Journey to DevRel: Back To The Basics

Lately I have been pondering the personal question, "why don't I start on the journey's I want to go on?"

That may not be specific enough. So here is a little context.

I want to move to Developer Relations/Advocacy one day. But I have never started that journey outside of random spurts of motivation to write blog posts or do the LinkedIn stuff.

So why don't I go on that journey?

My current thought: I have held so tightly to doing DevRel as a job that it has kept me from taking steps to do DevRel today.

I have asked for help/advice ad nauseam and the consistent advice I get?

Start today. Start writing today. Start streaming today. Start making videos today.

Some how the advice is obvious and yet, we funny humans, have the ability to not do that thing which will get us where we want to go.

Why? Because it is not the thing we want.

Being able to be patient, make a few sacrifices now, and pursue a goal gains much attention and attraction because so few of us do it.

Why? Because showing up takes determination. Showing up means putting in work.

Im not sure if old twitter spaces are recorded and available but @swyx was on a twitter space yesterday (August 19, 2022) and they talked a lot about starting in the DevRel space. If I find it I will edit this article and add a link.

I found it -> DevRel Twitter Space

So What Does Back To The Basics Mean?

Well, for me, right now, it means starting from the basics of technologies, learning them, and then teaching them. Things like:

• React
• React-query
• Svelte
• Svelte-Kit
• tRPC
• Nextjs
• HTML
• CSS
• Tailwind
• Prisma
• and on, and on, and on

Back to the basics to me is more a personal rallying cry to do the simple things and write or make videos about it.

The tendency for me is to think, 'well to teach a technology I must present a full course that covers the topic in its entirety so that I am offering something.'

Really all that means is...wait for iiiiiiiiiiiit...

Competition

And competition kills creativity quicker than anything I know of.

(It should go without saying but I am not referring to good competition in business and good competition as in Open Source where we put things into the world and others iterate on them and then we iterate on what others have done. This is simply competition that is rooted in pride and wants to 'beat the other guy.')

Why? Because I think so focused on putting something in the world that is 'worth it' or 'different' or 'innovative' that we never put anything into the world at all.

So, back to the basics, for me, just means that I want to learn things from the ground up, with fresh eyes, and then teach them how I would teach them to myself when I was just starting to code.

When I was in my coding bootcamp my brain hurt so bad. Trying to understand patterns and practices was really difficult.

But now that I know them I think I can teach in a way that would be understandable.

And that starts with the basics. If I try to skip to something more advanced, former me would have been lost. Current me is still lost if I don't learn an api or language with the very basics.

So this is where I want to begin my DevRel journey. Hope to see things progress over time.

A quick note on basics as I thought about this for a bit. What I mean by 'basics' for teaching purposes, is that any thing I teach, I will go back to the basics. Not that I will necessarily be starting from the ground up with Web Dev. But if I teach react-query, I will teach it having learned from the basics of the api to the more advanced. Same with anything else.

Last note, essentially that p.p.s message in notes we used to write. If you want to hear a phenomenal take on setting goals, go listen to @t3dotgg talk about this. Here is his youtube video on the subject