[Weekend Drop] Marketing to Developers, Learnin in Public, and Communities as Marketplaces with Patrick Woods on the Developer Love Podcast

Mar 20, 2021

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After this podcast recording, I wrote Technical Community Builder is the Hottest New Job in Tech which went into further detail on my thoughts on Community!

Audio source: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/developer-love/ep-15-learning-in-public-with-shawn-swyx-wang

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Patrick Woods: Awesome. Swyx, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

I'm really excited to have this conversation.

I'm sure lots of folks are aware of who you are and probably follow you on Twitter, but for those that don't, would you mind giving us a little bit of an overview about who you are and what you're working on?

Shawn "Swyx" Wang: Sure. Thanks for having me on.

Been enjoying the podcast, and this is my second Heavybit podcast alongside JAMstack radio.

So I'm Shawn, I also go by Swyx, that's my English and Chinese initials.

It's a complicated history, but I was at Netlify, passed through AWS and most recently just left AWS to join Temporal.

And have been primarily active in the front-end/ serverless space.

And I've been very interested in this whole idea of developer experience.

I did not know to call it developer love until I came across Orbit.

And I think Orbit's model is fascinating and really nails it.

But to me, the way I've been breaking down developer experience is developer tooling and developer communities.

So kind of straddling both.

I was a moderator of r/ReactJS subreddit, going from about 40,000 members to over 200,000.

Recently stepped down from that to help run the Svelte society, which is the community organization for the Svelte framework.

And I think it's just a magical thing to be able to enable a community around a certain technical topic.

Patrick: Yeah. Thanks for the overview.

So you mentioned developer experience as a concept and a practice that you're very interested in.

What do you think led to that point for you?

Swyx: Honestly, it was Netlify branding their developer relations people as developer experience engineers, which I was pretty skeptical about, because if you are devrel, just say your devrel, don't try to put some unique spin on it.

But then I think they really envisioned something bigger than traditional devrel, which was building our integrations and also working on community building, which is not like me talking to everyone, but also enabling others to talk to everyone else.

And so I think many to many is a really noble goal.

It's very challenging obviously, because you have to influence without any formal authority, but it's also a very appealing goal economically, because then you don't have to scale their number of employees linearly with your number of users, which I think makes a lot of sense.

Patrick: So you mentioned developer experience for you is really comprised of tooling and communities.

Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between those two pillars?

Swyx: I don't know if I have a formal relationship in my head.

The framework that I come from is actually from Cheng Lou, who used to be on the React Core team.

I think he's on the Reason or ReScript core team now. And he gave a talk at Facebook's internal conference called Taming The Meta Language, and the argument of that--

And it's a very good talk. I recommend people check it out.

The argument on that talk was essentially that every programming language or every framework has a core and a periphery, and the more developed it gets, the core which is kind of like the code that runs, is a smaller and smaller part of it.

And really the middle language starts to go around it, which involves tutorials, docs, workshops, community, jobs, third party libraries, yada yada.

And so in his original slides, he had a long list of these things that are wrapping around a very popular framework, which for him was reacts, but you can extend this to basically anything.

But for me, I think it essentially just breaks down to, okay, the code that is not core but makes all the developer experience much better, so that's the developer tooling, and then developer communities, which is all the people around the code, which isn't core to the code, but makes using that code a lot better.

So it's just code and people.

Patrick: Yeah. I love that.

So as a project or a framework grows the core, maybe it becomes smaller as a percentage of the overall footprint with the periphery, the middle language increasing.

What's that tipping point look like, do you think, when it switches from code to community being the bigger part?

Swyx: Yeah. This is something you can tie in to Geoffrey Moore's idea of Crossing the Chasm.

So for people who haven't heard about this, it's like a five stage adoption process going from 0% of the total population to 100% of the total population.

And then it's a bell curve from 0% to a 100%.

So the early stage is kind of the hobbyists, like super early adopter types.

The only thing that they care about is this is cool.

I can hack on this in the weekends, and this is technically better on some basis, right?

Like in theory, I really want this thing to exist. I look at all the existing solutions out there and none of them fit me, be...