DevRel Book Club DeveloperRelations.com

Burnout is a recurring topic of conversation in DevRel circles. In this episode, Jessica Rose shares Devon Price's book Laziness Does not Exist, which looks at the idea of the "laziness lie".

Watch the video on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/mK234ljCCnQ
Transcript
Ramon Huidobro: 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the DevRel Book Club podcast. It is my joy to be here with my co-host, Matthew. How are you, Matthew? 

Matthew Revell: 

I'm very well, thank you. Coming to you from a snowy little corner of England right now. And I have to admit, I'm huddled next to a heater because it is rather chilly here.  

Ramon Huidobro: 

Ooh, yes, please stay warm. Here in Vienna. It's quite quite mild, I have to say. At least it stopped raining. The dog doesn't like to walk in the rain . 

Matthew Revell: 

Well, it is our first DevRel book Club of 2023. And to begin with, I can't believe that we're already in 2023, but let's put that to one side for a moment. The topic of the book we've got this week is fairly on point for a new year episode. 

Ramon Huidobro: 

I agree. It is gonna be a really good conversation. I'm really excited and gonna bring on our guest. Now we've got with us, Jess. Hello Jess. How are you? 

Jessica Rose: 

Hey. Oh, and hello to everybody out in the, we don't say cyberspace anymore, do we? What I mean is thank you so much for having me, and it's an absolute delight. 

Ramon Huidobro: 

It is our joy to have you, Jess. Jess here has brought with her the book Laziness Does Not Exist by Dr. Devon Price, PhD. I loved this book, but we'll get more into that. But before we do Jess, please tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Jessica Rose: 

Cool. So, hey, my name is Jessica Rose, or Jess Rose, or really anything with the J is pretty laid back. I've been in DevRel for about a decade now, which is some time, isn't it? And for a long time, I specialized in doing early stage startup consultancy and open source consultancy.  

But, and this is, this is gonna be wrapped up in why I picked this book, I had a really rough, do you know, everybody had a really rough year in 2020 and started rethinking about how I had, I sound like I'm gonna sell you supplements, don't I, like, started rethinking my life but started restructuring my life. And actually I'm gonna be starting at a new perm job that's part-time next week.  

So I used to work at the Mozilla Corporation. I'm gonna be heading over to the Mozilla Foundation to do DevRel for the Common Voice Project, which I'm really excited about. I've been working part-time for a while, and I spend the rest of my time doing a free programming bootcamp with a very familiar face. And we'll talk about it as part of this, but a lot of that time I would be spending working, or I had traditionally spent working, I spent doing nothing productive. 

Matthew Revell: 

Before we dive into that, can you tell us a little bit about the Common Voice Project, please? 

Jessica Rose: 

So Common Voice is so cool. I forget that not everybody is a big languages nerd. And so if you want to build a digital product with voice, there's a couple different voice products that you can use, but they tend to be paid and they tend to be rather limited in language options. The Common Voice project is a corpus of community source voices, which are hugely diverse and exciting, and they're completely open sourced and free to use. So if you wanted to make a voice assistant and you didn't wanna pay a mon bunch of money for that, or if you wanted to do depends on the kind of research, but you were doing research and you wanted to look at different Ki Swahili accents, there's a huge da database of the, those voices. Well, so for me, I'm a languages nerd and I am an open source nerd, and this was just sort of the perfect job for me. I'm really still quite impressed that they've decided to let me work with them. 

Matthew Revell: 

Thank you. I would l

Founder of the VirtualCoffee.io community, Bekah Hawrot Weigel, joins Ramón Huidobro and guest host Gift Ojeabulu for this episode of DevRel Book Club. Bekah shares how Susan Cain's book "Quiet" has helped her DevRel career.

Catch the video on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/up_bW3Fds90

Erin McKean is a lexicographer, documentarian, dressmaker, novelist, and the founder of the Wordnik online dictionary.

She is also Ramón and Matthew's guest for this episode of the DevRel Book Club. Erin shares how Kathy Sierra's book "Badass: making users awesome" has influenced her career in developer relations, open source, and technical documentation.

Watch the video on YouTube or use your favourite podcast app to hear the audio episode.

https://youtu.be/1dI4I9M_0gc

Developer relations is a lot like art. There's a blank canvas you need to fill. Often, that can be intimidating to the point of making it hard to even get started.

In this episode, Adam DuVander shares how Steven Pressfield's The War of Art has helped him to overcome "resistance", which is an idea presented in the book as an outside force that stops us from pursuing our creative endeavours. Join Ramón, Matthew, and Adam as they dive into what the book has to offer and look at some of its more controversial elements.

https://youtu.be/lODDFV6h8bc

Technical Community Builder Erin Mikail Staples joins Matthew and Ramón to share how Shannon Mattern's book "A City is not a Computer" has impacted her career.

https://youtu.be/fFcqL2rr7MY

Tessa Mero joins Matthew and Ramón to share how the book The First 90 Days has influenced her career in DevRel.

https://youtu.be/dzIUk_OXTOA

During their discussion, they cover:

02:55: How meeting with an executive coach has helped Tessa frame her DevRel career progression
07:20: The idea of achieving break even in a new role
10:10: How to handle getting promoted to a position where you manage people you've previously been working with
16:11: Is it harder for DevRel people to reach break even due to needing to learn the vendor's technology?
27:49: Preparing yourself for a transition and making sure you don't transfer wholesale the things that worked at your last job
31:49: Non-obvious things learned from moving to new roles
40:20: Understanding how more senior roles affect the weight people give to your requests.

Follow Tessa on Twitter

Buy the book: Amazon US, Amazon UK