The Art of Landing a DevRel Role

In this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we’re focusing on the increasingly valuable role of DevRels. Francesco Ciulla, Developer Advocate at the open-source daily.dev community — which has more than 100,000 daily active users — joins us for a DevRel deep dive.

Listen as Francesco explains how a career change in his thirties set him on a path towards becoming a developer, being hired by the European Space Agency and, eventually, landing a role as a developer advocate, crediting much of his success on his ability to leverage social media to advance his career. 

Outside of his personal story, Francesco shares his thoughts on connecting with devs, why YouTube is such a powerful platform, and settles the debate on the kind of content developers are most interested in. 

“It's better to be Batman on one social media than Mr. Nobody on all the platforms. So having one strong platform, I think is the key.”

Episode Highlights

• (0:00) Accelerate State of DevOps survey
• (3:05) Francesco's career change to programming
• (10:15) How to leverage social media
• (16:10) Best ways to connect with devs as a DevRel
• (22:28) Challenges of being a DevRel
• (25:42) What platforms should DevRels be using?
• (30:07) Community building on YouTube
• (33:12) Technical vs non-technical content

Episode Excerpt

Conor Bronsdon: I'm sad we have a stop here in a few minutes, but this is great. I'm really loving the opportunity to dive into this with you. And I want to talk in particular about something you alluded to, which is so many devs flocked to YouTube as a place to learn and grow.

What has your time on YouTube taught you about community building?

Francesco Ciulla: Yes. I do the same. So when I want to start a new topic, I usually flock to YouTube, as you said. I think that YouTube is great; you think YouTube is a great platform for learning, but also, as a content creator and from a community perspective, it's great.

I also created a community of content creators. We've also connected with devs now, so YouTube is a great platform. I think the best will be to just focus on one single topic. For a while, I didn't do this perfectly, but let's say that this is the advice that I give. So choose one topic and focus on the topic, and this is where you really can build trust.

And you can also build your presence, not just a social media presence, but content creation. I know many DevRels who got the role because they started the YouTube channel. I don't think it's my case because it was more like for this human interaction, but let's say I know people, I dunno, they started a Python YouTube channel, and they got hired by a company that uses Python as a main language, for example, And JavaScript frameworks, front frameworks. I think that having a good YouTube channel, I think it's, it's really important. But it really takes a lot of time to create if you're not a millionaire or your parents are not millionaires, probably. Starting a YouTube channel is not the decision. The money decision.

So we have this misconception that, like YouTubers, they are all millionaires. The truth is not exactly that, but YouTube allows you to do one thing, to reach out to reach people for free. We can say so. YouTube has this embedded search where people can discover you. So getting discovered in these hard times really means a lot

It creates a direct connection. I don't need a TV to invite me to reach out to someone. I don't need a newspaper to invite me. It'll be nice. I've also appeared in a couple of newspapers, That's good to have, but it's not the only way I can reach out to people. So what YouTube is great because it creates this direct connection with other people.

I can create a tutorial about DevRel, or for example, I started a YouTube series about DevRel. It's called DevRel Unlocked, and it's me talking about DevRel. So you can literally do whatever you want. And this is, what really makes YouTube a powerful platform, let's say as a content creator.

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah, I think people underestimate the fact that YouTube is still the second-largest search engine in the world. A ton of people flock there to look for how-to tutorials and interesting content. And I know you've done a lot of different things there. You've covered a lot of different topics.

Read the full episode transcript.