Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide

This is the second edition of the book that earned 10 5-star reviews. It’s now bigger,richer and better.
Your walk-through guide to Developer Marketing and Relations now has 5 new chapters.
Build your DevRel dream team and project. Learn from success and failure stories.

Software developers are gaining increasing influence within every company they work for and work with. Engaging at C-level is no longer sufficient: the software developer is now a powerful force in decision-making.

This book is intended to be the “textbook” for those working - or starting - in developer marketing. It will teach you how to engage with developers to build a two-way relationship that is informative and empowering. The book is a timely guide to essential best practices in developer marketing, which is a nascent industry and quite unlike other areas of B2B marketing.

All profits are donated to a worthy cause, details of which can be found on the book website at www.developer-marketing.com.

Topics covered include: running successful developer events, building and maintaining a solid community of developers, how to get the most out of email marketing, how to nurture IoT / hardware developers, how to encourage experts in your community to advocate for you and how to generate a mindset for content marketing in your organization.

This book, the first of its kind, is from leading developer marketing practitioners in some of today’s largest technology companies. It collects the insight of a generation of thought leaders within the field, sharing them to the benefit of all who are working, or planning to work, in the industry as it finally takes off. The goal is to accelerate best-in-class developer marketing, which ultimately benefits users and customers.

The authors of this book reflect a diversity of experience from those working at some of the world’s most auspicious software companies. It includes chapters by developer marketing thought leaders at Accenture, Arm, Atlassian, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nutanix, Oracle, Qualcomm, Samsung, SalesForce, SAP, Unity, Visa and VMWare, and a foreword by the Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing for Amazon Web Services. The book was produced by SlashData, the company behind The Future Developer Summit, where the most prestigious technical companies in software development come together to share their insights and best practices on developer marketing. SlashData are also the the leading analyst firm in the developer economy, tracking global software developer trends via the largest, most comprehensive developer surveys worldwide. Their research helps the top technology firms understand who developers are, what tools they are using and where they’re going next.

You will find this book essential if you’re working in developer marketing and want to learn how to build your ecosystem to attract, support, and grow your developer base. You will learn the fundamentals if you are a new hire entering this domain. You will pick up new and deep insights if you are already working in developer marketing and want to advance your career. It isn’t a step-by-step guide to writing a developer marketing strategy, but instead a toolbox for you to gain the knowledge and practical understanding needed to work with your audience.

Whatever your experience, you know, or soon will know, that the developer audience is a tough one to market to, because they dislike aggressive or repetitive messaging and prefer to gain early, hands on experience with a product, making up their own minds by experimenting and talking to existing users. If you take away the insights of our contributors, and absorb their tips and best practices you will be well on the way to handling any B2B marketing role!

SlashData is the analyst of the developer ecosystem. We help top-100 tech companies understand developer audiences and measure the RoI of their developer strategies. 
With more than 10 years of data-backed developer research, we know where developers come from and where they are going. We have consistent data on why they get involved in development, what they're learning, in which industries and on what they are working, which technologies they use and how happy they are with them, and what they expect from vendors and developer communities. We track how the population grows, locally and globally, and how its profile changes over time. 
More than 30K developers from more than 150 countries share their experiences with us each year through our Developer Economics surveys. Our sample is diverse, representative and exhaustive of the communities out there. We translate our surveys in 9+ languages each time, and reach out to developer communities of all shapes and sizes, with our network of 70+ leading partners globally. 80% of responses coming from new participants each time. Yet, our findings on technology adoption and trends are consistent, survey after survey. For further details on our methodology, please visit slashdata.co/methodology.
Our aim is to empower the DevRel community by providing the data they need to make the right decisions and step up their DevRel game, for best developer experience. Besides "Developer Marketing and Relations: The essential guide", we produce the "Under the Hood of Developer Marketing" podcast where experts in the field share not just their successes, but also their biggest challenges. The Future Developer Summit is our bi-annual event for developer marketing and relations leaders. Moreover, we run the Developer Program Leaders' survey twice per year and publish the results. You can visit devrelx.com and discover all our DevRel initiatives, as well as dig into our rich collection of developer research data.