Over the last 10 years, since I moved to Berlin, I’ve been working in different roles, such as Event Manager and Developer Marketing Manager, at different companies in the tech industry. Most of the time, I've been working with the developer audience.

Currently, I'm Head of Developer Marketing at R3, where I work closely with the developer relations, developer experience, and engineering team to grow and support our community.

Today, I'd like to talk to you about internal evangelism.

What is developer evangelism?

I’ll talk about internal evangelism in tech companies, building software, building tech products, and building a developer community. And that's why I'd like to quickly go through what we already define as developer evangelism and developer relations.

The goal of developer relations and evangelism is to support, grow, and engage the developer community through collaboration, content, and engagement.

The developer evangelists are part of the developer relations team and are responsible for nurturing mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and software developers.

In other words, it's a collection of strategies and tactics that help companies to work better together with software engineers.

But what exactly do developer relations teams do and why do they do it? That depends on the needs of the organization. But there are some common tactics that most companies use to attract the developer audience.

We have content, including the creation, placement, and distribution of content like blog posts or videos.

Events are also very crucial, like sponsorships, speaking engagements, attending events, or organizing your own proprietary events like meetups or conferences.

Developer education is also part of this, such as documentation, tutorials, and how-to guides.

Developer experience is another tactic. API design, SDKs, reference apps, or sample code made available on GitHub.

Another key thing is developer advocacy. Interacting directly with developers on social media, on Stack Overflow, in forums, or at events.

And then we have the community. Running champions programs or other ways to incentivize or reward developers. Maybe gamification.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. There’s some overlap, and what one person, team, or department does will differ from company to company. But I think we can all agree that these are very common tactics to attract developers.