Well, my “This Week in DevRel” series has turned into this “couple of months” in DevRel. In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” And I feel like a lot of the last two months, I’ve been moving fast and not taking the time to look around. I’m working on it. This post is more of a highlight reel; I plan on writing a reflection on how I plan on building time into looking around more than once in a while later in the month.
Highlights
Conferences
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to give my talk Does your Org Need a Community at MagnoliaJS this year and to attend Momentum Conf. I did a lot of learning at these conferences. Some of it was when I was listening to talks, including one on community and one on burnout. Some of it was talking to other people in the field. I gravitate towards people who are doing some type of community building, whether or not that’s in their job description. Having this conversations helps me to get a pulse on the wider tech community, bounce ideas off of community professionals, and explore new ideas and initiatives.
Hacktoberfest
It’s my favorite time of the year! This year I participated as a mentor, contributor, and maintainer. I got to work on my postpartum wellness app with others and launch a new Deepgram project as a maintainer that I really enjoyed working on. It’s a chrome extension that allows the user to get transcripts in a browser tab, and we’re working on functionality to have translation available as well. I plan on keeping this going as long as the ideas are flowing and folks find it helpful. If you want to check it out, here’s the GitHub repo. I also supported the Virtual Coffee Hacktoberfest Initiative. If you want to read more about that, check out Dan Ott’s post.
Livestreams
I did THREE in October! I did some TypeScript on Virtual Coffee’s TypeScript Tuesday Twitch Stream. I was also a guest on Mia Moore’s stream where we talked about all things open source, and I also did a Project Showcase stream with Appwrite, where we walked through Deepgram open source projects and talked about some of the ways we try to make our repos contributor friendly.
Blogging
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to have the cadence I want with blogging, but I did get a couple of posts in, including this one on [Open Source Projects for Hacktoberfest] (https://dev.to/deepgram/open-source-projects-for-hacktoberfest-2022-4cia), yesterday’s post on imposter syndrome and a new one on 5 Reasons to Contribute to Open Source Projects that will be up soon. The good news is, our monthly challenge for Virtual Coffee is Let’s Write 100k words together!, so you’ll be reading a lot more from me this month.
Hackathon
We ran a hackathon internally with the Learn Build Teach Community. We provided support, ran a couple of workshops, and are in the judging stages. This is the first time we ran an internal community hackathon, so this was a real learning experience. As part of the post-hackathon experience, we’re doing evaluation of what worked and what didn’t, and what our strategy will be going forward.
Twitter Spaces
I’m back on the Twitter Space game! I’m running them through the @DeepgramAI Twitter account. I’ve been doing them most Wednesdays at 1pm ET. So if you’re not following us, you might want to. Another option is to check out our Events discussion in our Community Forum where I’m posting our spaces at least a week in advance. If you have questions or comments before the space, feel free to drop them in there and we’ll talk about it on the space.
I think this is a pretty good overview of the things that I work on as a technical community builder. Oh, and one last achievement I want to share. I received one of the Twilio spotlight awards. If you want to know more about it and me, you can check out the Business Insider article Being a Technical Community Builder requires a lot of pivoting, versatility, and getting outside of my comfort zone. But if I wasn’t spending time getting out of my comfort zone, then it wouldn’t be that fun, would it?