Part of building and participating in a community is the influence we have on others. With the advent of social media and more personal interactions, people have risen to levels heretofore unexpected. Influencers help to sway the activities of a community and stars arise that influence at the highest level. Rachel Happe (Co-founder of The Community Roundtable) and Marshall Kirkpatrick (Vice President, Influencer Relations, Analyst Relations, and Competitive Intelligence at Sprinklr) join Mary & PJ to talk about the difference between influence and popularity, and what it means to be an influencer.

Mary, Jason, and PJ chat about what technical means in the DevRel industry and how job titles shape our roles after recording Episode 34. As the Developer Relations industry grows up, this is a question we’ll be facing more and more often as we struggle to define who is qualified to build relationships with a technical audience.

As Developer Relations becomes more mainstream, the understanding of what makes someone qualified to be a Developer Relations professional is getting cloudy. Do you have to have a technical background? And if so, does that mean that you’ve held a “Software Engineer” title? Or simply that you’ve taken the time to understand the technical pieces of your product? Jason, Mary, and PJ are joined by Karissa Peth, Sr. Developer Relations Program Manager at Microsoft, and Matty Stratton, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, as they dig into the nuance of the various Developer Relations career paths.

Mary, Jason, and PJ sync up after Episode 33 to discuss event management, creating new events, and where event organization fits into community management as a whole.

In this episode, our hosts are joined by Aaron Aldrich and Quintessence Anx, both of whom are Developer Advocates who also have experience organizing community events. Together, they discuss the challenges, lessons learned, and tips for organizing events for a technical audience.