Let's first address the elephant in the room, shall we? Who is a DevRel? What does a DevRel have to do? How is it any different from marketing?
It's been a month at Keploy as a DevRel so this blog will be written from a one-month-old DevRel's perspective. A DevRel's (Developer Relations) work includes managing community engagement, technical writing, evangelism and building relations with developers who are the primary users of those companies. It is to help developers use the company's product and at the same time address their concerns by suggesting improvements internally. Developer advocacy is also about hacking growth and helping your company win. This is the high-level view of what the role is about but it's specifications differ from company to company.
I got my first DevRel internship at Keploy, which is a no-code API testing platform. I was introduced to this role and this opening at Keploy through one of my friends, who has been interning in similar roles for about 2 years now. I love to engage with the community and watching her do so well, I decided to give this role a chance. We built the DevRel team from scratch at Keploy which meant brainstorming new ideas and creating our own path ahead.
Let's look back at the journey till now. We work in sprints of two weeks each, so at the start of the sprint I decided my OKRs along with the rest of the team. On commencing the sprint I reached out to numerous colleges and arranged sessions to raise more awareness about Keploy. In these sessions we give an overview about APIs. However, we felt that this short session was not enough to explain how to build an API. We decided to start Keploy API Fellowship to teach the students interested in getting their hands dirty with code and delving deeper into APIs. I and my team curated content for the Keploy API Fellowship, which would be a two week learning saga to learn about and code APIs, understand what is API testing and integrate Keploy into your APIs for automating testing. We plan to launch it by next month.
I wrote a few blogs on API testing, connected more with various new communities, curated content and managed social media too. All the work was mutually divided amongst the team. We had regular stand-up meetings, which were a new concept for me but I soon realised it's importance. Our stand-up meets helped the team know what everyone was working on and stay on the same page with respective to how things were being done. The stand-up was also a place where we could discuss any problems we were facing. One of the most exciting parts about the stand-ups in this first month for me were the learnings from our founder. We got to read about and understand many concepts and growth metrics that are used in the industry. Also, I will soon be starting my training on how to take user interviews.
I recognize the things I did well but there were some things that didn't go as planned. I learnt that writing is a skill that improves with consistency. You may think you're not a good writer or that you don't have much knowledge but that is not true. Start writing and you will find, you have things to write about. Be consistent with writing and you'll become better at it slowly.
It has been a great learning experience overall and I hope it continues to be so. Please feel free to message me on LinkedIn in case of any doubts, I'd be happy to help.