Developer Relations vs Public Relations

Hello 👋🏽

Welcome to Dev Shorts. Issue #17 talks about Developer Relations, Serverless OSS project, and more!

This week, I did a podcast on Developer Relations with Karthic Rao, founder of incredible.dev. They are building a community-first platform for creating developer content. I’ve linked the full video below.

During the conversation, it occurred to me that many misunderstand Developer Relations and Public Relations.

According to Public Relations Society of America —

Public Relations (PR) is a well-known term for many. Each company has a communications team that helps maintain relations with the media agencies. The PR team helps drive the product or brand-level messaging of that company into the targeted audience.

For example, the PR team takes the product release messaging along with a few quotes or snippets from leadership, publishes those digital/online media via the media agencies.

Developer Relations (DevRel) has many definitions 😅 on the other hand. Many organizations don’t need a DevRel team unless they interact with developers in one way or the other.

Imagine if you are publishing an API or a dev tool that helps you deploy applications on servers; you might need a DevRel team because the end-users are the technical audience — Developers.

You often see a DevRel team in an OSS product company because they work along with the developer communities, essentially contributing to the initial growth/adoption. But this has changed a lot with Cloud platform vendors.

DevRel teams create various engagement channels through which developers could use the product/service provided by the company.

Even though it looks overarching, in many cases, a DevRel team manages the developer brand perception, creates content, takes the feedback, or more!

It might be easy to build brand capital or change the perception of a brand by following a specific PR strategy. But DevRel is not so easy, and it takes a good amount of time for any brand to gain the trust of developers.

I have seen many leaders from B2B SaaS misunderstand DevRel, and compare DevRel with PR or think DevRel is an amalgam of “Solution Architecture + Technical Marketing”. It essentially erodes the brand capital built by the respective PR team.

Long story short, both are not the same, but both can work together to create a great brand. Nowadays, I could see more tech media sites that serve as platforms for C-level audiences, mid-level management, Developers.

If you are interested in this topic and want to learn more, you can watch the below conversation or read this medium article from Reto Meir.

While architecting an application, it really helps to have a flow chart on how the specific service should be scaled, according to the standard recommendations. I found this wonderful resource, that you should take a look at if you are working on any Cloud platform.

Wonderfully put together, underrated advice for many students out there.

Serverless Stack is a framework to build full-stack Serverless applications. I feel this area is still developing and has a lot of potential to help many developers.

Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native distributed message streaming platform, actively competes against Apache Kafka. Both are amazing! Pulsar Summit Asia is just around the corner, CFP is open too.

If you like this week’s newsletter, rate it with “thumbs up/down.”

Sincerely,

Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽