No one will remember your programs. They will remember the calls you made when nobody was watching. My @DevRelCon talk is up 👀 youtube.com/watch?v=wqlS9YI1… Here's one of mine. We got the judging wrong at our own Summit Hackathon in London. I published a post saying so, and we re-ran the whole evaluation at our expense. No one made us. After all, judges' decisions are final in hackathons. We could have fixed the scoring sheet, sent some apology notes, and moved on without ever saying it out loud. That option was cheaper in every sense, and I thought about taking it. Publishing that post was one of the hardest professional decisions I've ever made. I made it before I had any idea how our developers would react. I was prepared to lose the trust we had worked so hard to build over the past few years. I was prepared for them to walk away. But integrity isn't measured in the response it gets. It's measured in the decision you make while the outcome is still unknown. The post was just the public part everyone saw. The work that mattered more came after: working out how I failed to set the team up, what conditions let it happen, and what structural fix stops it from repeating. I published it because of a developer named Sam. He showed up in 2023, before we had an incentive program or a product worth showing. He's now technical lead on the system handling 10 million criminal cases a year across 18 forensic labs. 2.5 years from a test network to a government's real one. The job was always to make that path shorter for the next developer. Sam is why I made the call. The next Sam, whose name I don't know yet, is why I'd make it again.

If you're searching for a job rn, I highly recommend that you don't let a model tell your story for you. Write down the facts before it fills the gaps. lauren.md/

Every role I’ve held since teaching high school English has been a teaching job at heart: @Amazon, @GoDaddy, @Vonage, and leading DevRel teams. On this @CodingCatDev episode, I talk about why developer education determines whether a product gets adopted.

Before your next launch, open a coding agent and ask it to build hello world with your SDK. Don’t paste in any docs. If it’s wrong, a developer will decide your SDK is broken. You won't get a second chance. Your first impression is the agent's experience now.

The deal I made myself: new job, new hair. I have not found a new job. Yet, here I am. Turns out I can job hunt OR look busted, not both.

You can take the girl out of America, but she’ll still drive 30 minutes from her teeny village for a Starbucks PSL, just to feel like the basic B she once was 🎃

This is why I've stopped calling what I do developer relations.

october's backyard bounty has been... next level 😍

A developer’s first question now goes to an agent. Your docs are what that agent reads, or doesn’t. I spent the last year on that problem: 16 Claude Code plugins that verify AI-written code five ways before a developer sees it, and a tool that runs every hackathon submission in its own disposable microVM to report what actually compiles. I build and run developer orgs: advocacy, education, docs, DevX. Previously: Polkadot, Midnight, New Relic, Puppet, Vonage, Amazon. And now I'm open to my next role: Director / Head of / VP, remote. Reposts welcome ✨

So fun to find out how much we have in common outside of DevRel. And inside it too 🤓 The world is small, and DevRel is even smaller. @eddiejaoude is truly one of the good ones!

One thing about me? I LOVE a working lunch🍜