Why Do We Have Dev Rels Now?

I've been a dev advocate since 2008ish and before that worked in pre-sales (mostly crafting custom demos and prototypes for prospects and existing customers). In my early days as a dev advocate, I was hired into marketing and most of the work was public facing (blogs and conference talks). But then that role soon moved into an official Dev Rel org where we did mostly 5 things:

1. Build and maintain a plugin SDK and integration framework

2. Help write docs and guides (we had a dedicated tech writer in our dev rel org)

3. Do public facing stuff: blogs, conference talks, participate in hackathons, etc.

4. Plan and host events: company developer conference, hackathons, meetups, etc.

5. Write code... could be anything... sample code, tech blogs, integrations, bug fixes to product, new features in product, etc.

It was a hard job in the early days -- lots of context switching. Those who were well suited for it were devs who communicated well, knew how to tell a story, and loved the hustle.

In the past several years, I've seen this role evolve a bit more to be what the author of the article describes: basically dev advos with a social status who speak at conferences a lot. While I think that's an important aspect of a Dev Rel org, I think a Dev Rel org should have a healthy balance of people who are good at the public facing stuff and those who are highly technical and can get in the weeds with other developers. A Dev Rel org with that combo can deliver high-level and visionary stories to the public and also dive deep into the tech with any developer/architect in the industry.

With the pandemic, we're having to reinvent ourselves yet again and trying to figure out how to get the best signal-to-noise ratio with our audience. A lot of people are trying new things out. For us, we're diving into video a bit more as a medium. I'm not entirely sure how good virtual confs are going to fair in the next year, but from what I've seen recently, I'm not optimistic about the platform.

Other roles we've seen ourselves optimizing in lately... being a more useful resource internally especially for our sales organization -- helping them craft a better story, providing better demos that are reusable, writing long form guides on the stuff you probably wouldn't have thought to write about in the past.

if I want to be a DevRel, what should I do?

I think it legitimizes a company and shows that they have a great developer team that can communicate with the outside world

The main difference I would say is the emphasis on the backpack they wear

If you have available time, start doing the job. Write, teach, talk, stream, etc. about technology that you like. Grow your communication skills and audiences. Then when a company you feel passionate opens up a DevRel role, you'll have your 'resume' ready to go.