Catalyzing Innovation: The Power of Developer Communities - Bianca Buzea

uh good morning waro I'm super happy to be here uh again uh as a speaker for a second year in a row by now um woro has a very special part um in my heart uh I was very excited last year to discover a very powerful developer Community here and I'm happy uh to be back today we're going to talk about the power of uh developer uh communities and most importantly how we can power these developer communities uh using developer relations uh also known as uh Deval I want to take a very practical uh way here so instead of having a theoretical talk I'm just going to walk you through specific activities and uh initiatives that I've been using myself in my most uh recent uh role so without uh further Ado uh let's get started about a year ago I wrote an article it's called Uh the Silver Bullet for the 30 6090 uh days plans as a Deval back then it was cohort uh four of Deval uni I'm going to tell you in a second about uh Deval uni so basically what was happening a lot of the students were asking like okay I get the Deval role uh how do I make a strategy like how do I move uh forward what I'm going to do exactly and I felt like okay I'm going to write an article and clarify there um everything that I think it's uh important uh for for such a start uh I might I must admit here the the title itself uh it's um a bit uh clickbaity in the article I actually say that there is no one size uh fits all it really much depends uh on the community on the project uh on the resources that you have available so there are a lot of factors to take into account but there is something else actually that I wish I've done differently with this article and that's the fact that it turned out to be uh too theoretical uh not practical enough and that was mostly because back then I was already a couple of good months almost a year in my previous role so I didn't have those examples uh fresh into my mind if you want but today uh that's about to be changed before uh I tell you how uh a few words about myself so I used to be uh Solutions architect in web 2 I used to work for AWS uh I've been involved with the web free space uh till 2017 then in 2022 after it Denver I decided that I want to go uh fulltime into uh web free so I joined the team um at balancer a couple of months uh later I uh founded Deval uni that's a comprehensive uh resource for anyone who wants uh to start into developer relations and most uh recently I joined uh the chronicle team where we do oracles the centralized verifiable oracles so now back to my story with the article today I decided that I want to do Justice by that article so instead of a theoretical approach I want to present you my Journey uh in the first 90 days of Chronicle so no more Theory but real life examples and real life stories okay before uh we we do that a few more pieces of the puzzle I want to tell you a few words about Chronicle and next I'm going to tell you a few words about developer relations and then we're ready to go through the actual examples so chronicle chronicle is the Oracle that has powering maker since June 2017 an interesting uh fact here it's actually the first Oracle on ethereum now you might ask I'm sure like why did I I do why didn't I know that fact well Chronicle used to be part of uh maker from the or from the Oracle unit and only last year in 2023 it span out of maker under the chronicle uh branding and that's also the time when it got open up to the community in times of uh TVs or total value secured it uh secures around six billion in assets however what I really find uh interesting about this protocol and what really excites me is the way it innovates the first uh way it innovates is through its decentralized network of validators those are run by reputable protocols as you can see here gitcoin infura maker Dow now known as Kai we talked earlier about rebranding um and many others so essentially those projects are staking uh their their brand reinforcing the trust um into the protocol uh the next the next top I want to talk about is about lowering cost essentially lowering uh gas cost this is done through using schnor signature schnor signature has been around since the '90s so has been for quite some time around us however this is the first time schnor signatures are used in the context of web free oracles this is the Innovation here in the times when the network is not congested and the gas um prices are not high that might not be super important to you but when gas prices are high it becomes extremely important now the last top I want to talk about is transparency so we have what is called the chronical dashboard and that's your oneway stop uh to see full transparency into the protocol so you can see who are the validators you can see uh which data those validators have been uh using in order to update uh the price and you can even verify their signatures in the browser both the signatures for the validator and the signature the schnore signature for the Oracle that's the actual data that gets pushed on chain now that I uh gave you the the background on Chronicle I'm going to do the same for developer relations you can consider it an emerging field uh it's been around since the uh 1980s it started at Apple on the Macintosh uh Team Mike Murray in 1982 was the first one who coined the term software evangelist one year later uh Kawasaki uh became uh the softare Evangelist at Apple however it took a very long time until 2013 for developer relations to be considered a mainstream uh career path and if you ask me in terms of web free developer relations which is a a niche of this Niche another niche of this Niche uh it became popular maybe one or two years ago so what is Deval uh you can think of the role of three uh pillars the main purpose of this is to enable developers to be successful with your technology the first pillar it's about Community here it's about creating a feedback loop between the developer community and uh the core uh Team of the protocol so from the point of view of the core team you represent the community and from the point of view of the community you represent the courting by you I mean here the the different person some activities here uh include organizing events hackaton or even getting feedback from developers the next pillar is content here it's about creating awareness but also about educating people about your technology different forms of uh content here include uh blog posts videos even talks at conferences similar to what we're doing right now and finally we have product this is all about enhancing the developer experience and to do so uh we have multiple uh ways we iterate continuously on the documentation portal to make sure that it's up to date that is uh that it offers all the information needed to developers we create uh code examples we enhance the tooling there are lots of uh tiny pieces that goes into uh this developer experience so now that I gave you the overview of the two pieces of the puzzle we're ready to dive into my first uh 90 days at Chronicle as a Deval I put here some pictures uh with the team because I believe the initial month it's very important to build uh those relationships with different stakeholders in the project and I think way too often we are rushed and we say okay it's not that important to have those one ones to get to know each other we're going to get to know each other when we're going to work together however I believe it's not like that those initial uh 101s those initial meetings basically represent the foundation of the working relationship you're going to have later so don't skip that so as I was saying in my 30 days it was a lot of focus on building those uh relationships on getting to know uh the key stakeholders seeing their Vision uh of the project seeing how we can best collaborate uh together and what projects we can uh tackle together and most importantly discovering those as people uh then another important part here was about creating uh deal audit I call it this is basically a pulse of the different initiatives across uh Deval whether we're talking about a community developer um education developer awareness Etc so having this uh information ready taking this pulse of the different initiatives uh that were happening I was able to create a developer uh relations strategy with short-term goals and long-term goals of course now the next part was uh on laying the foundations for uh the success of the documentation uh experience an example uh of that for example is um adding algolia this not only adds a searching features to the documentation Port but most importantly it uh offers critical insights about the users who um are going on your documentation portal so by using that you can see where the developers are coming from where they reside in the world you can see which terms they are looking for you can see which terms they're looking for and they can't find anything uh those are also called Misses So based on those insights you can really uh optimize your documentation in the future so it's key to capture um that information as early uh as possible and to iterate also here it's um an important part was to create the ecosystem resources this is a a hub if you want of different uh resources about uh the ecosystem the standard naming for this um Hub is awesome and then name of the protocol so I respected the same uh pattern you can find this under awesome Chronicle and have a look at the different uh resources to get you up to speed uh with the protocol next we're talk the about days uh 30 60 a lot of the focus here was on documentation documentation is a continuous uh enhancement process it's not like you've done the documentation and now you're done no there is constantly uh there are constantly enhancements uh you can bring whether we're talking about uh new educational resource whether we're talking about synthesizing better certain information or just integrating feedback from the developers beyond that uh you need to keep in mind that the product evolves so uh you need to document those new products as well and to make sure that they are easy to understand and to uh Implement by uh your developer Community also about documentation here I want to talk a bit about uh the different uh approach is uh to documentation in in our case uh it cames uh with two pillars if you want one pillar was about understanding the different informational uh needs of the audience and here we're talking about different types of content uh we have uh tutorials those are rather learning oriented how to guid uh those are uh problem oriented so when a developer wants to to solve a particular task explanation and refence those are um in the category of theoretical uh knowledge so that was uh on one side making sure that we have documentation that covers each of these areas but also it was about making sure that there is enough visibility for the project so if you think about uh Chronicle uh this is a chain agnostic protocol uh currently it's live on nine networks and this number continuously increases so evaluating that you soon realize that you need visibility on all those chains and developers from all those all those chains need uh to discover your project so from that point of view I went um and introduce uh in the documentation of these chains and of these projects uh links and pieces of content about Chronicle my point here is that you need to assess what your project is about out how it interacts with other stakeholders if you want um in the web free space and how to best position uh your project in respect to that now other topics I want to cover are the developer uh Journey here is very important because it kind of uh guides the developer on how to make uh the best use in the shortest amount of time uh with your product and the case of Chronicle here usually this journey starts on uh starts with exploring the oracles on testnet uh then uh people need to request access on mayet because on mayet uh oracles are read protected by a white list and uh in most of the cases there is a third step which is uh they want an additional or they request an additional Oracle or an additional chain integration another pillar here it's about uh enhancing the developer uh experience here I want to talk a bit about uh cookbook AI this is an integration for the documentation portal as well it's a chatbot AI that basically allows you uh to stay on the same page ask questions and get answers uh to those queries so it effectively uh enhances the support but also the developer experience and finally feedback while there are many ways to gather feedback you can do so at a hackaton you can do so uh in person I believe that the most important way to GA feedback uh is through the documentation portal uh itself a feedback about the documentation of course that's because it's the closest to uh the documentation it's in fact part of the documentation here I used uh pushed feedback basically developers have the option to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to different pages but also it comes with additional functionality where you can add a piece of text about uh what you liked or what didn't go uh that great and you can even take a screenshot so you can capture uh more information than just like I like it or not next up uh hackaton I here actually this is part of a bigger uh sphere if you want of events we have like hackaton conferences and events and meetups sorry but uh I want to focus specifically on heatons because I think those are key uh for developer relations and the developer Community I see heatons as a journey it's not like there is a Finish Line there are activities to do before the hackaton during the hackaton and after the heckadon so let's start uh with those before the heckadon before the hecaton is very important to have the proper visibility for your hecaton and for your Bounties in our case here we did uh it Global um Brussels uh and before the hackaton I made sure to have the proper visibility through several initiatives one such initiative was to create a hackaton guide um an oracle guide that lives on the E Global uh website which basically created additional um additional sources uh of users for our bounties um and um what we prepare for Brussels another important part here uh was on the Bounty reveal most of the videos on the Bounty reveals go like this hello my name is these are the bounties when you have like a couple of those and you are um a builder with limited time you're not going to remember many of those instead here I took a different approach I created a humorous uh video where I also introduced the bounties and it had a different effect I was in fact uh nicely surprised at the side event in Brussels when someone stopped me and they were like oh you're the Deval from chronical I saw your Bounty reveal I'm gonna hack this weekend so we want that kind of uh that kind of uh action to trigger uh in the developers with the Bounty reveal now during the event uh the workshop the first stop is the workshop the workshop usually it's around 20 minutes so in 20 minutes there is this much information you can pack uh instead of trying to pack as much information as possible in those 20 minutes you should focus on instead on getting the developer started with your product and also showing them where to find additional resources and how to get help that's way more powerful also here uh the Builder uh cheat sheet this is a a piece of paper that you print out you spread around the hackaton it creates awareness uh it's also a great resource when someone ask you for uh resources and you can point uh Builders to specific resources on that uh Builder cheat sheet uh but ultimately it's very important to have it um at U at your boot because people will come at the boot uh and it's a great conversation starter and also a great way to introduce Builders to your bounties and last St here is the support throughout um uh the event you want to make sure that you have continuous uh support throughout the event people uh on the ground there uh talking with the builders and being present to ask uh questions and you need to be also prepared here for the unexpected in my case here uh the second day of the hackaton I got quite sick I had to go to the hospital but I was lucky enough that we were enough people on the ground and I have like some amazing supportive uh teammates that were all able to continue the support so it's also something to keep in mind uh planning for the unexpected now after the event uh it's very important to capture the feedback from the developers and to iterate on that feedback you can do so uh for example with a survey and uh also it's very important to celebrate the success of your Builders this uh doesn't stop uh to the hackaton as I mentioned at the beginning it's rather a journey the hackaton is just the beginning of those future projects so what you want to do is to build relationships with those Builders and to continue to support them through throughout their Journey now a few words about these uh 60 90s UH 60 and 90 uh so the last uh month uh this is when uh the foundation is set so since we have the foundation now it's time to scale efforts so how do we scale efforts uh in our case I created a a template for Workshop activations uh to have it both for hackaton but also for different uh video tutorials so this increases the developer experience because they can go uh step by step and uh see uh what they need to to do in a much nicer way uh presented similarly here uh you need to make sure that there are educational resources for new uh products in our case uh we launch uh couple of weeks ago the real word asset uh Oracle this is a new product very important for us so a lot of the focus was on creating these um learning resources uh for this new product and finally uh you can start uh diversifying uh content in my case I introduce various uh video forms nowadays video uh format does very well when it comes to um the different educational resources I'm not talking only about me I'm talking in general what I saw among other Devils and also I introduced uh a newsletter to keep the community updated now you might ask yourself okay so what's coming uh next now the the 90 days are gone what's happening uh I can only say uh keep an eye on Chronicles communication channels a big announcement uh will come uh in September about Community activation I can give you a hint though uh it's about uh the fact that real amplification happens uh through community so keep that in mind it's going to be something around uh Community I would also love to invite you to assess my work and there is no better way to assess a dev then by using uh the tech they advocate for I also want you to uh win some priz isn't doing so I don't want to to do it for free so I would like to invite you to the next two hackaton uh Chronicle will uh be part of uh those are it Global San Francisco and it Global uh Bangkok and finally if you like this format and those uh insights about building a developer community and developer relations uh check out uh the QR code it's going to take you to the pre-register ations for cohort number six of deal un thank you that's it on my side are there any questions okay we have a question we have a mic here yeah it does work so as a Dev um I also saw you made some iterations and coding examples do you need to have like a previous coding experience and how much or is it really a non-coding job uh coding experience definitely helps what I want to mention here it really depends um what product uh what what company uh you join and by that I mean how big is the Deval Keem so for example right now uh it's only me on the Deval Keem in the past for example I I led a team of four so naturally being a team of four each of the people could go into the direction they felt uh more attractive to more uh excited about some of those were uh in the direction of uh Community Building others uh towards uh content uh Etc so yeah depending on the size of the company uh you can potentially find some roles where you don't need that much of uh coding experience but in general definitely uh being Technical and being able to produce those uh coding examples helps and thank you