The State of DevRel in Web3 with Bianca Buzea, Nader Dabit, Steph Orpilla, Vitto Rivabella & Leilani

so now I think we're ready to start uh I'll start by introducing myself my name is Bianca Busa I'm the developer relations engineer at balancer and today with me I have some special guests I have Victor ravela a lead developer experience at Alchemy javito hi there hi everyone thank you for inviting me today Steph or Villa developer relations engineer at polygon Leilani letting them product manager at covalent and another David developer relations director of Ave and lens and also founder of developer Dao okay so we're gonna start with some specific anecdotes and stories from your experience as devrose and then we're gonna look at the broader image so my first question for you is how did you become a devrel what's your story in one two sentences you want an honest answer is by mistake uh no actually I come from an art background so before joining web free I was just weird feedback I was a VFX supervisor in the movie industry so I was making like 3D models for the movie industry and when I got into coding my biggest issue and I think a lot of people are approaching recording has this issue is actually understanding documentation or understanding where to tap into like web free is such a complex technology you need to understand where to start you need to understand what kind of Technologies you want to use you need to understand what kind of products you want to use and so very generally what happened is that I started translating documentation and creating content on Twitter and I started noticing that a lot of people found value into these and we're like wow now I understand how this works now I understand how to develop this and that and of course Network effect I think social medias use the right way a very very powerful and what happened is that I ended up running panels and spaces on on Twitter mainly and at a certain point I remember Alan from Alchemy she's our project manager at the time was lead Debra she was like oh my God we should definitely collaborate I was like well I probably want to apply and then I met that guy there that is that guy in Tech of course Albert and we started working together and met another staff started working together as Deborah's but yeah no that's the story super short was super enjoying to teach people how to develop in a very digestible way but then we can get into it later for me it really was an accident I was a software developer at a Fame company and it's actually Patrick's fault that I'm in crypto sorry Patrick but I got really bored at my job and I saw either a tutorial or something on the chain link blog and I didn't actually finish it I never finished tutorials even though I'm sure they're very very great and high quality love you Patrick but I didn't finish it and instead of building a lottery I ended up building something totally different and I realized that I like hacking and exploring and it just didn't align well with what I was doing in web 2 I like to explore phase of development more than the expand and extract phases so I just kind of realized I wanted to be on The Cutting Edge and Deborah was really great for that because it lets you play with so many different Technologies the whole job is to try out new things and learn new things so it's been very fun uh I fell into this by accident as well um it's quite a web free journey I guess I actually joined covalent first a couple years ago in The Alchemist program that they had which was a community program for learning more about blockchain and um I didn't really have any technical background I still kind of don't I studied economics but in that program I was learning how to use the API and I actually just got really interested that it was something that I could teach myself and I got kind of deeper and deeper and deeper and then met a couple people from the company including Harish who's actually our lead Debra who's here and I was really fortunate to be able to get to learn from people around me and actually come on and join full-time in a full-time role so I got a job out of it and then once I was in the company I moved from marketing product devrel kind of a bit of everything which is also I guess a bit of a classic web three story and I just really fell in love with the developer experience and going to hacker icons and actually seeing how incredible it is that people want to build something nobody's built before explore new tools really help each other have these fun teams and also not needing to really have too much experience that's what I'm trying to do now in this space is kind of make it accessible for people like me I guess who just want to learn more and are curious and get easily intimidated so I'm trying to kind of make it less intimidating too um so I started getting into developer education pretty early on I founded a couple of like meetups and coding schools in Mississippi where I'm from where we don't really have a lot of that stuff especially back in the day and kind of naturally evolved into opening like a training company where I taught software Engineers how to build mobile apps using react native and JavaScript and one of my clients was Amazon and then Amazon hired me to do devrel at that time because I was getting kind of bored doing the same thing over and over and then I got bored with cloud and I discovered blockchain and web 3 really really fascinated by it and have been in this space for about two years first joined the graph protocol then I worked briefly with Celestia now I'm with Lynn's protocol and Ave and I'm having a lot of fun and I'm really honored to be here with like really great panel of people here so thank you so I heard a lot on this panel like what specific actions you guys took and what was your journey I would like now to know what are the specific skills you think a devil should have yeah I mean I think that it really um is a combination of technical skills and not technical skills usually for the most part but I think it depends on the size of the devrel team if you have a very large Deborah team people can be more specialized in what they're good at so they don't need to be good at everything and the smaller teams would be better suited with like a well-rounded person but I think if you are just generally wanting to be good you want to be you know good at coding to some extent being able to explain Technologies to developers and also being a good communicator and someone that's good like with community and stuff like that so if you have those two characteristics and then you start having like the focus of building in public and sharing what you're doing I think those three things put together typically make a good Deborah yeah I I completely agree but I would also just add from my perspective um just a willingness to really like actually want to learn from the people that you're also helping because I feel like it's really two-way so for me what's been really nice is anyone that comes to the booth or that I meet at events like this often teaches me something more than I know and then I can accumulate that and share it with community members and I feel like the circulation of knowledge is what really really is great and if you're willing to be a part of that and like keep that going then you can boost your develop our community a lot and make it an exciting space to be aside from just like the hard skills that they may need but kind of retention for what I've seen uh it you need kind of something more you need a little bit of magic and Spark and for it to be fun for people so I try to do that with the content that I create and I don't know if I do a good job of that but I definitely try to do that and yeah just to make it like an enjoyable experience for me I think it's the ability to learn and be curious I don't think our jobs stop where our companies do if that makes sense you have to understand more of the ecosystem so like keeping track of what launches are happening like chain link functions for example launched this week it's huge and it's going to be incredible so I think being willing to learn about things outside of your day-to-day job is important because that way you can talk to developers and say hey I understand what you're asking here's this other solution that maybe you don't know about yet and being that person who can guide them to something that will make their products make sense and have better product Market fit and just integrate with solutions that exist instead of rebuilding the wheel totally I loved all of your answers I think the thing with devrels is that there are two distinct parts right on one hand you're a marketer for like developers you're a marketer and for marketing you're a developer and there are different skills for both groups so as a marketer and a developer first you need to be able to translate complex technical things into human digestible words and that's kind of the most complex part because once you start being curious once you start experimenting with these Technologies once you start learning about these Technologies and that's that requires some technical background so definitely if you want to go like on a bullet point list on what you need to know as a devrel is probably knowing how to code and then there's these other part is like knowing how to write documentations knowing how to create content that can teach other people to code now on the other hand there is this development part and I totally agree with you you need to be curious and that means a lot of things especially in web free our main and core job is onboarding people into our ecosystem not just into our like companies right my job daily job is not just onboarding people into using alchemy that is kind of limiting but is onboarding people into developing web free and that requires a lot of curiosity a lot of willingness to willingness to explore a lot of willingness to understand how the underlying technology works so to tldr your your question I think on one hand is being able to connect with people being able be inquiriers to learn from other people being curious to interact with them understand what are their needs so it's kind of like a therapist some some way on the other hand yeah for sure right you talk with these people and sometimes the hardest part when you're talking with people is not just asking them Yo what do you need because people were like want to answer you is understanding what their needs are and then going back to your company your engineers and be like okay wait a second this is what actually people need this is what actually we should actually develop on the other hand as a marketer you need to promote these things I heard a lot about learning marketing strategies learning about different Technologies learn and be curious proposed by staff which I totally second that now I'm curious like how do you guys think your own skills have evolved while being in this role sorry I didn't hear the question how your skills have evolved during this role as Deborah no one supposed to answer this question I'm a completely different person but not just because of since I started being a Deborah but since I joined web free web free is a lot right you have a lot of different people coming from a lot of different backgrounds you have artists you have developers like die hard like low level Engineers that are talking things that I have no idea what they're talking about so I think first and foremost I became a better listener I learned how to ask questions that's really hard um it's not just like asking random questions but it's like asking the right question at the right time and asking yeah things that really you want to know about that's the first thing definitely super important learning developers marketing there is this book I didn't really read the book but I love the title that is developers marketing doesn't exist that is so true and this is something you need to learn because developers are the hardest to to be sold right when they see an advertisement on Twitter they just skip over when they see an advertisement on YouTube they just skip over that's not how it works you need to find a way to interact with them and then of course as a developer experimenting a lot learning how to code better and coding clearly because at that point you're sharing your code with other people so you're not just not like okay I want to make my cloud the most optimized possible it's like how can I make my code readable and on top of that creating content so all of these things together and plus that's really difficult I don't know folks if you have the same experience but being in between marketing and Engineering it's it's hard right because you need to translate this space and Market there won't understand what engineering is saying and Engineering want to understand what marketing you say and so yeah I think communication is the the biggest thing I learned yep marketing is definitely like something that I didn't have skills in before I talked to prod product and project people and other devs so I was used to explaining things very technically but you have to also be able to talk non-technically so that people understand what you're saying and oftentimes yeah you're the person communicating between the quora engineering team and the marketing team so that they're not saying the wrong things which which sometimes does happen um but yeah I think I've grown in those ways and also just getting used to kind of this social media aspects of this job like I said I came from development and so now it's just different getting used to being like okay now I have to have a YouTube thumbnail going I didn't know this about solidity you know or like top five Patrick's not calling anyone out uh but yeah so that's some that's something I definitely have been growing at and still am not great at but I learned from my peers and they're great at this so yeah um I think for me the biggest learning curve and the skill that I've probably developed most of this job is trying to just explain Concepts and systems and kind of the Frameworks of things rather than actually you know writing the code or saying line by line this is what you do because that way when I can create some sort of like analogy that everybody understands or really simplify the concept or break it down into like a really high level explanation I can kind of reuse that I guess when it comes to talking to engineering and marketing or all different departments but it's also like trying to make the content approachable so again I know I go back to like Learners and beginners a lot but as somebody that's in that position I don't I don't want to read like two sentences and say okay I'm not going to understand this so I guess trying to make everything really high level all the time which is really hard to do especially the more specific and the more granular you can go with a tutorial but really bringing it back and just always trying to make things simplistic and go back to the roots and like why it's important is always something that I'm working on um I think that one of the things for me that's changed the most is how I approach learning a new topic and there's like hacks that you just start learning over time and the more that you can learn and distill and teach the more effective you are at scale so if we start kind of identifying these little hacks so things might be like a new piece of software comes out you want to be someone who understands and kind of teaches that you kind of know which GitHub repos to look you know how to search for things you know how to kind of like take all these Technologies and distill them down for yourself to understand them in order to kind of teach them so for me it's been more about like learning quickly and like learning different hacks to learn a lot more quickly for me so so we talked about evolving skills now let's look a bit about evolving priorities and this question is for you another so I would love to see more devrels out there at the sea level something that you're doing so can you talk a bit about how your priorities have evolved since you joined a place at the sea level at the sea table yeah I mean I think the ultimate goal is to be effective at scale and you know you kind of completely will be changing your priorities every day and every you know as things change different companies change so for me it's been more about like what are the most scalable ways for me to be effective and help people and I kind of reevaluate that every day and also depending on where I work it's also going to change a lot so a lot at Abe and lens it's different than when I was at Celestia and that was different than I was at the graph so I think it the the unfortunate answer for me would be it depends but in general it's about trying to be effective at scale which I think is ultimately going to help the most people thank you anyone else wants to add about evolving priorities maybe little you're with Alchemy University Shiloh Community University do you want me to chill I can University so I can share it so subscribe to our community building university.alchemy.com is completely free just kidding um I think I love what you said it is being effective at scale this is super hard like as a Gabrielle you get pinged constantly with a bunch of things again you are the point of contact between engineering and marketing and they both have different priorities every single time so you need first and foremost to understand how to context switch we were talking about this I think a couple of days ago that context switching as a devrel is really hard and but it's also a priority right because you need to learn that to be effective at your job but I think on top of that I when I started it as a Deborah I thought like okay um being big on social media is great um talking with people creating content is amazing but I think especially in web free my priority over time became education education web free is so important why that because we need to import more people so that was the first thing but second also learning how to communicate effectively being ruthless with your time understanding how to handle your schedule in a way that doesn't of course make you completely crazy and at the same time it's still effective at scale and you can help all the Departments so priorities change every single day based on the market based on the demand based on the people that you're working with based on your ideas as a devrel you have a lot of ownership right so you can think okay this is a tool that we should develop this is something that we should talk about and that becomes a priority because you understand there is like a market Gap or a lead there so I think over time even today my priorities are constantly changing based on yeah what the people need and what the users need yeah and just to add on to that I think scaling has a different meaning in devrel than it does in development and part of scaling for me is making things self-service both internally and externally so like I need self-service things to give to my marketing team and to my developer teams so that they're talking to each other effectively and they know what the other people know about each other and then I need resources and documents to make self-service all the new products and developments for our developer communities because they need to know kind of like where the collection of resources is where the docs are what's up to date and what's not so having all of those things in docs that I can easily share has been really effective for me because instead of explaining something to someone I'm just like oh check out this doc or look at this this is where I have it and that way they have a point so they don't have to ask me a question until they get through it and then if they still have the question I'm totally open to answering it and I'll add it to the doc super quickly I think this is super important can you expand a little bit on what cell surveying content is and how it helps you the other day so self-service is just something that [Music] down uh there's this concept of bus factor in engineering or I guess the nicer way to put it is like Lottery Factor like if I win the lottery I'm piecing out or if I get hit by a bus I'm also peacing out so hopefully I documented everything that my co-workers and everyone needs to know so that they're not fully dependent on me um I would also add priorities are definitely always changing in the devrel role because you're so dependent on the product itself and especially if you're in a fast-moving company or if you're earlier Stage Company I mean you have a general road map and sometimes people really stick to that and other times something comes out of the blue and you just add a new feature in two weeks and you need to create content so that people know how to use that so being adaptable I think is like a really really huge asset especially in devrel because not only do you need to figure that stuff out and you also need to be able to help other people figure that stuff out and sometimes you're not going to know everything up until like maybe the day that it happens this Communications who knows but things move really fast in web3 so definitely we'll keep you on your toes so so far we looked mostly at your specific uh anecdotes experiences let's go big Broad and look at the bigger picture so why are devrel people important for the web free ecosystem um right off the bat web 3 is like incredibly difficult to understand for a lot of people even if they are developers and have a developer background I mean web3 is like a completely different Beast if you walk around and look at the booths I mean we've come a long way but even the way that we describe the protocols and the projects and the blockchains and everything it's very full of jargon and different terminology that people aren't used to and that just permeates to like any single person that's coming into web3 whether it's a developer or not so especially in terms of like increasing adoption and getting people into this ecosystem and getting people building it's super super important to have develop people I think who can simplify onboarding and show you some kind of like end goals or what completed projects look like give you inspiration anything that makes it easier to see why the work matters or how you can actually get from point A to point B so I would uh that's a really good answer by the way um that essentially when you look at web 2 quite unquote uh the way that developer marketing works there you know it's about Network effects because you want as many people building on your product as possible therefore you can kind of have metrics and make money obviously but I think it's even Amplified in web 3 because the more users that you have on your protocol the more valuable your protocol becomes the more people then come to build on it so it's kind of The Snowball Effect so if you can get out in front of your competition you can kind of get more people using and building it starts becoming kind of a really hard to uh breach moats that you might be able to build for a protocol that's definitely more you know apparent in the blockchain and the web 3 space because of the way that these networks are valued based often on usage and since we're just building protocols the more developers that are building on your protocol the more apps that will be be built therefore the more users so it just increases that kind of Snowball Effect I think great answers I love that I think there's another thing that is more low level that is just like if you have to explain something that can be a technology that can be your community well if you ask a marketer probably to talk about account obstruction that's probably not it won't be the best explanation for many different reasons it's a matter of skills right and if you ask an engineer a very low level engineer to talk about a community or from a community that probably won't work super well either just because their skills are completely different and they dedicated their lives to other things learning other things me personally I'm a mediocre engineer I'm a Docker marketing but the two things together actually make a good combo because if you ask me to explain something like a protocol I'm able more or less to explain it in a way that is digestible if you explain if you ask me to create a community or start posting content and creating content I can more or less do it probably because I'm more like I don't know energetic than for a skill is a skill so I think devrels again are super important and it's just because they're Deborah because they put together developer and relations and so they right near like right in the middle between marketers and Engineers again and this bridge is almost too much undervalued in many many different ways I cannot see a world where all of these users or tons of these people that are here today would have been on board into web free without the presence of amazing devrels like the ones that we have here today I love the idea of combining different skills to get your superpower maybe now we look a bit and each of us go around and talk about your favorite perk about being a devrel I think it's this one exactly what we're living right now and so I think contacts and interacting with the community breathing what they're breathing right understanding what they're building understanding more having a view a very high level view on the future of this domain and talking with people I personally love talking with people to people I personally love learning from them I personally love meeting bright Minds like the ones that we have today on the panel and yeah that's I couldn't imagine imagine myself sitting like 12 hours a day in front of a computer without having an interaction whereas I can imagine myself sitting six hours in front of a computer coding and then the other six hours talking with people about all the things that are coded all the things that our Engineers have called in and yeah that's that's probably the best part I love being the first Builder on something new because I get to kind of tinker and I also get to put on my product hat and be like oh this is what's missing or why aren't you doing this so I get to be curious about that and also give people the first examples of how to use a technology I don't understand things usually unless I see an example or like a design example I think that's how a lot of us learn we're not coming up with things from scratch or at least we're validating our ideas by like looking at the ways other people who are super smart are doing them so it's interesting to me to be one of those examples and then to see how people take that and challenge some of my assumptions and I like working with like super talented devs like all of you that's probably the best part I think my favorite perk is like at the end of the day or at the end of the hackathon actually just seeing the completed projects and getting like the wow factor from things I've never thought about or people that completely like come out of nowhere and surprise you and used your product to do this thing that you never knew was possible and also it's that like amazing connection that you get when somebody passionate is telling you about something that they created and I get to experience that a lot which I really love it makes me like a happy person to see other people's work come to life and be a tiny part of that so it's a really gratifying job actually I really enjoy all of that aspect yeah there's a lot of stuff to love about this job you get to travel and all this other stuff is cool but mine is very similar to hers you know I'm a self-taught developer everything that I learned to become employed was due to people going out there teaching uh open sourcing their code helping answer stuff on Twitter all this stuff was for free and once I became in the position to do that I wanted to give back and essentially Deborah was getting paid to do that to teach people and help them and when someone comes up to you and they're like hey I got a job or I built a company and sold it or whatever because of something that you did it's like a really gratifying thing and that's honestly one of the most enjoyable Parts about this job you guys have been selling very well the job of their Rel we're almost we're at the end of the time but one quick tip for someone who wants to become a devrel oh sorry building public yeah obviously that I guess I would cataract in public building public it's both of those things yeah and take advantage of events like this I guess talk to as many people as you can learn from as many people as you can and then you'll be able to view that knowledge to other people as well yep all that so I think the biggest thing is just getting started and I think lots of people are like oh how do I get started being a devil well just start creating content just posting building public post what you're learning about explain what you've learned explain a code that you've written talk with people try to understand what they're building so it's really about go public be do not care like everyone makes mistake I think the biggest problem is that people are like oh my God if I go public and start posting my own things people will judge me yes but people will judge you anyway so just stop worrying about that right just start posting start putting your stuff out there people will appreciate that and when you have the first person coming to you and be like yo I started web free because of you folks you all know it's the best feeling ever you're like wow I changed someone else's life unfortunately we're at the end of the time I would have loved to continue but let's give a big round of applause to our panelists foreign