In this RedMonk Conversation, Jeremy Meiss, Director of Developer Relations at OneStream, discusses the current state of DevRel with Kate Holterhoff. They chat about the importance of engaging front-end developers, the role of content and community, and the nuances of influencer marketing. Jeremy shares insights on how to effectively reach and engage developers, the significance of quantifying DevRel efforts, and the evolving landscape of developer engagement in the tech industry.
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Transcript
Kate Holterhoff (00:12)
Hello and welcome to this RedMonk conversation. name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, and joining me today is Jeremy Meiss, director of DevRel at OneStream. Jeremy is alumni of CircleCI, Solace, Auth0, XDA Developers, Ericsson, Sprint Nextel, and Hallmark, among others. I’ve just listed a little sampling here. He’s also involved in the Linux Foundation, a phenomenal public speaker. Jeremy, I am just so excited that you have finally Finally joined me on RedMonks podcast, the Monkcast today.
Jeremy Meiss (00:45)
MonkCast. That’s that’s great. No Kate, I’m glad to be here. I will say it’s great that you could fit it in with my know busy schedule and my assistant and all. No really it was a matter of me finding the time and then going oops sorry and finally finding the right time. So fantastic. I’m glad to be here.
Kate Holterhoff (01:03)
Yes. well, I am so glad you did make the time. What’s great about our schedules and what we do, Jeremy, is that we often meet at conferences and I’ll just kind of scan the room. And if I see blue, I’m like, my God, Jeremy’s here. And I won’t always know that you’re at the same conference and you’ll just be there. And it really makes my day.
Jeremy Meiss (01:25)
That’s just, Well, I appreciate that. No, it’s very much the same, especially I like, and you can attest, I’ll text you and the other monkers. Is that what we’re calling monkers? Sure. Monks, the other monks. Sure. In fact, you all should have your own monk hobbits. Habits, habits? Habits, not hobbits. That’s the thing with the hairy feet. I don’t want to see James’s feet, but.
Kate Holterhoff (01:36)
Yeah. Monks, usually, yeah.
Jeremy Meiss (01:56)
or Steve’s really for that matter. yeah, I will often text you all to find out, are you going to be at said Conference? Because I definitely want to meet up and hear what you all are doing and hear what you’re all talking about and ask you questions about said Tech and whatever.
Kate Holterhoff (02:14)
Absolutely. And you are an expert at that. I still feel like I’m learning from you. There’s a lot to conferencing the right way. participate, I would say, at a 10. That usually involves karaoke, attending all the things, knowing all the people, and usually giving a kick-ass paper. Or I’m saying paper. You can tell I’m an academic. A kick-ass presentation.
Jeremy Meiss (02:39)
Yeah, very much academic. I have 12 hours of college credit to my name, so don’t put me in the same, don’t say paper, because I’m going to break out in hives.
Kate Holterhoff (02:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m indeed recovering as an academic. It’s still part of my lexicon. always, be kind. I’m slowly sloughing off the trappings of my background there. and Jeremy, you have correctly brought up beer for us. So what is the appropriate beer for our RedMonk beers on the MonkCast today.
Jeremy Meiss (03:12)
Yes, so the beer that I am enjoying is called a Float On Limoncello. Let’s put it in the frame. It’s from Pathlight Brewing in Kansas City, which no longer has a retail establishment as of last month. But it is and vanilla sour ale with lactose for those that are dairy allergic. There you go. Dairy intolerant.
Kate Holterhoff (03:34)
Intolerant? Yeah.
Jeremy Meiss (03:37)
Lactose intolerant would actually be for that But yes, it’s it’s very good. I’m not a big fan of sours, but I started to find some sours that I like or that are not Too like a stringent that makes your you know, like Yeah, I don’t need to pucker any more than I already do and so ⁓
Kate Holterhoff (03:50)
Yeah, you pucker.
Jeremy Meiss (03:57)
Yeah, so I found some and this one’s actually ⁓ good. It does not taste like a limoncello, the correct term is. Sure, limoncello. ⁓ But it is good.
Kate Holterhoff (04:03)
limoncello, yeah. I like a sour ale. Those are good, yeah. Okay, amazing. Well, glad that we’re keeping it on brand. Red Monk, beers, Jeremy, the whole thing. into it.
Jeremy Meiss (04:19)
And with Monktoberfest coming up soon. Yeah, I mean, I’m just kidding. And we’re already in July.
Kate Holterhoff (04:22)
I know, it’s coming up in October.
Yeah, let’s not go there. The year is halfway done. Jeremy, I am so excited to talk to you about all the things. So let’s begin with what you’re up to at OneStream. What sort of projects are you working on?
Jeremy Meiss (04:30)
Okay. Yeah, so OneStream Software, joined coming up on a year now. We’re at 11, almost 11 months. But they, I am building a developer relations and developer experience discipline at the company. As they’ve expanded, they went public a few months, a month before, a couple weeks, month before I joined, which, you know, is on brand as well. I miss all of the fun. But they are, as they’re expanding as a company, they need to start reaching the
developers who are implementing APIs ⁓ and such within their financial systems for accountants and so ⁓ building up our developer experience which we didn’t have and so that’s that’s been my main thing right now but also once we have that in place also doing the developer experience side of that because I’ve ⁓ I feel like the Farmers Insurance guy I know a thing or two because I’ve seen a thing or two at this point
Developer Relations and Developer Experience. And so yeah, that’s what I’m doing there. So right now, the biggest project is around, like I said, Developer Experience, but really focusing on ⁓ bringing some developer documentation into play and really driving a lot of our APIs, which we had a lot of APIs within the system, but not something that could be accessed from external sources to
build those integrations and streamlining processes and such within accounting departments and all that. So yeah, I am building that within the company and that has been quite a journey. Pretty exciting. I’m actually getting back to doing a little bit of development
six months to nine months that I have not done in years. So that’s been good. I don’t know that…
that if anyone code reviewed that they would feel the same way. But I feel good about it. So that’s all that really matters. That’s the developer experience, right? I feel good about it. Who cares? Right? Sure.
Kate Holterhoff (06:37)
That’s right, that’s right. ⁓ UX is right out. DevX is all the way. That’s all we care about.
Jeremy Meiss (06:41)
Yeah. It’s the new orange. DevX is the new orange. Doesn’t matter what the previous color was. DevX is the new orange.
Kate Holterhoff (06:49)
Yeah, we don’t we don’t talk about end users here. They’re really not important
Jeremy Meiss (06:53)
We can just deal with developer experience, because developers are the real kingmakers, as somebody mentioned in some book that became cool. Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (06:59)
Indeed. Somebody smart probably said that. Yeah, I get that. Okay, so they’re barely keeping you busy. you’re doing basically nothing APIs, documentation, writing a strategy. Yeah,
Jeremy Meiss (07:11)
Yep.
Kate Holterhoff (07:16)
like, it’s not much.
Jeremy Meiss (07:17)
AI does all that
Kate Holterhoff (07:18)
all right so we have not had a DevRel professional on the MonkCast in like a while. and that is a shame and that’s on me. so i want to begin with ⁓ let’s call it a DevRel state of the union. a lot of drama in DevRel in the past 12 months. has that cooled off? like where are we at? how do do the DevRel folks feel these days?
Jeremy Meiss (07:32)
Okay. Well, hey, I feel like I have to ask the requisite drama? What drama would you be thinking of? What? We’re not a bunch of theater kids. At least not all of us. Some of us still are. ⁓ No, I think it’s been an interesting time. ⁓
Kate Holterhoff (07:46)
Drama? Well, yes.
Jeremy Meiss (07:58)
you had, I mean for a long time and I’ve been kind of, I hate to say preaching it, but I’ve been screaming it pretty much the same I guess from the street corners ⁓ or the tech street corners, whatever that might be, ⁓ that we needed to change. We needed to really understand that as business changed and the need to really justify, like we needed to be able to justify what we’re doing.
Just like anybody else. We’re not special no matter what you know my mom used to tell me I’m not as special as I want to be and so like you’re gonna have to justify what you do because everybody does and so for years there’s been kind of a well, know, you can’t quantify what DevRel does it’s all very ⁓ Anecdotal there’s no actual Whatever the opposite of anecdotal is
There’s no quantifiable things. It’s all qualitative. Which is, I’m going to, I’ll not cuss and just say that’s BS. Or I’ll cuss and say it’s bullshit. You can edit out whatever you desire. Because it really is. Yes, there are certain things that you are qualitative. You kind of get a sense for it. And that as you have your ear to the ground and you’re hearing what’s going on, like,
Sure, that’s great. What people feel about the product. you have to be able to quantify things. And there are plenty of things you can quantify within developer relations. But it has to be tuned to what your company is doing, what the business is. And a lot of people in DevRel over the last 10, 12 years have not wanted to ⁓ have those conversations with the business ⁓ for whatever reason. I mean, I could probably list.
tons of them, but we don’t have nearly enough time and I don’t have nearly enough beer. ⁓ But the, and so the discipline has had to go through a lot of growing pains around that. ⁓ That’s part of why a lot of companies when they do layoffs, when they’re not the like random layoffs that companies started doing where it’s just, we’re going to do just a swath of people.
Doesn’t matter where they’re at and nobody really knows. When it’s targeted, DevRel organizations tend to be one of those that goes first. And that’s because you get, especially when they get rid of the whole DevRel org, is you’ve not quantified what you do. You’ve not really been able to show the value and trace everything back to your OKRs or whatever fancy way you have to track things.
You haven’t been able to relay that. ⁓ And so there’s been a shift in understanding. And of course, those companies, when they get rid of their DevRel and community teams, like within six months to a year, they’re hiring again. They’re going, whoops. We effed up. We forgot that we needed those people. They were actually doing this. And so I think there’s been that upheaval. A lot of people have been in and out of
different roles over the last year and a half, two years because of that. Some are still looking, but it’s been interesting. And so I think there’s, there’s been that shift. I’ve been advocating for a while and kind of wrote a number of things around this, but really been advocating that you, you’ve got to have those conversations. You’ve got to build relationships with your sales teams, got to have those relationships with your product and in marketing. If you’re not in marketing and
Like all these things are good. It doesn’t mean that you’re devaluing what you do. It doesn’t mean that you’re not being empathetic and it doesn’t mean that you’re not having the voice of the developer and you’re not being gently. You can do all of those things and still have a conversation with the sales team and also figure out what they’re looking for and how you can help support them and still be developer focused. Like those are not mutually exclusive. So yeah, it’s been an interesting time for the last couple of years.
Kate Holterhoff (12:01)
Okay, and have you seen hiring like leveling off? I mean we we heard about a lot of folks dissolving their programs. that there was no jobs. I saw many folks that seem pretty desperate on LinkedIn. ⁓ you know it’s sad
Jeremy Meiss (12:16)
There are, think for the most part, I wouldn’t say hiring’s come back, but it has picked up. You do see a lot of roles out there. The problem is that you also see a lot of roles that keep popping up. It’s because companies are terrible, the recruiting department’s terrible at doing recruiting, and LinkedIn is a giant dumpster fire when it comes to applying for roles, ⁓ and the bots are re-
Kate Holterhoff (12:20)
Okay.
Jeremy Meiss (12:40)
are crazy when it comes to that. And so I tell people, if you’re going to go apply for something, figure out what roles are out there. And then go to the company site to apply. Don’t just use LinkedIn, because you’re just lumping yourself in with all the other bad source material. so I think there is still some of that issue of
Are the rules that are out there actually real? are they just kind of throwing stuff out there to see who’s there? ⁓ When I was looking at a year and a half ago, there was multiple roles that would pop up and then would interview for it. And then they’d say, yeah, we already hired somebody. And then it’s like, OK. And then you’d see it again. You’d quiz them. They’re like, yeah, we’re just putting it out there. I’m like, OK. Whatever.
I won’t name names of those companies, ⁓ they, I think there is that there are some people that are still looking and have been looking for a while. And so there’s, but there is that, but I think most of the people I know for the most part have found something or either found something steady or still doing some consulting. ⁓ But it’s still tough across the board. But I am seeing companies start to hire and bring in. So yeah, answer.
Kate Holterhoff (13:58)
Yeah, and I’m curious, as I’ve talked to folks about their experience trying to find jobs as developers, what I’m hearing a lot of is it’s not AI yet. I mean, that’s ridiculous. But what it is is this sort of post-ZIRP economy, and there’s an offshoring thing happening. And that’s always been the case, I know. But I’m hearing of a lot of folks that are, experiencing their entire org being dissolved and moving overseas, either to South America, if it’s based in the US, or to India, So is that something where DevRel is also being offshored?
Jeremy Meiss (14:28)
I think some companies have tried to do it in the past and in fact there are some hate to call it snake oil, but there are some organizations or companies out there that offer, hey, you can go to a DevRel university and become a DevRel out of college. there is a pipeline of people that are trying to be this.
I’d say like an offshore kind of view of that. I keep seeing them pop up and I see them disappear. So I don’t really think it’s a thing, but I do see a lot more contracting or consulting or fractional DevRel kind of things popping up. So I’ve seen that which has been interesting because there are a lot of those anyways and have been around for a while. Yeah, some come and go and so I think there is a piece of that but I wouldn’t necessarily call that an offshoring kind of thing.
Kate Holterhoff (15:22)
No, I agree. that’s interesting though. I spoke to some folks who are doing the fractional CTO thing, the fractional CMO. I have not heard of fractional DevRel, but that’s something that you’re seeing.
Jeremy Meiss (15:35)
Yeah, I’ve seen a people do that, a few companies offer that as ⁓ a thing, whether it’s fractional or just contracting. Call it whatever you want, it’s contracting.
Kate Holterhoff (15:42)
Yeah, contracting. well that helps me. ⁓ as part of that state of the union, so we have already mentioned AI as one must, but are you seeing that AI is helping in particular tasks in the DevRel space?
Jeremy Meiss (15:59)
I have. I think some of it is just how you’re approaching it. think DevRel is about like authentic, empathetic interactions with people. ⁓ Obviously we know AI doesn’t do that, can’t do that.
because that’s just, it’s not authentic. And it’s not really an interaction. You’re just kind of interacting with a machine learning model with better compute. That’s all AI is right now. And so I think there’s a… piece of AI that I think if we embrace it and we know learn how to use it correctly and treat it like a junior dev and give it tasks to do and then come back and review those and validate that that’s what you want and that I think it works great for that and so in the context of
building out things within your DevRel organization. I think it works. think you can utilize AI to help figure out, hey, here’s the thing I want to do. Have it do some searching. know, Google’s deep research is a great thing ⁓ within that kind of stuff. ⁓ Like, you can use it to your advantage, but to produce final product? No. ⁓ Just the same as you wouldn’t want it to produce final production code.
But you can use it to produce some pretty good bare bones, stand something up to get an idea, like an MVP. then you can use it to that. Use it to your advantage. But to do a full on thing, no, I think that’s definitely doing a disservice to your users and to the company that’s employing you. I think there’s
There’s plenty of reasons of why you would use AI and why you could use AI to do a lot of different tasks. ⁓ Paige Bailey from Google ⁓ had a really great blog post about the different things that she’s like, she automated a lot of the repetitive, mundane daily tasks that she does every day that have to do with some reasoning and have to do with, you know, what are the top issues and.
that she should look at that are from a repo and like certain constraining things that you can have something like AI look at and streamline and automate some of that. And it’s not going to make final decisions, but it’s going to give you what you need. There are ways to do it, but you can definitely see those that have relied heavily on DevRel to do their job because the content is just not great. and it’s missing a lot of that personal piece.
Kate Holterhoff (18:40)
Yeah, was interested, ⁓ Shaundai Person she posted a thing on LinkedIn about how at Netflix they’re using it for writing documentation. And it seems like that sort of use case is pretty good. Like at least getting that first draft in, obviously you want to review it. But that’s the sort of thing that I’m seeing it, fixing a bottleneck. I mean, not many developers like to write documentation. It’s not a lot of fun, but it’s such an important piece
Jeremy Meiss (18:49)
Mm-hmm.
Kate Holterhoff (19:05)
Yeah, like an exceptional DevRel experience is having that up-to-date documentation,
Jeremy Meiss (19:09)
There was a great, and to plug another podcast, there was a great podcast that Matt Stratton did with Arrested DevOps podcast with Kat Morgan, what, so about a month ago, ⁓ that they talked about, you kind of like the AI ethics, but it, and it was really great, but they really dove into how to use it and how you can actually make it work for you without the finished product, but putting in the right constraints.
writing the right PRDs and writing ⁓ the documentation. All those things that could take you hours, ⁓ 30, 40 hours of work could be done in a couple hours and then you still are gonna have to come back and look at it. But it’s done a lot of that busy work and heavy lifting and then you come back and do the review and add what you need. So there’s
It was a great podcast, it really, I think, highlighted a lot of the ways you can make it work for you without having to ⁓ just let it do everything.
Kate Holterhoff (20:13)
yeah i love that that it’s it’s both the busy work and the heavy lifting because i totally agree where it’s like super important you gotta have it but at the same time it’s like ⁓ this is i said what i said like why do have to keep repeating myself like the code is here why do i have to show you how it works come on figure it out all right so part of the conversation around DevRel that i like to have is sort of
Jeremy Meiss (20:26)
Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (20:38)
parsing out types of developers. And so a conference that you and I have both attended is Render ATL. It is hosted in Atlanta. It is targeted to front end developers and content creators. And it’s been going on for what, four years, I think at this A while. Fifth year, gosh.
Jeremy Meiss (20:56)
think this was the last fifth year, I
Kate Holterhoff (21:00)
So been around for a while. Has a real following. A lot of folks there. It’s great presentations. And in the past, when you were at CircleCI, have had a pretty good experience there at the booth. And I found this super fascinating, because when you think about CircleCI, I didn’t tend to think of them as being targeted to front-end engineers.
And frankly, in the past, nobody’s targeted anything to front-end engineers. Like they didn’t, they weren’t perceived to have any purchasing power. And so I would love for you to talk about what is the value of DevRel reaching out to front-end engineers specifically, in 2025, Why do this?
Jeremy Meiss (21:32)
Great. think it has to go, it has to come down to, one is like total addressable market from a business perspective. What are the things that your company does that developers can use, whether it’s front end, back end, practitioners, ops, whatever you wanna call that.
⁓ It’s it’s going through that very real like understanding personas and then there’s always the edge cases that you don’t think about ⁓ and ⁓ I think for me, I think a great example of that would also be like ⁓ At KubeCon London Adriana and Marino gave a great talk on observability
from the context and from really OpenTelemetry of like there are a lot of use cases that are not just like code related.
understanding how your business processes are and if those processes aren’t working the way they’re supposed to and the results ⁓ like for instance Delta like it’s not so much the code as much as you can have planes you know the details on the planes when they land when they take it like but all the different metrics associated you can utilize OpenTelemetry observability type of systems to get that data
And that’s a great use case that we haven’t thought about before. ⁓ If we just kind of say, well, this is only for software developers. OK, great. Or this is only for back end. But what about those people that still have to do things that are still kind of related to your core business? How are you meeting them? And so when it came to the front end developer, ⁓
You know, I’ve done front end development, I’ve done back end, I’ve done just about everything over my 30 years in tech. And for me, was understanding that people still need CI/CD whether they are in…
know, front end or back end. The first time we were at Render, one of the first questions asked was, you know, well, why is CircleCI here? And I was like, ⁓ great opportunity. I turned it back and was like, why wouldn’t we be here? And the response was, well, we’re front end developers. We don’t need to know continuous integration. We don’t need to know, like, continuous deployment. We don’t need to know how that stuff works. We just kind of…
push it over the wall was kind of the way it was. And I’m like, that’s exactly why we’re here. Because it’s not about pushing it over the wall. It’s about how can you utilize these core principles of continuous integration, the continuous deployment? How can you put that into your day-to-day work and help with testing, help with feature flags, help with like all of these things are all part of CI/CD and overarching DevOps.
that we haven’t looked at, we haven’t thought about it that way. And they went, ⁓ and it turned out like that was a great show for us. First show back, which helped, but also like the number of conversations we had and the number of new customers we got as a company from that was very much front end driven. And a lot of the conferences we did over the next year at that point were kind of front end driven, but it was because there was this unmet market.
that we could speak to and that had actual means that CI/CD could meet. And so I think that’s the piece that, ⁓ especially DevRel organizations should definitely be looking at. But marketing is a larger ⁓ piece of that is what are the areas that are maybe not using it the way that you want to use it?
but still could use it, ⁓ whether that’s version control, whether that’s different databases, whether that’s ⁓ image compression, whatever the tech is, guaranteed there’s other ways that they can be used that you’ve not thought of. ⁓ And so get involved in those things. Figure out what those are and run a trial. See if it works. See if it resonates.
Kate Holterhoff (26:08)
and you saw good results from that right like yeah can you talk more about that yeah
Jeremy Meiss (26:11)
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, yeah, I mean, think it was over like that event and then a couple other events over the next three, four months ended up being about three, I don’t know, let me think, close to almost 350, 400,000 of pipeline.
just from those events and those were not like huge events they were like developer focused events and they were heavily on the I wouldn’t say heavily on the more ⁓ front-end II kind of side but it was because
You know, we were able to track what were the, the inbound, what was that opportunity and could track it through. And again, I worked with our sales teams. I worked with our marketing team, our marketing ops to figure out how can we know how this stuff is working for us.
And then could go back and look at it and say, hey, this worked for us. We should do it this next year. Or we could say, yeah, that didn’t really work, so we’re not going to do it. It gave us better data that we could make some decisions off of.
And that was repeated across whether it was for front end, whether it was for even just DevOps days of just reframing how we interacted with attendees and how we did things that were providing them with value. And I’m not talking about the tchotchkes and such, but giving them the opportunity to have a voice in not only the product, but also
they were getting the opportunity to win a really cool gift they could win at Sony headphones people want to get a $350 set of like amazing noise canceling headphones or a foot and a half tall R2d2 Lego set like
They want that so they will happily spend a minute and a half to fill out a quick survey of three, four questions about how they use CI/CD.
And also at the same time, leave their company name and company info. and then answer the question of, you want us to reach out to you about some sales opportunities? Yes, no. And do you want us to give you stuff on the developer things we’re doing? Yes or no. And each of those went to different things. And we actually had at developer events, we had a, I it was like 60 % said, yeah, reach out to us from a sales perspective. Like I’d never had that before.
Kate Holterhoff (28:37)
Wow.
Jeremy Meiss (28:39)
But it was because we were doing some things that really have great conversation. it’s about figuring out what people need and then go meet that. And then make sure that you’re bringing back things that your teams inside the company want to know. So that helps.
Kate Holterhoff (28:59)
Okay. That’s useful. And so my takeaways from this, ⁓ and correct me if I’m wrong, is that when it comes to swag, go big or go home, little things are just going to get thrown away, big drawings for significant prizes are the way to go. That’s just good advice. Okay. And the other thing that I’m hearing is that, and maybe I’m extrapolating here, that folks who are not already set on a particular product that haven’t sort of baby ducked on a certain technology are actually a better group to market to because they don’t have preconceived notions about what sort of tool is going to work best. They need to be educated and there’s the potential for them to be at the table for those sort of purchasing decisions in the future. Okay.
Jeremy Meiss (29:45)
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s bringing back and talking. We all know from a developer perspective, we get ⁓ asked, hey, have you heard about XTool? And it’s been proven. I spent years in customer service eons ago. People are more than willing to provide their experience on something if they’re asked specifically. and they’re more than willing to tell about a bad experience than they are a good experience.
And so having that, and that comes back to a little bit of the developer experience side, but it’s also this just simple piece of figuring out what people are wanting, what they’re needing, and help them understand how your tool might meet their needs. And then also be willing to say, you know what? You’re a startup, and what you’re wanting, this is probably not the tool for you.
But in X, when you reach and give them like, give them actual things, when you start reaching these limits, come talk to us. We would be happy to kind of help you make that migration. The number of times that I had people reach back out and say, hey, remember me from X conference? We’ve now reached this spot and we’re starting to see the things you were saying. Can you have somebody reach it? Like that was a…
pretty normal thing to have people reach back out. So don’t be afraid to say, no, this is probably not for you. But then give them the, but when you hit this thing, then it does have that conversation with them and then maybe follow up. And someone would say, well, that’s being sales. Okay. You’re either, you’re either making the thing or selling the thing.
That’s it. So get out there and have those conversations and then you can turn them over to somebody that’s actually going to nurture that side of it. But be willing to be a resource for potential users potential customers and don’t be afraid to say no but talk to me when.
Kate Holterhoff (31:56)
this is all advice gold. Love it.
Jeremy Meiss (31:58)
I don’t know about that, but sure.
Kate Holterhoff (32:03)
Okay, so The pandemic just destroyed developer conferences. Attendance was down. It’s my understanding that in the US, it’s still not back up. And a lot of this conversation is sort of revolving around the conference scene. DevRel does more than that. Are there other ways for developer relations to be reaching this audience that we are?
talking about here, folks who need to be educated, who are interested, who might in the future say, hey, I now have a need for this six months later. How do you reach that audience outside of the conference circuit?
Jeremy Meiss (32:38)
Yeah, for years, know, kind of the three prong approach has been like code content community when it comes to those types of, especially within the developer relations space. And when that, when you hit that, the content you create can be used, can be something that can take that place.
People are starved, especially coming out of COVID, the lockdowns and such, people are starved for actual interaction. so the in-person things are still heavy. In the US, it was great for a while, and then it went downhill. A lot of that had to do with the US dollar. A lot of that had to do with the elections. A lot of that had to do with
a lot of other things, but the reality is that you’ve, in Europe, it’s different. It’s exploding. Like, KubeCon London was the biggest that it’s ever been. You had KubeCon Japan, sold out. ⁓ You’ve had, the opposite has been true, and I think some of that has to do with…
Kate Holterhoff (33:36)
Right.
Jeremy Meiss (33:48)
people are hungry for it. But when it comes to like those that, know, other opportunities, content is still a thing. ⁓ Producing that content, and I’ve been a big proponent with the teams that I’ve had of creating content. ⁓
if you’re going to write a blog post, then chances are that should also, you know, could potentially be a talk, which also could be a five minute video, which could also be a 20 minute video, which could also be a tutorial, which could also like, you can repurpose that content depending on your audience. So understanding your audience, understanding your persona, like that is, that is even, I’d say it’s even more important than it used to be.
But you can shape that content to what they’re what they’re looking for and there are companies and tools and such out there to help you Take you know you produce this and then they can split it up into five different five minute videos or five minute 30 seconds But like all those things ⁓ There are tools out there to do that so that you’re not recreating the wheel
But having good quality content has always been a thing, whether that’s a conference talk, whether that’s a blog post, a tutorial, a workshop, a video. All of that has been an important thing. And the only way to get good content is to understand, not the only way, but the starting point for is understanding who your audience is.
and try some new things. Try it a little bit. Not every company, mean, a lot of companies went out and bought, I’ll say bought, they went out and bought DevRel people that had followings during the pandemic, which made sense because everything’s online, but they thought that was going to continue for them. And there was a small window where…
the online conference the online thing was a big deal and then everybody got tired of it and everybody got like burnt out on that quicker than they could have gotten burn out on other things and some companies have just been like, we’re only gonna do content and they’re missing such a huge
portion of their potential market by not being where people are. So you have to figure out who your audience is, what can you tap into, who can you reach, and then craft accordingly. You should not be all or nothing. You should have a pretty healthy mix. You might have one area of that that’s going to be heavier, but you should be doing all of those things.
Kate Holterhoff (36:18)
Okay, so we’ve got our A content. Let’s talk about the influencer part of this. So where you post it, who posts it. I know I’ve had some funny conversations with you where I’ve shown you a product and you say they bought those followers or those aren’t real stars, no names, but ⁓ these are conversations you and I have had IRL. ⁓ So talk to me about that.
Jeremy Meiss (36:44)
Part of that DevRel and marketing and the way you interact and reach out to people, influencing has been, it’s not a new thing. We’ve had that for.
I mean, you really go back centuries. Like this is part of the human psyche is that what other people, are very, very influenced by marketing. Any, any developer that says, ⁓ marketing doesn’t influence me. But yet they have, you know, three Mac books and that, like that, and they’re like, okay, cool. Like it does like, or they’re drinking five Celsius’s a day. And they happen to like repeat the same words that come from it. Like,
marketing works. The problem, the difference is like making it so it’s not so marketing and it’s to its actual relate. Like there’s differences but they still are influenced that way. So we’ve always had influencers that is a thing. ⁓ I think the biggest challenge is how much you rely on them as a company when they will go
You’re buying somebody’s time. And if there’s someone else out there that is going to pay more, they’re going to go to that. The reality is, I heard somebody say once years ago, and I’ve heard it repeated many times, of you keep them how you got them.
And if you’re getting somebody or getting your content because they’re just following some Influencer that’s been peddling and I’ll say peddling. I that’s a little Yeah But has been essentially Influencing selling whatever putting their name on something to five different things over the last two years You’re when they go somewhere else those people are gonna go with them
Kate Holterhoff (38:15)
I like that.
Jeremy Meiss (38:43)
They’re just going to follow. I’ve ⁓ spent a long part of my career in the Android development space. whenever there was ⁓ some custom developer that was creating custom ROMs, had a name, and then they would go from X device, like they were using HTCs, and then they wouldn’t use Samsung. All of a sudden, people stopped buying HTCs, and they wouldn’t follow the invites.
It happens. And so if you put so much of your ⁓ effort around trying to get people to your product based on an influencer, you just have to recognize that’s probably going to happen. Doesn’t mean that it’s always going to happen, but that the mindset of
Somebody that’s put their names on things and traditionally does that for for a piece of what they do and then have could have three or four people they’re doing it for That’s that’s part of a business And there’s nothing wrong with it. But as a business and as a you know from a DevRel perspective, you just have to know that If you put too much weight on that and not enough on the uh, know down in the weeds and that
You run that chance of having a very short period of time that your product is in front of everybody and then all of a sudden it’s not. So you can’t just put all your eggs in one basket. I mean, hate to use all these different metaphors, but they’re real. We use them for a reason.
Kate Holterhoff (40:12)
So a good DevRel strategy around influencers, whether they be influencers from DevRel specifically or folks who maybe have a newsletter or maybe a YouTube channel that’s popular or something like that, would be to just recognize that it’s one part of larger strategy and not to devote too much time to it. ⁓ That’s good. Is there a way that you
Jeremy Meiss (40:37)
And I know a lot of the influencers on the, I’ll call them influencers, whatever you want to call them. I know a lot of them across the different tech space. they do a great work. So no one devalues that. I think they’re extremely important. But a company has to, like, yeah, it should not be the whole thing. Now, if you’re a startup, problem. There’s a time for that. You don’t want to bring, you shouldn’t bring a DevRel person in as your first
non-engineering hire, You shouldn’t. ⁓ You should be hiring a product marketer before you bring in a DevRel type of person. But for those, it’s OK to contract out some influencers to kind of get your name out there and help do that stuff. But know that’s a drop in a bucket. That’s a flash in a pan. It’s a
metaphor we want to use. it is. It should not be the full, it’s not the end all be all for everything you’re going to do for the next six years. It should just be a short period of time.
Kate Holterhoff (41:37)
And is there a way that you can recognize that this is probably purchased stars, purchased likes, purchased whatever? Like, what are the red flags that you look for when you’re trying to figure out if this is something where they’re trying to buy their way into recognition, whether they earn it through authentic, engagement and good technical, abilities, whatever.
Jeremy Meiss (42:01)
that I would have a silver bullet for that, for me, I’ll say, this is probably gonna come across weird, but wrong or whatever, but if I haven’t heard or a group of people that I trust have not heard about this product or this tool or whatever, ⁓ I’m gonna be a little suspect.
And that doesn’t mean that I have the large, but I do know a fair number of people across multiple verticals to borrow the term. ⁓ But if it’s not, then I’m going to be a little suspect. ⁓ There’s a lot of hipster.
JavaScript programming frameworks ⁓ that pop up every six months and then they disappear and something else pops up and there it’s I mean it happens all the time and so like for me if I’m looking at a framework or something I want to mess around with I’m looking at like not only when was the last like update but also like how long has it been around what was it forked from like
How many people are using the GitHub thing of the insights of like, many people are actually contributing to this? Like, what is the actual health of the project or the tool or whatever it is before I go and say, I want to put my business around it or around like, hey, I’m going to devote the time and effort to something that.
It’s going to get replaced with some, you know, fork of this and now it’s called this and it’s really just this with bells and whistle. Like we see it all the time. And so it’s, I think there’s a, for me, it’s a little longevity, seeing how long that is. And it doesn’t have to be that it’s like six years, like no tech changes, but at least have some staying power or have a good number of contributors. If it’s just one contributor and Then yeah, no, sorry.
Kate Holterhoff (44:10)
Yeah, you’re making me think about vanity metrics over time. So if a JavaScript framework goes from zero to I don’t know what thousands of stars overnight, maybe those aren’t real. Maybe these are, yeah, they could be real.
Jeremy Meiss (44:25)
They could be real, they could be, I mean, that is probably based on something happened and everybody’s like, oh, I really like this, I like the direction. But think GitHub stars don’t really mean anything, because it’s like a Facebook like, okay, they give a thumbs up, cool. What does that mean? Vanity Mextras are good for a period of time.
But you have to move from them to some kind of result base, some actionable type of data, and not just a, it’s really easy for somebody to click like or follow or, like, those are, that requires no real interaction. That’s my thing. That doesn’t require much. You just click it, OK, cool. It’s like the, what is it,
Kate Holterhoff (45:10)
Okay. I see. Okay.
Jeremy Meiss (45:18)
NPS the net performer performance score net whatever ⁓ i think for the most part it’s it’s just bullshit because
Kate Holterhoff (45:22)
Hmm.
Okay.
Jeremy Meiss (45:28)
somebody’s doing they just have to click up would you recommend this to somebody yes or no or Between a you know, hey, what’s on this scale? What it’s an arbitrary scale. It’s so it’s subjective based on what somebody says great But what do you do? Like I’ve hardly ever seen anyone take an NPS score and say Hey, you know what? They said that they would do this Now let’s reach out to him and say well, hey, what what can we do to help you share like?
Kate Holterhoff (45:41)
Yeah.
Jeremy Meiss (45:57)
You’ve said they’ve the person that said they would share. What are you doing with it? Oh, I don’t know. We just track the score. I’m like, OK, that doesn’t mean anything because you’re not doing anything with it. It’s just a vanity metric that helps you feel like that. So there has to be something you do as a result of it for it to be any kind of actionable thing.
Kate Holterhoff (46:10)
Yeah.
okay i feel like this is still an unsolved case then. so you know if somebody goes viral on hacker news, they might get all those stars overnight, but the staying power is still questionable. okay.
Jeremy Meiss (46:33)
Yep,
absolutely. It could. Yeah, what does it think about the now? No, please don’t put that in the word. No, not at all. Not at all. Now, it’s more, more, is it, yeah, it’s that how long has it been around? And was that, you know, X number, did that happen now? Or was that like over time? So.
Kate Holterhoff (46:34)
You know, so the only way to know is if Jeremy’s heard of it. This is what I’m walking away from this is
This is what I’m hearing. i feel like there’s a smell test involved too you know there’s the equivalent of like yeah ⁓ jeez okay well you know you are from DevRel so you’re just stuck in the mire of ineffables Jeremy and there’s just no dragging you out of there
Jeremy Meiss (47:01)
There is. Yeah.
There you go. There it is. That’s
what it is. It’s just this. It’s all just who knows Just throw it up there and yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (47:19)
Spaghetti at the wall.
geez, okay. Well, on that note, I think it’s about time to wrap up. So, before we go, how can folks hear more from you? Preferred social channels, I know you’re going to some conferences in the not too distant future. How can we keep track of your deep thoughts and all the products that you’ve heard of?
Jeremy Meiss (47:34)
Yep.
gosh,
deep, deep thoughts. Well, jerdog.dev on Bluesky, that is really like, if I post, that’s where I post. I go between, I post a lot to, yeah, I should probably post something, moments. ⁓ That’s probably the best way to, you know, keeping track there. ⁓ Jmeiss.com or jerdog.dev will take you to a website that I need to update.
So, you know, that’s one of those things that’s been in the works for the last year. And then I do have some conferences coming up. I’m going to be at Community Over Code North America coming up in, I think that’s in September. I’ve got that coming up. I’ve got KCDC. KCDC Developer Conference is going to be the middle of August.
as well as DevOpsDaysKC both at the same time. ⁓ DevOpsDaysKC is co-locating with KCDC. So go out to DevOpsDaysKC.org and you can get ticket for both.
Kate Holterhoff (48:45)
you’re gonna be at KubeCon right in Atlanta?
Jeremy Meiss (48:47)
I’m planning on being a KubeCon in Atlanta and then I will be at Monktoberfest in the first of October and then I’ve got some other stuff coming towards the later part of the year. but definitely check out jerdog.dev on Bluesky
Kate Holterhoff (48:54)
Monktoberfest.
Okay.
Amazing. Okay, well, I know I’ll be excited to have a good hang next time I see you, Jeremy. And KCDC is on my list at some point. It’s not gonna happen this year, maybe next year, 2026.
Jeremy Meiss (49:19)
You definitely
need to be there. It’s a fantastic conference, ⁓ largest in the Midwest. And it’s great. And it’s getting pretty.
Kate Holterhoff (49:24)
man.
I hear so many good things.
Really enjoyed speaking with you, Jeremy. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
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