DevEducate: The Art of Teaching Developers at Scale
Kamran Ayub
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Discover how to increase the impact of your DevRel efforts every other week with lovely advice from developer educators and creators that will help you educate and inspire developers.
Available episodes
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Mar 6, 2023
So What is DevEd Anyway? | Notes from the Test Kitchen | Ep 5
This is a short interstitial episode featuring some past notes from the DevEd Test Kitchen that elaborate on some thoughts I've had about what DevEd means and why it's critical for product adoption.
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Feb 20, 2023
Educate Tomorrow's Buyers with a Developer Content Program | Erik Dietrich | Ep 4
This week on DevEducate, Erik Dietrich joins me to discuss what goes into creating an effective developer content program. We cover types of developer content, driving awareness, what he’s seen working with technical brands, what DevRel has to do with Disney, and how to measure brand marketing in a way that gets us closer to understanding content ROI and profitability.
Episode Link: https://deved.rocks/4
Talking Points
* Working backward in developing a content strategy
* Figuring out where to put focus through experiments
* Why driving “awareness” isn’t good enough
* What early-stage founders need to avoid
* When it makes sense to be an expert when creating technical content
* The ultimate metric to measure that goes beyond views, leads, and conversion
* Avoiding the 3 most common mistakes in content marketing
<Blockquotes>
Lightly edited for context
“I think a lot of us start with the article in mind, almost like if you’re a developer, you start thinking of the solution first. But what we really need to ask is why are we writing an article?” – Erik
“I always think of content in terms of who is it that you want to read this piece of content, and then what are you hoping that they’ll do next?” – Erik
“If you’re really in it for the long haul, take somebody who right now is too junior to be your customer and then fix that. Over the next year, they’re going to consume content you produce until they are ready to become your buyer. And if you do that, the marketing funnel is kind of easy because they just trust you so much.” – Erik
“A lot of technical founders in the early stages will tend to view marking as, ‘I create a bunch of content where I explain how awesome my solution is.’” – Erik
“Disney is brand marketing personified. The day that your kid is born, you put them in a onesie with Mickey Mouse on it.” – Kamran
“The nature of the content you create and the channels in which you create them are really going to be informed by laying out how somebody goes from, ‘I have never heard of your brand before’ to ‘I want to become a customer.’” – Erik
“The way you use content in your marketing is so variable that it can feel like boiling the ocean. So there’s a tendency to just say, well, this is almost unknowable so I’m just going to focus on the tactics.” – Erik
“Run an experiment and fund it enough to get statistically significant data out of it, but don’t let it go on in zombie form for too long if it’s not working.” – Erik
“If you’re in the developer world making developer tools, it’s pretty common that you are going to be creating a category, meaning you are building something that nobody has an elevator pitch for just yet.” – Erik
“One of the things that's very much not lost on me is just what a tough problem it is to solve getting good data about your marketing.” – Erik
“Brand awareness in particular is a very long play that’s really hard to measure and you’re almost just taking it on faith from a lot of veteran marketers that like, ‘Hey, this will wind up being a good idea,’ you know?” – Erik
“A lot of people would say developers are a very skeptical audience so you need developers that are marketing to them. And I would say that’s true if the premise is instructive.” – Erik
“Performative content is when you are putting content on the site and there’s really no target audience in mind because you are not really talking to anyone. The paradigm is, ‘Look at me, look how smart I am, look how smart our brand is, you should do business with us.’” – Erik
Links
* DaedTech – Erik’s blog
* HitSubscribe – Erik’s technical content marketing agency
* Reasoning About and Projecting SEO Content ROI - DaedTech
* Traction by Gabriel Weinberg
* Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz
* Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
* CommonRoom – developer community growth platform
Creators & Guests
* Kamran Ayub - Host
* Erik Dietrich - Guest
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Feb 6, 2023
Building a Developer Recording Haven | Xavier Morera | Ep 3
What does it take to get started recording professional video content? In this episode, Xavier Morera joins me to share his journey to becoming a full-time Pluralsight author and what ultimately led to building his own recording studio – and what Vin Diesel has to do with it.
Talking Points
* Xavier’s journey from Microsoft trainer to full-time course author
* What the entry-level to pro hardware looks like for recording
* What going from a home office or closet to full-blown studio looks like
* Pro tips on reducing video and audio recording maintenance
* Why hiring a theater actress can improve your speaking
* Ways to improve the quality of your home office right away
* How a studio can be turned into an investment and an asset
<Blockquotes>
Lightly edited for context
“There's always going to be someone in the room who doesn't know what you know. So it's always going to add value when you teach someone something.” – Kamran
“In my earlier courses, my laptop was really noisy. I had to put my laptop on the floor, under the desk, and get some long cables so I could put a monitor and a keyboard on top.” – Xavier
“If you're thinking about doing video recording, you'll have to pay attention to your equipment. And you might have to adjust some of the hardware that you're using.” – Kamran
“I updated a course that was three years old and because I recorded it in that same booth, with that same microphone, when I'm doing the update, I can just drop in new sentences and my voice really hasn't changed so it sounds pretty much the same.” – Xavier
“If you're a business and you're creating video training you also have to maintain it because your software's gonna evolve over time.” – Kamran
“When I close everything, I could do yoga or meditation here without hearing even a pin drop.” – Xavier
“When I was doing earlier courses and I had a full-time job I didn't record during the day cause I was working, but I would just record at night when everybody was sleeping and that was a good time to do it.” – Kamran
“There’s this theater actress I hired a few months ago. I'm like, I'm 40-something, I know how to breathe. And she was like, no, let me teach you how to breathe.” – Xavier
“If you had the means to create your own recording studio for yourself or even for your organization, it could be a shared space and you could even rent it out if you needed to.” – Kamran
“I think the most important thing is… just start. Stop just waiting for the right conditions. Just get a microphone, start recording. It's not like you're releasing something to a hundred million people and everybody's watching what you're doing. Just release something, you'll get someone to like it, then you'll improve it and you get better with time.” – Xavier
Links
Xavier’s Links
* Xavier on Pluralsight
* Xavier’s .NET 6 Big Picture course
Equipment
* Blue Yeti Snowball – a good entry-level recording microphone
* AudioTechnica ATR-2100 – another entry-level mic Kamran uses to record
* Rode Podcaster – a mid-level microphone great for podcasting and voice
* Shure SM35 – a headset microphone (called a “lav mic”) that keeps the microphone the same distance from your mouth
* DBX 286S – high-end microphone pre-amp, helps remove “s” sounds
* Behringer Xenyx-Q802USB – Kamran’s budget-friendly microphone pre-amp/mixer
* Kaotica Eyeball – a microphone isolation shield
* Dragon Pad pop filter – what Kamran uses, attaches to your mic arm or desk
* ATS acoustic panels – 2-3” thick foam panels that absorb sound
* Cheaper foam acoustic panels – Kamran uses these in his home office
* Black Theater boards – drywall-like panels that can be used for studio ceilings
* Whisper Room or StudioBricks – get your very own recording booth for a healthy investment
Other Links
* The Dunning-Kruger Effect – a cognitive bias where low-performers and high-performers-alike tend to overestimate their ability
* Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing (TED Talk) by David Dunning
* The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Explain Their Work (MIT webinar) – what happens to us technical folk when we have deep subject matter expertise?
* Elocution (public speaking) training – talk like a pro with the help of a trained vocal coach
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Jan 23, 2023
DevEd That Sticks | Joe Eames | Ep 2
Talking Points
* What is “make it stick” and how does it translate to developer education?
* What makes effective learning?
* Effective learning myths
* What you see people getting wrong when teaching developers (and what to do instead)
* How to measure learning effectiveness (what are the metrics we might care about)
* How your teaching methods have changed over time
<Blockquotes>
Lightly edited for context
“The quicker someone gets to where they are feeling comfortable with what you’ve built and are effective at it and can implement it, the more likely they are to turn into a paying customer or stay a paying customer and not convert over to something else.” – Joe
“Compared to your competitors, if you are faster and easier to learn, you are almost for-sure more likely going to have a significant lead and edge in gaining and retaining customers.” – Joe
“A lot of the things that we think have to do with effective learning are actually wrong.” - Joe
“Effective learning should feel effortful and should feel hard. If you go to the gym and after your session you walk out and you’re relaxed, if you’re not tired at all – that’s a really good indication you did not do anything useful at the gym.” - Joe
“Life doesn’t involve us doing the same thing over and over again, and certainly programming doesn’t.” - Joe
“Follow-along coding is one of my biggest beefs. Programming is not typing – programming happens in your mind as you try and figure out what constructs, what code to actually craft and create. Whether you're typing with a typing language or drag and drop with a language like Scratch – the actual programming happens in your head and typing is just an expression of it.” – Joe
“When you’re typing along with somebody who’s coding you’re making zero decisions yourself as to what code to write. You are simply mimicking and parroting the code that they write and so what you’re actually getting is typing practice.” – Joe
“As educators the more you can do to get people to do hands-on the better. You can even just tell them how useless it is to watch this video and that they need to be putting this into practice themselves.” – Joe
“You don’t actually learn better using your ‘preferred’ learning style, the most important thing is to get the learning in the most effective learning style based on what you are being taught.” – Joe
“Ask a friend to go through the course, essentially a beta tester, and have them give you some real, true feedback.” – Joe
“Ultimately YOU [the learner] are the most responsible person for your own education.” - Joe
“We watch other people do something and we think that somehow it teaches us something and it really doesn’t. It’s the most ineffective way to learn anything.” - Joe
“Being familiar with a topic isn’t the same thing as gaining mastery over it.” – Joe
“Popularity is certainly no measurement of the quality of your education.” – Joe
Links
* Make it Stick (Amazon affiliate link) / Goodreads (non-affiliate)
* Joe on Puralsight / Medium / Twitter
* Angular 11 Fundamentals on Pluralsight – Requires a subscription
* Fundamentals of Angular on Thinkster – Free but aged (like a fine whiskey)
* StackBlitz and GitPod – Spin up interactive sandboxes
* New React docs with Challenges – You have to fix the issues to beat the challenge
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Jan 9, 2023
Bypassing the Walls Developers Put Up | Todd Gardner | Ep 1
Talking Points
* How Todd used a local-first approach to grow TrackJS
* How to think about developer marketing as educational content
* Why it’s easier to sell to your friends
* How speaking positions you as an expert
* How the marketing personas can differ between similar products
* How humor and storytelling engage an audience
* Why targeting “developers” is too general
<Blockquotes>
Lightly edited for context“Build an audience and turn them into your friends because selling to your friends is easier.” – Todd
“I started with people who I’d take out to lunch with or go get a beer with to understand their problems. It turned out to be a fantastic way of building a dedicated and engaged community here locally where I could get really good feedback… and it’s lasted up to this day.” – Todd
“I would take a flask with me and I would take a couple of shots of whiskey 15 minutes before I was going to go on stage because my nerves were on edge. I totally understand how terrifying [speaking] is.” – Todd
“With whatever you’re going to do… whether it be your consulting, being a freelancer, looking for your next job, or your building a product of some kind–at some point you’re going to need to sell it.” – Todd
“It’s too late to build the audience and try to sell at the same time. You need to have credibility first and then sell second.” – Todd
“Out of all the people I’ve worked with and talked to, developers are the most suspicious of sales. It’s not that they don’t even like being sold to, they actively dislike salespeople.” – Todd
“This is the tiptoeing that we need to do in order to be effective at selling software to developers, we do this ‘educational content marketing.’” – Todd
“Developer relations is really about helping developers get better at what they do and if you help them understand how your product helps them make their jobs faster or easier or more effectively then you’re getting the same benefit without seeming salesy.” – Kamran
“You can build it but people may not come – especially if they don’t know about it and even if they do, it might not be what they’re looking for.” – Kamran
“You have to tell a story and you gotta inject humor. I think both those things are really, really important in putting together a talk of any kind.” – Todd
“[Storytelling] is not something I started out doing and then over time I learned that crafting a narrative just made my talks so much better.” – Kamran
“The world of software developers is not one thing. There are so many smaller groups within that and I think it’s really important to know who you are talking to more precisely than ‘developers.’” – Todd
Links
* TrackJS – JavaScript error monitoring
* Request Metrics – Real-user experience monitoring
* PubConf – An after-party developer comedy show at a bar
* Todd’s website
* Todd’s Twitter
* Observable Web Applications – Todd’s recent talk
* Hero’s Journey narrative framework
* Pixar storytelling
* Your Perfect Tech Talk by Saren Yitbarek
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