:19:06]Excuse me. I thought that there was a lot more there than I expected, you know, like I expected going into it. It's just like, well, what benefits am I going to, I see from, from doing this well, well, you know, I'll do a better job at outreach. I'll do a better job at uptake of my product. But you know, I hadn't thought of the hiring angle, even though that's, you know, it's playing right there in front of us.
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00:19:26] You know, if you build a strong community, you have a very like high quality pool in which to fish for, for, for, for standout employees. That it's a source of, of not exactly free marketing, but you know, it's like you have a chance of growing a class of evangelists, people that are going to go out and spread the word about, about what, whatever it is that you're doing.
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00:19:47]
swyx: [
00:19:47] sorry. I've even gone one step further. So I took the hiring thing to the extreme. So, the, they started that I work at right now, it's in portal. We actually started listing jobs for our customers so that we can help them hire based on at least through us. So, so like, okay, if you don't work for us, but can just come work at one of the, one of the company, one of the customer companies.
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00:20:07]And it's just like, like we win if they win, you know what I mean? And, and it's, you can just take this to an extreme level where you just start becoming a de facto recruiting agent. Really good. But I do, I do that, like, you know, if you do a really good job community, actually your the person's membership in the, in your community actually outlives there.
[
00:20:24]Present employer. And that that's a really strong community. That's like, okay. I'm, I'm I'm first and foremost, a member of your developer community. Then secondarily, I just happened to be at this company right now. But you know, I do, I do have my primary network within, within your community.
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00:20:40]
Brian Douglas: [
00:20:40] And I guess, can I add actually get some clarification too, from you Swyx when you talk about these terms like dev ops, who like everybody knows what dev ops is now, it wasn't an unknown thing, you know, 10 plus years ago. But when you build a community, like what are some sort of like ways you can avoid those pitfalls?
[
00:20:56] Because I know every time I go to an event and I join a random slack channel for just that event, like I leave that slack channel as soon as it's done. So like, I'm curious what your, your, your thoughts are. As far as building community from scratch.
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00:21:11]
swyx: [
00:21:11] Oh, wait, are you saying that this is a problem with DevOps?
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00:21:15]
Brian Douglas: [
00:21:15] I use dev ops because dev ops is a very clear term. There's already established community, but if I started B Douggie conference and wanted to everybody joined the movement, like it's going to be a challenge because it's going to be me and maybe a couple of people in chat. So like, how do I make sure that this is not another community that's become stagnant or stale?
[
00:21:34] Like I want to create the next devil.
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00:21:36]
swyx: [
00:21:36] I gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah. I think so you and I, of course were very informed by our Netlify experience for anyone who doesn't know actually started the whole debt roll practice at Netlify. And I basically, you know, was one fourth of his job after he left. Anyway and something that nullify did, which was brilliant was that they didn't create the Netlify movement.
[
00:21:57] They didn't create the Netlify conference. They created the JAMstack movement and the jazz that conference. And, and, and I really. I like this idea that you build something that's bigger than yourself. Like you build a movement that other people can evolve get involved with and see themselves in to the point where they start competing with you and you have to be okay.
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00:22:15]If you're, so mission-driven that you're okay. Losing because someone did your job better than you. Then you, then you've really found something that's worth building a community around because otherwise it's just, you're building a cult, I guess, where it's centered around you. And, and so I, I really like that.
[
00:22:32] For example, I'll give you a concrete example, which is at, I think our second JAMstack conference Netlify we invited people from Microsoft competitor in, in some ways who did not use Netlify at all, did not pitch another fight at all. But just presented their ideas on JAMstack and we invited them as a speaker.
[
00:22:49]Yeah. Ha. Yeah. I mean, I, I, and I think that we should have more you know, competitive competitor companies also visited the conference as well. I think we should have more of that. I think it shows a fundamental level of security that you're like, okay, I'm not threatened by you. Or like, I care about this enough that you know, this is big enough that multiple players can win in this space.
[
00:23:11] That's a real community where, whereas you know, a lot of other times you're just running it to as a feeder service into, into, into your marketing funnel.
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00:23:22]
Brian Douglas: [
00:23:22] Yeah. I like the, the thought about building a community that's bigger than yourself. And I think like speaking from good hubs perspective, cause I was a time user recently employed at GitHub in the last three years.
[
00:23:32] Not really that recent, but it startup worlds. That's, that's kinda, that's like forever ago. But what I'm getting at is like the whole get collaboration, open source protocol. I, I liked that GitHub didn't try to strangle it and try to own it completely. There were other competitors are doing a great job and having collaboration tools around, get up, get, just get in general.
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00:23:53]And that sort of funnel of new users, community conferences, slack rooms, discords it's been helpful for me in doing my job because there's already established community that I can just go in and not try to take leadership on, but more of like, Hey, I want to learn from you as well.
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00:24:11] I do think that at some level there's, there's a transition from like, okay, this is bigger than yourself, but then at some point you're, you're big enough that you are a community on your own. And I think, you know, once you're past like 50 million developers, you can have your own community. That's totally fine.
[
00:24:27]Same thing for like Salesforce at Dreamforce and AWS and reinvents. Like we all have, you know, huge companies have their own conferences and this totally fine, but I think when you're getting things off the ground, that's a totally different story.
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00:24:38]
Idan Gazit: [
00:24:38] I think, I think you, you, you touched on something interesting there about picking, you know, it's always, it's always hard to stay away from like blatant advertising when it comes to like developers, like, you know, who do I work for? What is it that they make? That's obviously going to be a central part of the discussion if, you know, I'm representing, you know, company X or Y but you highlighted that, you know, for Netlify the story was not it was not Netlify, it was JAMstack forget hub it wasn't look at GitHub and, and and our specific web app, but the the collaborative nature of open source, specifically powered by decentralized version control.
[
00:25:18]And like, you know, the get is important. The polar requests are important. The rest of the stuff that get it brings is important, but it's not that's not the thing that's going to emotionally resonate with with people on its own. Not unless you have such a, you know, so much of a better product that it's like, oh my God, people are wowed by just the existence of this thing.
[
00:25:38]Which is great. If you can pull that off, like more power to you, you know? I think you, you touched on this sort of linear path. Okay. Like you have a story, you tell it and you think about this, this path that, that you want to take people, a journaling journey that you want to take people along that starts in marketing territory and ends in sales territory.
[
00:25:57] Hope. And then by contrast, you know, coming back to that. To the orbit model. One of the sort of assertions you made there is that your remodel is not, it's not strictly linear, that it has these other dimensions. It has this love dimension, basically like a measure of, of activity and reach as a, as a, as a measure of influence.
[
00:26:14] But when I still look at this at this model, it's still talking about these sort of concentric rings of, you know, you start at the very outer, most orbit, you know, as just an observer and accessibly, you move, move your way into the middle. That's still seems like a relatively, you know, linear journey to me.
[
00:26:30]I think it's curious, I, you know, that they, that they put advocates at as the closest, the inner most ring versus contributors. Because when I think about like, where, where do I spend the maximum amount of energy? It's in contributing, it's not an obvious, it's really easy for me to advocate.
[
00:26:48] I can advocate. React until the cows come home. And you know, all I got to do is write like nice things about react, but contributing to react like an effortful activity. So, I'm curious, you know, about that journey, like, what do you think, is it, is it really about getting people to contribution is contribution just a, like a left turn on this.
[
00:27:09] Does this make sense to you? I don't know. I'm curious what you think.
[
00:27:11]
swyx: [
00:27:12] I, I feel like they've probably written this up. So I'm actually looking up the, the, the writer right now, cause this is probably a better question for Patrick Woods who came over this model. But I, I agree if you want in principle, at least in an open source context that people who number of people who contribute are far less than the number of you who advocate for the thing.
[
00:27:29] And maybe that, that should be the inner circle. I would say that it's less linear because the whole point is that you can jump in and out of different orbits depending on your life situation or just whatever projects you're working on. That's totally fine. And it's not considered a failure. Yeah, I don't know if that.
[
00:27:47]
Brian Douglas: [
00:27:47] Yeah, I do have some thoughts cause I know Patrick and I know Josh pretty well and I have been able to rub shoulders with them so that the founders of the corporate model or the orbit company as well. And I talked to Patrick on his podcast, which is called developer love and episode one, you can hear way more detailed what I go into and right now but the one thing that I had to figure out when I joined GitHub as a developer advocate and at the time we had advocates, but no one actually had the title at the time at GitHub.
[
00:28:12] So I was even the reigns to do developer relations at, get up, figure out what that meant. And at that time I had to figure out also what that meant, but also give a talk at developer dev role con cause we had a speaking slot and I call myself the Beyonce of get hub. And I do that tongue in cheek and I joke around about that, but I do that because like, I don't play.
[
00:28:33] I don't play Beyonce music all day, every day. Like I don't, you know, I don't know how to play the backing tracks on base or anything like that. So I'm not really contributing in that sense, but I will tell you about Beyonce and tell you her story. And I think it's the same thing with open source. Like I made a contribution to no JS back in November, it was a really painful process.
[
00:28:50] I learned a ton and my contribution to the no JS was that I read blog posts. I did a contribution on their repo, but the difference is when I get on stage and I show you how to write a script in node and I go around and I share, I'm like, well, I noticed still great despite dyno or Dino and all these sorts of Russ compiler times, like I'm still advocating for no JS.
[
00:29:12] And I think. If you can bring more people to the sort of inner circle. I think that's, that's always going to be super helpful. And if you have people who are going to be the mouthpiece, I guess what I'm getting at is my job at GitHub is not to be the number one developer advocate in the world. My job is to build more developer advocates.
[
00:29:30] So if you can advocate, get, get help on behalf of get hub and I don't have to be involved, then that's an entire automation automated process. Now you can argue contributions that can automate that and just grow and sustain the project. But there are a lot of GitHub projects or sorry, open-source projects have lots of contributions that you've never heard of.
[
00:29:48]So like until someone tells me that exists or I see it on the trending tab it's going to be a hard a hard thing to focus on to try to get more contributors when no one's actually knows about this project.
[
00:29:57]
Idan Gazit: [
00:29:57] Right. There's there's definitely, I mean, that's definitely like a, like a hurdle to be crossed in terms of just like, you know, where do I even hear about this?
[
00:30:05] I mean, obviously there's, there's, you can think of that as a, I'm sure. Not coming from a marketing background, you know, I'm sure there's entire textbooks about the phase of like, you know, how do I get people to even know that I exist before I like, you know, how do I wedge the door open long enough for me to attempt to get across?
[
00:30:23] Like, and here's why you should care about me. There's a whole phase of, of, of just spreading the word.
[
00:30:30]
swyx: [
00:30:30] That's why, that's why I think, you know, we I do, I do think that we do need technical community builders, whatever the, you know, whatever we call this thing. They, they, they probably need to be technical because they need to have that technical leadership of like, I authentically went through the same journey that I'm telling you that I'm hoping that you also go through with me on this.
[
00:30:48]And, and this is something that non-technical community managers cannot do. So it's like a. Thing where you have to hire someone on who has a software engineering background or is it, you know, pay them like a developer, but then put them on non-technical things, which is communities less Senegal.
[
00:31:09]
Brian Douglas: [
00:31:09] Right. You know, I don't know. It's a weird job. It's just this thing, authenticity to it too as well. Like I would not have know how to be a developer advocate if I wasn't a developer first. So like, I always put myself in the mindset of like, if I had to use this thing and it takes me 12 minutes to get it set up, like, I'm probably never going to use it again.
[
00:31:24] So like, how can I advocate on the behalf of this product to make this better? And how could I bring that information back to whoever makes decisions at this project company maintain her level or whatnot. And it's just like, I, I just still think it's one step more than just contributing, keeping the lights on.
[
00:31:41]It's more of like, Hey, I want to also bring that feedback. How can I improve this? And I think. The, the roles inside the community. I think technical community manager, it's a great world because it actually touches all those different pillars. And specifically in the model, I know we're focused on that, but like being able to turn it on, turn it off and also know how to listen as well.
[
00:32:03]Are very valuable like attributes that I would love to have on my team. I get hub for sure. And we do have those by the way. I just want to set the record,
[
00:32:13]
Idan Gazit: [
00:32:13] Just to be, just to be upfront and clear. So, I think, I think we're all dancing around a little bit, the, the, the bigger question of what are the qualities like, what are, what does success look like for this role?
[
00:32:25] How does it, how has it changed? Like, you know, if we, if we called the role previously developer relations, and now we're calling it this subtly. Name around technical community building and sort of the, the, the stewardship and the shepherding of, of a community. What what's success, how is success different in, in this sort of like a slightly different like mental model and, and what's different in the day to day?
[
00:32:50] Like, you know, if, if previously, you know, previously I was doing Debra and that meant I was doing X, Y, and Z with my days in order to succeed at my job and contribute to the success of the business. What does that look like in this sort of new, mental framing of community building, as opposed to simply developer relations?
[
00:33:11]
swyx: [
00:33:11] Yeah. So I can give a crack at it and then I'm sure Doug has, has other thoughts. You know, at Amazon, I can tell you directly the, the, the KPIs that we were reporting and, or. To the outside world. That's, that's the only thing that they expect out of us, which is number of views on the content that we produce.
[
00:33:28] Right. Very depersonalized. You're just a number to me. Did I get a thousand? Did I get 10,000? Did I get a hundred thousand? I did a better job if it was a bigger number. Great. But there's no relationship there. There's no measurement of quality, like was, was that they just glance at the title.
[
00:33:43] Where did they actually read the whole thing and try out the demo? There, there are different weights for different you know, actions that people can take. And we do try, they check that, but it's all a joke. Like it's not okay. Everyone knows that it's a joke. You know, it's a proxy to what we really want, which is people trying you out and seeing if they like you and you know, short of standing over their shoulders, you can't really get that.
[
00:34:06] I'm so sorry. What I, what I do, what I do like is that orbit is trying to innovate on that by measuring you know, what they call love, which is just the intensity of activity which is the same thing, but tracks on a per person basis. And, and, and suggest in, and that opens up the possibility of like, having more of like a CRM model, which is very much the sales idea of like, you know, have, have an idea of that, the customer journey from beginning to end and suggests or automate engagements as they, as they come along on the journey.
[
00:34:36]Which, which is less, it's just, it's just a lot less transactional, like at, even at Netlify. Like I was, when, when you get to the point of like attaching UTM tags to your posts, to see the, the response of of, of your campaigns that's just, you're just marketing. You're not there role. I mean, and so, so, so I definitely care a lot more about the relationship aspect and how much you can, you can cultivate just by understanding the customer journey rather than treating them as a sort of faceless numbers
[
00:35:06] Like I am all, I'm definitely against trying to look at views and how many people are in the stream right now. Cause I think that's you you've lost it at that point. But I think what success looks. Is the names that I see in the chat right now. I see a lot of familiar names. So how many of those familiar names do I see next time?
[
00:35:21]Because as those were my, I didn't even know this term tumblers that you mentioned in your slides. Cause I've seen this around, but I didn't know what that was. The party corgi chat has tumblers and I didn't know what tumblers were today. But I guess I have an anecdote too, as well from net network.
[
00:35:33]Netlify when I was doing, and we, we were bottom growing and we have this opportunity to speak or speak and also attend and have a boot that react rally. And it would have been super easy to say, Hey, can you fill out this form? And we'll send you, we'll get your email. And then you have a chance to win, you know, this thing at Netlify.
[
00:35:52]And instead my approach at that conference, which was like one of the first conferences I ever had, any sort of marketing, advertising, whatever my approach. Come to the booth. We had an Nintendo switch on the, on the booth table, and then we had a bunch of stickers. And the thing was if you switched to Netlify, which is like, it was a pine, really.
[
00:36:10]And then we'll give you a chance to win the switch. And the step was, all you had to do is scan a QR code and then click the deploy to Netlify button. And it was on that, that website or, sorry, it was a get hub repo. You put click the deploy Netlify button, and then inside the site you deployed from Netlify.
[
00:36:24] After 15 to 30 seconds, it took happened to be a gap suicide. So we were at on-brand for the conference. Then you read the website you just deployed and the instruction says, click this button to tweet. And if you tweet that would actually put you in a hashtag and I had a node server that would then pick a random person.
[
00:36:38] So we did this for three days. We gave away the switch by the second day, cause we'd had enough people. I think the conference was like 600, 700 and we had about 320. People who participated. And then after the first day we knew we engaged the community because the next day two or three people came and said, Hey I clicked the button and then I saw what you deployed.
[
00:36:55] And it was a Gatsby site. And at the time Gatsby wasn't even 1.0, so like nobody would use Gatsby at that time. And they're like, yeah, I switched my entire blog to Gatsby. And it's hosted on Netlify. So then we know, Hey, this person is actually super engaged. This is, this is my next advocate. Like, I'm going to, whatever you need, I'll give you a sweater or a t-shirt eat.
[
00:37:12] If you don't win the switch, like I will engage you and give you everything. You need to continue down this path. And that was the focus. And like for marketing, it looked great. But we didn't have the sort of traditional fill out this web form. It was this click, this button used a product if you don't want it, or if you want to delete the repo by all means, get hub out at the time, get hub had all hit all your information.
[
00:37:33] Like we weren't even collecting your information. So like the goal was just really. Taking it for a test drive. And then if it works out for you we have this forum, we have this community, we have get up issues like this jump in where you, where
[
00:37:46]
swyx: [
00:37:46] you fit in. Yeah. And then we also, I think potential enterprise team customers.
[
00:37:52] This was after Brian left, but you know, w w we also had like a separate process for potential customers to highlight to the sales team where we actually scanned their badges and took down info and basically fed indirectly to their CRM or whatever. And that was pretty good because w we were able to capture a lot of really useful detail that gave our salespeople are really good
[
00:38:11] Yeah. And you just don't know who you're, who you're chatting with too as well. Cause that, that story. About being at react rally. One of the people who walked up and said, Hey, this is actually pretty cool. That person was maxed away, Burr and max Storybird. A lot of, a lot of people know him. He used to actually work at, get hub for a time.
[
00:38:25] He built a whole product, got acquired by GitHub, and now he's at Gatsby as well. Coincidentally. But I never met max. I just knew who he was. I knew of his story. And then we connected and like, he didn't like, he wasn't like the number one Netlify fan boy, I don't, I'm pretty sure he didn't walk away shipping everything to Netlify, but we made that connection.
[
00:38:42] So every time I had a conversation with max or he remembered me, that was like a nice serendipitous moment of like, oh yeah, we met at that one time that when I did that thing and like, you just can't put a metric to that of like, what big names do you know that like, at the time max was like, he wasn't even a big name, but like you just, yeah, you just can't quantify that you can't put a number to that.
[
00:39:04]
swyx: [
00:39:04] I mean, it probably contributed to the reacts to be on Netlify as well. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a domino effect and there's a sort of like a density effect, like one person using it. All right. Cool. Two people. All right, cool. But then like three prominent people then it's starts to become a thing, you know?
[
00:39:19]So I like that concentration of like, presence which, which also points of it being more of a community. Right. So, yeah. I don't think, I don't think we gave you that like a lot of like numbers, we're just like, we just talked about people, which is very natural thing.
[
00:39:34]
Brian Douglas: [
00:39:34] Yeah. And the one thing that I did want to add to real quick is that the one thing, when I joined GitHub, my biggest goal was I spent four years in San Francisco and I only needed like a handful of get up.
[
00:39:43] Employees never went to, to get hub office. And my goal is to get up employee today. And a developer advocate is I want to put, be a face to a company that has an Okta cat for a face. Like I want you to know who to reach out. And if it's me, or if it's not me, like, I'll give you the right person. And that's like one of my goals that get hub to do, to be an advocate for getting you in the right router.
[
00:40:02]
Idan Gazit: [
00:40:02] That's, that's interesting. I mean, like, you know, there's a part of my brain in the back and it's like, you know, like the true wind was the friends we made along the way. Exactly. It turns out that It's interesting though, because this role that you, you just described, this thing exists, it's called an ombudsman. And if you're familiar with this, I think it comes out of the military. Like, you know, this is like the person that the families at home are in touch with in order to like, you know, reach their, their loved ones that are deployed wherever and have any concerns or whatever.
[
00:40:31] And so the there's a, there there's a sort of like, a name for, for, for this role of like, you know, liaison into the company and actual human that can, you know, step in and maybe not help you solve your problem directly, but at least point you in the right direction, like, you know, attach you to the person that can actually help you move forward.
[
00:40:51]But you're, you're right in saying that there's like, you know, these aren't, you haven't really given me like hard metrics. Like, you know, if I'm now going to pitch to a company like, Hey, here's what I'm going to do for you. They're going to be like, okay, like, What are, what are the, what are the OKR is what are the KPIs?
[
00:41:09] What, what, what is the thing that you're going to be measured on? How do we know if what we're doing is succeeding.
[
00:41:16]
swyx: [
00:41:16] There is a company that actually does that, which is Weaver that AI, they call it community qualified leads, and it takes a very salesy model to, to this direct attribution towards sales and marketing and all that.
[
00:41:27]And so, yeah, I mean, once you have the tracking system in place, you can Def you can absolutely do that. And if you need to quantify in that way then absolutely. Yeah, you know, I, I, I don't necessarily feel that strongly because it tends to be. Then become a fight for whoever is the last touch who gets the most attribution which makes it a very political thing.
[
00:41:49]
Idan Gazit: [
00:41:49] Sometimes between departments in some senses, that sounds like it's going to set up all the wrong incentives inside. You know, it's like when you're like, you know, at a store and you get mob by like, you know, it was like, no, I'm the one who like, you know, did anybody help you today? Well,
[
00:41:59]
swyx: [
00:41:59] yeah, it's like, so for me, I don't know if you guys have played Kerbal space program.
[
00:42:08]
swyx: [
00:42:08] Okay, I'll just give you like the rough intuition. When you, when you start off trying to get the rocket from off the ground, into, into orbit you're very concerned with all the tiny little mechanics of like what degree tilt you're doing, what what your yall is and pitch and whatever and your, your velocity and your weight and, and the stages that you do.
[
00:42:24]But once you're basically at velocity and in space you then only care about your like DV. I forgot what the, the, the, the calculus is, but like, you only care about your high level metrics and you don't actually care about the low level stuff, because you're, you're, you're beyond that.
[
00:42:41] You're, you're cruising at a speed where you, you should just move the big controls that actually matter, and then leave the lethal minor attribution's to, to like random noise or like, it's going to bubble up if it actually becomes. And I, I think that that's how large and our community should be managed.
[
00:42:57] Like, as long as, as long as your efforts are growing at a, at a decent rate, you can trust that it probably will trickle down to whatever and you don't really have to be too precise about how exactly you attribute it. That's at least my intuition. It's going to be, it's going to bother me now that I don't remember what the it's like DVD or something like that for your, your, your Delta Delta V or yeah.
[
00:43:18] Anyway, I'm sure someone in chat is yelling at me. I have a question for you guys if, if, if you want to enter entertain this. So there's a, there's a problem in my mind, which I haven't resolved, which is this idea of a super user. So at Netlify Netlify we call them the other friends at get hub.
[
00:43:32] You call them, get up stars. Stripe has drug community experts. These are an AWS as, as community builders. These are basically unpaid super users, which you give some kind. Yeah, but you know, perks but they're your external third party advocates. What do you think about them? How do you, how do you make them effective?
[
00:43:49]And, and basically everyone is new to this game. Like GitHub stars program is like a few months old. Right. Or maybe a year old. Yeah. Since September. What's your, what's your, what's your take on these kinds of programs? Like what, what is, what are what's their role compared to you guys?
[
00:44:06]
Brian Douglas: [
00:44:06] Yeah. I, I could speak on partially behalf of get hub and something that I've always also put a lot of thought into before I got, I could have, because I was trying to it's ironic because I was trying to help build what is now the net difference.
[
00:44:18]And but I, I just didn't have time before I left to, to actually see that. What it is today. But I had that same thought of like, what is the reason I gave that talk on being the Beyonce of GitHub is because Beyonce has a super fan group. And they're called the beehive intents of if you go after Beyonce, that beehive will show up.
[
00:44:37] And and it's not as that intense, but it's like when people came after her, after she had the baby, like
[
00:44:42]
swyx: [
00:44:42] people will know. SNL had a really great skit where there was like someone who had admitted that they didn't, they didn't like a Beyonce song. And then they just, the beehive showed up. Yeah. And it's
[
00:44:52]
Brian Douglas: [
00:44:52] the same that we saw with the the K-pop stands like BTS that's a little, like more extreme, but like there is a group that will go to bat for you.
[
00:45:01] And like, my job is to really go to bat for the hive. So to answer your question, like success looks like these are the folks that are creating the courses, writing the books, they're there on the forefronts of creating the YouTube videos. When the thing is announced, like it's the opportunity to give them as much information as they want.
[
00:45:20] So if they want to monetize it, they can, if they want to grow a community around it, they can. But it's simply like they're doing a good job. And we want to make sure that we're catering to them because. If, if someone's already doing like my job for me, like I'm all for, Hey, let's, let's have a coffee.
[
00:45:35] Let's let's learn. What are your blockers? How can I unblock you in the future? Or are there any features you're looking to like to ship? Like, let me introduce you to the PM and let me let the PM get your feedback directly. So like you just take the company directly to the source of the growth and that's, that's what I see it as.
[
00:45:52] And I've seen very, I've had similar talks to other leaders of these sort of groups. And that's usually what their goal is, is like this help empower folks through the people who are empowering the,
[
00:46:05]
Idan Gazit: [
00:46:05] I, I I'm like strongly reminded of there's a post from way back in the dinosaur ages. About success being a function of, of being able to grow a thousand fast. And that if you can find a way to, to reach that sort of threshold and it's thrown out there, I think in the same census at our member who coined the, like, you know, mastery comes at 10,000 hours or something like that is like a order of magnitude.
[
00:46:28] Like when you reach this this, this tipping point, and that's, that's a signal that like, you know, what you're doing is working and maybe, maybe this is the kind of metric that that we're looking at. It's not views, it's not posts. It's like, you know, how many, how many engaged, super fans are? Are we creating?
[
00:46:44] How many people do we have that love the thing that we're doing so much, that they're going out of their way. To spread that to more people and looking at that as the like you say about the Kerbal space program, sort of like, you know, the gross leavers of, of success, not the little like fine tuning adjustment dials, but like, you know, the big steering wheel that indicates that like we're doing the right thing.
[
00:47:05]I don't know. I mean, the, this, this question of like, you know, what has been the impact of, of GitHub stars? This has only existed, I guess now since Doug, you said since September, September. Yeah. So this is like a hot minute old or maybe it's like a thousand years old. It's unclear.
[
00:47:20] And actually, I, I think the official launch was September. We actually started formatting this form I guess making the formation of the stars around may, June. And I get to have like a very clear impact that we, I saw from my end which we, we watched this feature called to get hub profile, read me it's a feature everybody has access to, but at the time we had the sort of under wraps in like a super alpha we do for all features that get hub.
[
00:47:42] We have the staff ship that we call it. Alpha alpha or whatever comes before alpha, but that's what we, we have, we test our feature. So get up, employees all leverage it. And it sort of like came out of nowhere as far as this feature goes and what I have access to it. We are able to get this in front of stars pretty early on to the point where we actually had to get up star who created some content on how to build your, your profile.
[
00:48:04] Remi was like pretty cool, like within a week of launch. And that basically is the de facto tutorial on how to create a profile. Read me because it was so early, it just came out and this individual Monica, which I guess I can, I can name them as well. They are now like, they're, they're SEO wise, like that's the post, like it's not the docs.github.com and like that's success to me.
[
00:48:26] That's like seeing someone win in the, in the source in the sense of content and engagement of the community. And now as the point person, when it comes to that.
[
00:48:36]
Idan Gazit: [
00:48:36] That's that's actually a, really a really great it's like, you know, I know that I've succeeded at this job when, when other people's like, you know, results, outrank mine on, on on Google then success.
[
00:48:46]That's fantastic. We actually have a question, meaning a question here from Jeremy feel what's the feedback for, for a feedback loop for these super users? Like, I, there's a follow on question. There is, should the company be monitoring the output to manage their message? I'd argued that, you know, you can't manage other people's message otherwise you have to pay them a salary.
[
00:49:07]But but there is, there is a question if this is, if this is part of what you're trying to do as a community builders to build up this frontline, like top tier. Set of, of super fans. How do you help them succeed at that? Like what ammunition are you giving them? And how can you influence, I guess sort of like what the Diane's like, I launch a new feature.
[
00:49:29] What I really want is for my super fans to go out there and create content that shows off like, you know, what this new feature can do. Maybe use it in ways that I didn't even think of show how it fits into like a million different workflows. And each of those super fans, also, they have another foot into whatever communities they came from.
[
00:49:47] So, you know, you say like reacts Velt view, whatever, all these front end frameworks I'm going to have super fans from all of these different sort of walks of life. And each one of them is going to take the new thing that I did and show like, this is how it matters to the view community. This is how it matters to the whatever community and that's I think a very different thing.
[
00:50:07] So what do, what do you both think about that?
[
00:50:13]
Brian Douglas: [
00:50:13] Yeah. I don't know if you, if you had connections to the AWS community builders when you're AWS.
[
00:50:17]
swyx: [
00:50:17] Swyx yeah, yeah. We I know, made it something. Yeah.
[
00:50:22]
Brian Douglas: [
00:50:22] Awesome. Yeah. So I get we mentioned the get up stars but we have other groups as well. Like we have some members of our support team that also have a support community give him very likely a 56 million developers worldwide, which is, it sounds like a flex.
[
00:50:35] It is, but it means that we just have multiple groups. So another group that you might not know we have is we have a group of open-source maintainers that we talk to on a regular basis. And it's, it's actually a structured conversation and a group, and we get feedback from some of the largest open source projects that you've heard of.
[
00:50:51]And it's, it's very important for us to actually treat them. With this well not treat them. I was going to say treat them with respect, but it really is respecting their time providing, getting their feedback directly to the source of the people who can actually impact that feedback into our, our platform.
[
00:51:06]But as far as structure goes, the structure, it looks like we have a monthly meeting with all the stars. Everybody's invited and we call these the stars inside calls and like the PMs will show up and talk about some really early ideas of features and they get to see the feature develop over the course of time until it's ready for beta.
[
00:51:23] And at that point it starts with like, oh, I knew this was coming out. I'll use this, I'll incorporate this in my team at work, or I'll write some content, whatever you want to do with that. You just have some interactions. And that's what we did the stars conference which is, again, it wasn't a huge public events.
[
00:51:38] It was more just for the stars. So it's the point where I think I've even used Swyx you mentioned like, oh, I didn't know. This was a thing and never heard of this before. And it was like, because yeah, we just did it. It's only for the stars is not meant to promote GitHub in any way. It's just to give you access to all the information
[
00:51:59]But in addition to that, like we did have, we do give you the opportunity to have some unfiltered conversations too, as well. So one of the requirements for stars is to sign an NDA and it's just so we can have some really freeform conversation about GitHub, the platform, but also complaints wins everything across the board.
[
00:52:18]
swyx: [
00:52:18] Candor. Yeah. I mean, I, I like it. I, I, it's a, it's hard to organize. I think it's a full-time job, actually, if you do it, if you, if you want to do a good job of it, you know, and again, points to this thing becoming, because it it's probably is not, I mean, I don't know who handles it, but it's probably not developer relations handling it.
[
00:52:35]It's. It's just like, it is yeah. I think, I think this is a growing field where we're all defining what different categories of activities we can invest in. This is one of them. Another trend I see a lot is as people building universities like, Apollo building Odyssey Netlify building gems like explorers.
[
00:52:56]
swyx: [
00:52:56] Angie, you know, while she has she's the orgy. And then you know, GitHub has had labs or I forget what, what you guys call it. We did
[
00:53:04]
swyx: [
00:53:04] Yeah. Yeah. I tried to go through it for actions, but I didn't really get very far to be honest. But I think, I think, you know, like people are building like LMSs, their custom custom LMS is for their learning.
[
00:53:16] And I think that's another investment in community anyway. Sorry, I don't mean to ramble. I just like, these are all really cool trends where I think you know, it's part of the whole future of develop thesis. Yeah,
[
00:53:27]
Idan Gazit: [
00:53:27] fantastic. We are at time even a little bit over time. So, I think we could probably keep jamming on this for awhile, I'm going to throw up a banner on screen.
[
00:53:39] There's an, a thread in Okta discussions where if people have questions or maybe, Swyx, if you can drop some interesting resources in that thread. So, folks who are maybe coming out this later from the YouTube recording or who didn't get a chance to ask the question, you know, think about it later when they're like, oh, falling asleep.
[
00:53:57] Oh, wow. I should have asked this it can drop in and ask those questions and, and, and get some followup engagement. Thanks so much for joining us. Swyx. Especially because it's like, I don't it's tomorrow in the middle of the night in Singapore. It's unclear to me what time it is. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much.
[
00:54:13] Be Douggie for joining me here on the Octo speaker series. This has been a blast and have a lovely day,