Fast forward: deploying our best selves to build the future of developer communities

Tim Falls: Thank you very much, Josh. So carrying on the theme of how we got to where we are and what our profession is about, I'm gonna welcome Tim Fultz. So remember the rules, you gotta get on your feet and you gotta welcome him properly. So Tim Fultz from Keene. Please come to the stage.

Come on. Yeah. Alright. Thanks a lot. So Tim is going to talk about how do we take an approach where we absolutely make the the the the best approach to developer relations?

How do we how do we take a philosophical and a almost a spiritual approach to to what we do? So, Tim, thanks a lot.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Alright. Thank you very much for that wonderful intro, and thanks to Josh for kinda setting the stage for my talk as we have seen the history. Now we're gonna look forward into the future. This talk isn't really about predictions.

I'm not gonna tell you or try to tell you what's going to happen in our future. But I am I think it's more of a talk about self awareness, which can help help us guide ourselves into deploying our best selves and to building the future of developer communities, and better yet, the future of business. So as a lot of these talks start, I will tell you a little bit about me, but I don't want it to be a one way street, so I'll ask a few questions about you also. I like to divide me into work and play. So I'm gonna tell you about my play first to give you a little bit of an idea of, like, who I am as a person.

I started my life with the sport of wrestling, which kinda defined me for about twenty years, which is an awesome thing, it taught me a lot of things about work ethic. Growing up as a farm boy in Indiana, obviously, I liked rap music. I was actually a lot bigger fan of Tupac, but it's harder to find an icon of Tupac than it is Kanye, believe it or not. So that's my representation of of rap music. And more recently than that, I've enjoyed staring out the window of an airplane, much like many of you in this room I'm sure can relate to.

While I was with SendGrid, my previous company, as a developer evangelist or developer relations professional, I flew a lot more than I do now. I was flying about 500,000 miles over the course of three years with them, and I've kind of backed off that. I still love travel, but not that much. I also really like dogs. I have a pit bull named Khan.

He's an advocate for the breed. They're an awesome species and and breed is even though they get bad preps. And another thing that really contributes to my healthiness and happiness today is meditation and yoga, which I think is a great thing because it helps me and it makes me a happier person. And finally, I love capes. I own many capes.

I have a friend in Humboldt County who makes capes by hand, and we're actually business partners. So if any of you would like to feel more super, I can hook you up with a cape. And finally, I like film, movies. Now, to be honest, this wouldn't typically put be put in this slide, but I promise the fact that I like movies a little bit will make this whole talk make more sense to you all. So keep that in mind.

And finally, from there, did you guys hear about Snapchat? It's cool. Right? I love this thing. I think it's like one of the coolest things on the Internet right now.

And if you add me, we can send goofy shit back and forth. Now to that work part of my my life. I started when I was 15 driving tractors on a farm. I upgraded from there to driving moving trucks as a furniture delivery person once I had my driver's license. And then once I had my college degree, I got to drive forklifts in a manufacturing plant, still back in Indiana, which really sucked.

So I went back to grad school in Colorado, which introduced me to this place called Techstars, which was a seed stage accelerator you probably all have heard of. And that brought me to a company called SendGrid, where I was the sixth employee, stayed with them for four years until August 2014, and helped them grow from six people to two fifty people as a company. They're much bigger than that now. And helped grow a developer relations team of about over a dozen people at that time. But then I jumped off that rocket ship and landed at Keene IO, which is a data analytics company.

Happy to talk more about data analytics later on in the day if you'd like, but that's not what this talk is about, cause we're at DevRelCon talking about community. So I told you we'd also ask some questions about you. I heard some questions that Arin asked earlier. So but I wanna know, you know, a little better about the the grand in a granular way, like, who's in the audience today so I can shape my talk as we go along. So with a raise of hands, I would like to ask you to participate and identify yourself on based on the following questions.

We'll start with titles. Who has the word advocate in their title? Okay. What about the word evangelist? Alright.

How about community? And who of you is here aspiring to make that make one of those things your title? Cool. And how about those who are aspiring to hire someone and give them that title? Alright.

That probably covers most of the people in the room, but titles don't define us all. So how about we ask a little some other fun questions. I think we had a a raise of hands already from where people are. So who came the farthest? Who came the farthest?

Did you already ask that, Arin? No? Holler out your home city if you think you can't this one? Sydney. Sydney?

Where's Kansuke? Is Sydney farther than Tokyo? Maybe? Okay. We got Tokyo people too.

Cool. Who likes string cheese? Yeah? Who is proud of the Warriors for setting an NBA record? Boo hoo.

Who's proud of Kobe? Kobe Bryant doing real good things. I thought I would hear more boos from him. Alright. So now we have a little bit more rapport built, and we will move on with the talk.

And the story I want to tell you today starts on an airplane. Imagine that. The last airplane I was on was coming back from London, back here to San Francisco, where I call home. And so I got to 10,000 feet and I opened my laptop and my inbox was all in offline mode, so I was ready to crank through some emails. First email I opened was one from my teammate Taylor, who's somewhere in the back there.

Happy birthday yesterday, Taylor. And she wrote a great email, but it kind of upset me because one of her one of the points she made was that this conference was on 04/16/2016. Great. Well, just so happened, I had planned this wonderful trip to go to Costa Rica and take two weeks off and unwind and unplug and be on the beach. And for some reason, when I booked that ticket, my brain had farted and I booked the ticket right on top of this conference, which obviously is like, oh, man, that's kind of a pain.

So I was annoyed, and then that annoyance kind of grew to a little bit of frustration and maybe to the point of anger. So I was like, alright, well, I have a decision in front of me, make a speech or go to the beach. And obviously, you know what this what I decided. But instead of deciding in that moment, I I chose to take a minute away from my computer, let myself calm down a little bit since I was a little upset and decisions aren't made well when you're emotional. And I flicked on the movies.

And I chose a movie on that flight called The Big Short. The Big Short is about the great recession that we just went through about subprime mortgages and how that that whole thing led to an economic downfall. And my big takeaway from this talk or from this movie was that there were a certain number of human beings who made a certain number of decisions that greatly affected millions of other people. And those decisions were largely driven by money and profit for some people, but more importantly, they totally disregarded the other human beings that were gonna be affected by that. A week later, I watched another movie.

It was called The Revenant. And this happened about two hundred years prior to the Great Recession. It happened as Europeans were coming across America, and those Europeans were in search of beaver pelts because beaver pelts could be used to make fancy fur hats, and people in Europe would pay lots of money for those fancy fur hats. And believe it or not, this movie had something very much in common with The Big Short in that that movement of those Europeans across America in search of beaver pelts destroyed lots of communities. Those people who were making decisions to support their families, to make money, to profit, while those motivations are okay, they disregarded the people that they were going to affect, the communities that they were going to touch.

So that brings me back to the air the flight. I'm here today, so I chose to be here, but I had to call the airline and switch my flight. And as I'm sure most of you know and from experience, that's not fun. I called, I asked things, and they were arguing, and they said, here's a fee, and here's a penalty and here's a cancellation and it ended up being hundreds of dollars more than an original ticket. I still haven't changed it.

The really frustrating thing was I felt like I was talking to a robot because the person on the other end of the line kept repeating themselves and reading from the script that they had in front of them. Sadly, the company that employed that person had stripped that person from their personal agency. That person was not empowered to make decisions that were in the customer's best interest or in that employee's best interest. So for reasons including profit, but surely including lots of other things, That corporation had put structure around that that employee's job that restricted them from doing what they thought surely was the right thing to do from a human perspective. And that's a big problem that exists today, I believe, in America and around the world.

So we're in this timeline zooming out from kind of the place where Josh brought us to earlier, where the industrial revolution happened several hundred years ago and the industrial age has passed us. The digital revolution is happening and has been happening for several years now, And the information age is what is where we are. We're here, meow. And no, there was no bet to get me to say the word meow. I just wanted to say it because it's fun.

But there's a question mark in front of us, and and that's what we're gonna talk about for the rest of this talk. Towards that question mark, there's evidence of change happening in this information age that we're in now. Evidence like HR no longer be calling be being called HR, but people teams. Evidence like private equity firms focusing much more on the people they invest in than the companies. And I believe the biggest piece of evidence of this change that is happening is us.

The fact that we are here as a really big group of people at a conference talking about DevRel, which is humans doing business with other humans and putting a human face on companies so that other companies and the humans in those companies can relate to each other and succeed together. So this represents a paradigm shift. The model is changing, which also represents an opportunity and with that opportunity become comes responsibility. And to be sure, all of these things are very big and we're in the midst of them. So we're on that timeline at this crossroads where there are some things that we should or could do and a few things that we must.

And we, as a group of people, I believe, are very, very uniquely positioned to embrace this opportunity. And I believe we must assume some level of responsibility to take the world of business forward into a brighter future where we're all happier and healthier. So you might ask, why is this why is this us? Why do we have to do this? Well, first look at the numbers.

This is just based on a LinkedIn search for titles. And if you search for evangelist or advocate or community, which many of you in this room have in your titles, you get pretty big numbers and results. If you add developer onto each one of those, you get fewer results, but still a lot. So not only do we have numbers, but we have these corporations that are behind us, both big and small, with lots and lots of resources, people, money, technologies that can do really amazing things if put to the right use. So at the high end, we're over a million people with those titles.

At the low end, over 16,000 people. And that's just on LinkedIn. So I believe that we have the critical mass of people if we are together in a mission to make things happen. Beyond that, anyone in this room can write an article tomorrow, a blog post, and get it featured on Hacker News. From there, it might just go up mainstream to TechCrunch, and then from there, even further upstream to The New York Times.

Now you're reaching billions of people. That's a lot of reach and a lot of influence that we're pretty uniquely positioned to have. So once again, we're on this timeline. And this timeline involves a shift from companies that disregard the communities and the people that they interact with and that they touch and that they affect towards companies that we're involved with today who care about those communities and care about the people and are taking a more human approach to business. So I will leave you or not leaving you, but I'm gonna let you enjoy this for the next forty seconds, and then we'll go into the rest of the talk.

Love that song. It's gonna be stuck in your head for the rest of the day too. So we'll continue on that movie theme, and I thought I'd bring it back to a movie that you all can probably relate to a little bit more than The Revenant and The Big Short. So we're about ready to hit the hyperdrive lever. But first, one more piece of participation from you all.

We're gonna visit this place where Luke visited, and we're gonna do some introspection training. So you don't have to raise your hands this time, but I'm gonna ask you all to be introspective for a moment and ask yourself I'll ask you some whys and you answer with some eyes up here in here in your head. So the first question of why is, why are you here today? Why did you decide to come to a conference on a Saturday morning and spend all day inside this beautiful office? Is it because you wanna come meet new people and see old friends or hone your skills for your craft or because your boss asked you to be here or because you think that being here will help you achieve some get closer to achieving some metrics that you've set forth as goals for your team or for yourself.

And the second why is why are you in this role? Is it because you just were in the right place at the right time and this is chance? Is it because you feel like you were meant to be part of this movement? Is it because you were tired of writing code and you wanna get out of the out of the office a little bit and travel the world? All of these are probably answers that many of you have already said, and I'm sure you have many others.

But thinking about these things can help the rest of this talk sink in a little bit better. And the most important thing is the motivations behind your answers. So I encourage you to stop being introspective now and listen to the rest of the talk so we can have a productive discussion, but return to that later, if you will. So now we're hitting hyperdrive. We're ready to go, Chewy.

And as we go into this journey, we're gonna need some some power ups. Did you know that the the lightsaber is powered by crystals and there's several different types of crystals? But without the Force, those crystals are really nothing. The lightsaber is a manifestation of a Jedi's connection to the Force. So I'm gonna share with you what I think are some some crystals that you can take forth in your in this journey to to help us move us in the right direction.

So the first one is effective communication. What I mean by this is we need to be a lot better at communicating and expressing what we do and why we do it. Effective communication needs to happen while sending signals from one person to one person and one person to many. It also needs to be a two way road. It can't just be you being really effective at communicating what you wanna communicate to other people, but being really effective at perceiving and interpreting what others are communicating to you and knowing when there's a delta between what they're saying and what you understand and using your communication skills to get to the bottom of it.

Communication needs to be twofold in that it's quantitative in nature. And wait, I'll let you learn more about that from Rob later this afternoon on quantitative stuff, ROI, metrics. It also needs to be qualitative in nature. It needs to be anecdotes, stories. And this stuff complements what we what we talked about before with with sorry.

Let's start over. With qualitative and quantitative aspects of your communication, you can tell much better stories and you can get the point across to people so well that they understand it and absorb it to the point where they can repeat it and and explain it to someone else. That's what you want to achieve. Some tools that I use at Keen to do this throughout our organization, communicate what we do and why we do it. This is an example from a talk we had with the sales team recently, and they asked, how do we approach our sales process in a community minded way?

And they said, well, I'm not gonna tell you how to do your job, but I'll say, here's a tool that you can use. Apply filters. Apply the filters of humanness, helpfulness, and honesty, which is not only truthfulness, but transparency. So in any interactions you have with other people that you're doing business with, apply these filters and I believe you'll be taking a community approach, community minded approach. The second crystal is participation and inclusion.

So participation is about getting your team members who aren't on the developer relations team, aren't on community or evangelism team involved in what you're doing. Because the more firsthand experience they have in being a part of this stuff, the better they're gonna understand it. This complements participation does, complements that effective communication and really rounds out the understanding. Another example, at Keene, we recently took about a 100 community members to a science museum here in San Francisco for an evening. Now there's only five people on our community team and only three of them are based in San Francisco, so we needed some help to really create engagement with our 100 community members.

So about 20 Keenies came out to the Exploratorium after dark and interacted with our community from our sales and engineering and leadership teams. And through that participation, they much better understood as they walked home that night why we invest in community and what value it creates. The second one is inclusion. Now we talk about a lot a lot about inclusion, we talk about diversity, but talking about it is not good enough. Being deliberate and intentional and changing behaviors is what has to happen.

So instead of just talking, I want to show that we're also walking and you can too. This is a quote from a meetup that we had at our office and our and my teammate, SJ, she's very deliberate and very intentional about making sure that our events are inclusive. And she didn't require that everybody on this this event be a woman in terms of the speakers, but that happened. And someone at that event said, wow, this is the first Silicon Valley talk I've attended with an all female panel where the topic isn't women in tech. And this came about through intention.

The third crystal I'll share with you is to begin within. This might sound a little more on the hippie side of things and it might even sound selfish to you, but beginning within is one of the most important things that you can do to go out in the world and be the shining positive light and be helpful and do your job well. Beginning within includes physical well-being, obviously, getting exercise. It's really hard to do when you're on the road doing this job, but it's important. But it also must include mental hygiene and being really in touch with how you're feeling from a mental and emotional standpoint.

It has to be both. And as a group of people, we can be a woeful bunch, I believe. I've been guilty of it for sure, saying, damn it. I had to work all weekend. Damn it.

I haven't had a time time off in a long time. But as a Buddhist philosophy goes, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. It's up to us how much of that pain translates to suffering. We can reframe those those moments of woefulness to like, damn, I'm pretty I'm pretty lucky to have been in this city on this weekend working with all these awesome people. And I can take a day off next week because I work work this weekend.

I'm gonna take Wednesday off next week because I work today. So we can change behaviors. And as humans, we have this capability of self awareness, which gives us the capacity to be introspective, which sets us up to be more mindful people, mindful about who we are, where we are in the world around us, and how we affect the people around us. And that might seem a little foreigner or scary to like be this introspective person over in the corner, like focusing on yourself, but this can be a community driven thing as well. A community environment in which you can have this is with your teams.

So I'll give one more example. At Keene, we do this thing called introspection happy hour. Every Thursday evening, we all get together, we break up into groups of six to eight people and we just share our feelings with each other, our personal things, our professional things. You don't have to share anything you don't want to share, but you can share everything you do want to share. And it gives us all practice and being introspective in a really supportive environment.

And it also helps us understand the humans that we work with. So if anybody would like to check this out, we often have guests and we've had many guests go away and say, I'm gonna put this in into place in our office. So you're more than welcome to come join us for one on a Thursday. So we are human and humans are capable of a whole lot of things, even shaping the future of business, even if that seems like a daunting thing. And some say our potential as humans is without limit.

Remind you of anyone? So to wrap things up, we're back here on our timeline. We're at this spot where we can continue to allow businesses to disregard the communities that they touch and the people that they affect or we can continue doing what we're doing in this room, being the humans and representing the companies behind us as companies that care about the people that they affect. And we can jump on a rocket ship in the right direction and keep moving things forward and make sure that developer evangelism, developer advocacy, and community is not something that only a select few companies in the world embrace, but every single company in the world embraces. And if they don't, and if they continue disregarding the people that they affect, then they'll fail and the ones who really care about the people that they affect will succeed.

So by practicing effective communication, by ensuring participation and inclusion, and by beginning within, and a lot more, but those are some starting points to overcome the hurdles and to be our best selves. We can have more human companies, healthier workplaces, happier people, more sustainable success, fulfilling lives and careers, and more balanced societies. And if that's not enough, we can have a party in an Ewok village in the treetops. So here's where the credits, where credits are due and I would love to continue the discussion as the day goes on. So thank you very much.

Here's my contact info. Enjoy the rest of the day.