Inspiration from DevRelCon London

Recently a team from Twitter went to DevRelCon London, an industry conference for people who build developer communities, and developer experiences. This conference is part of an international series of events and served as a great chance for our team to meet our peers. We were lucky to hear about the opportunities and challenges others doing similar work, face. 

Our favorite talks
The conference included a varied lineup of speakers that discussed best practices for Developer Relations, creating documentation, creating communities, and the complexities of measuring success, and featured talks such as “Empathy flavored docs: A recipe with human values”, “How to rock a technical keynote”, and “A guide to crowdsourcing code samples”.  Some of our favorite talks included “Developers Love Webhooks, You Should Too” by Nicolas Grenie from Typeform on best practices for webhooks, “Managing the Burnout Burndown” by Anjuan Simmons, and “Scaling Adoption with Developer Targeted Video Content” by Carl Callewaert. Our team walked away feeling inspired and energized to continue investing in improving developers’ experience with the Twitter APIs. 

Sharing the Twitter API story

In addition to attending, two of our team members presented talks at the conference. Aurelia Specker, a London-based partner engineer, gave a lightning talk entitled “Twitter API: Story of a New Beginning”. She spoke about how Twitter is taking an entirely new approach to collecting feedback through a program called Twitter Developer Labs that is helping us collect and incorporate developer feedback early and often as we build the next generation of the Twitter API. 

Hamza Alam also presented on “The Value of Being Told you Suck.” This talk focused on how our team incorporates developer feedback through a customer satisfaction (CSAT) tool to identify “healthy” and “unhealthy” pages in our documentation and prioritizes improvements to key pages in a data-driven way. This approach has helped us improve some of the least-helpful portions of our resources, most recently through a full revamp of our authentication docs which were released recently

Bring on 2020
Overall, our team walked away feeling motivated to continue improving developers’ experiences with the Twitter APIs. It was great to get to meet people doing similar work and to learn about how varied the roles are in the developer relations space. We are lucky to be part of this community and look forward to connecting with more developers face-to-face throughout 2020.