Intentionality, AI Eng, Devtools Angels, and DevRel - on Scaling DevTools

Oct 10, 2024

Shawn Wang, an AI Engineer and angel investor known for his influential essay "Rise of the AI Engineer," dives into the evolving landscape of developer tools. He discusses the importance of intentionality in career and community building, alongside insights from organizing AI engineer conferences. Topics include the impact of AI on developer roles, angel investing strategies in emerging technologies like Supabase, and the significance of developer relations. Shawn also addresses concerns about developer obsolescence while championing human oversight in AI advancements.

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ADVICE

Scaling DevRel

Competent DevRels often transition to working with multiple companies.
This expands reach and influence within the DevTools ecosystem.

ANECDOTE

Intentional Launch

Shawn Wang intentionally launched the AI Engineer Summit alongside the "Rise of the AI Engineer" essay.
This coordinated effort aimed to establish the AI engineering field.

INSIGHT

Principles, Not Plans

Shawn Wang prefers principles over rigid plans, allowing for adaptability in his chaotic approach.
He believes planning is crucial, even if plans change upon first contact with reality.

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https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/swyx-2

Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit

And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte, Railway, Supabase, Replay.io, Stackblitz, Flutterflow, Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools angels community.

Besides this, Shawn curates DX.tips (DevTools magazine) and in a past life wrote the Coding Career handbook, championed learn in public, cofounded Svelte Society and was previously Head of Developer Experience at Temporal, and a Developer Advocate at AWS and Netlify.

Also, before this, Shawn had a very successful career in investment banking, trading, building data pipelines and performing quantitate portfolio management. I think this brings him a very unique perspective - I've always admired his ability to zoom out and see the big picture and the trends.

Even though Shawn is now all-in on AI, he's still one of the go-to authorities on DevTools go-to-market.

As you can tell, Shawn is someone I deeply admire. So I'm glad he came back.

What we discuss:

Organizing the AI Engineer Conferences
Rise of the AI Engineer
Intentionality and principles (yes we even talk about Alcoholics Anonymous)
The AI CEO
Invisible deadlines
Ilya believing in AGI more than most people at OpenAI
Are developers going to be obsolete?
Thor convinced swyx to invest in Supabase
Building DevTools that work well with LLMs
Angel investing in DevTools - why and how
Is DevRel dead?
How to hire DevRel
Why DX.tips exists

Links:

Rise of the AI Engineer https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer
Latent Space Podcast https://www.latent.space/
swyx's Twitter https://x.com/swyx
swyx's website https://www.swyx.io/
swyx's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnswyxwang/
smol.ai https://smol.ai/
DevTools Angels https://github.com/sw-yx/devtools-angels
DX.tips https://dx.tips/
DevRel's Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon https://dx.tips/zirp
AI Engineer Summit https://www.ai.engineer/summit/2023
AI Engineer World's Fair https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair
Coding Career Handbook https://www.learninpublic.org/
Shawn's previous appearance on Scaling DevTools https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/swyx
Eisenhower Matrix https://asana.com/resources/eisenhower-matrix
Thor from Supabase https://x.com/thorwebdev
Solaris AI coworking space in SF https://www.solarissf.com/
Browserbase https://www.browserbase.com/
Indent https://indent.com/ and Fouad https://x.com/fouadmatin
How to do hackathons https://dx.tips/hackathons
How to do conferences https://dx.tips/conf-guide
How to hire DevRel https://dx.tips/mailbox-first-devrel-hiring
Climbing the ladder of abstraction with Amelia Wattenberger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAy_GHUAICw...for the job. And they should not be doing that job and they should try something else to do. People pay for it because they need the job title to be filled more than they need that person. Those good people are very hard to reach.
That's one thing there. I also mentioned some other things that I've found in the different roles in the category:
Bottoms-up and open source have been very challenging in the growing a company success criteria. That's what different roles focus on: bottoms-up and open source, and particularly open source. You don't have to be open source.