Why I do DevRel and why I intend to keep doing it

Thierry asked himself, publicly, whether DevRel was still une bonne situation. I have been asking myself the same question, on and off, since 2018.

I also read Salma Alam-Naylor's post, the one where she announces she is leaving DevRel and public life, for good, probably. The burnout, the physical toll, having to justify your work over and over, AI quietly killing the discovery channels that used to bring people to what we make. I have lived through most of these things myself. This text is not written from a comfortable, distant place.

Where I am today

I work at Clever Cloud, a company that understands what DevRel is for. I do not have to justify my existence every quarter. Nobody asks me to turn a talk into a number of leads. What used to burn me out is no longer part of my daily life.

It is a privilege, not a life lesson. It does not solve the structural problems that Thierry and Salma describe. Loving your job is not enough to make its value understood by a company that does not want to see it.

Before it had a name

Before DevRel existed as a job title, I worked at a startup on Warp 10, a time series database almost nobody had heard of. I gave talks about it anyway, unpaid, because I wanted to, on top of organizing meetups and running community events on my own free time, without anyone asking me to.

When DevRel finally became a paid job, it was not a new activity I was discovering. It was the way I had found to get paid for doing what I was already doing.

What really drives me

I do this job because I love to share. I love that moment when something lights up in someone's eyes while I am talking. Telling stories matters to me, and so do those conversations with developers and communities, one after another.

None of that ever showed up in a KPI. That is exactly why I think it survives what is hitting the job today: AI devouring the old discovery channels, the constant need to justify your role, the question of whether to change direction.

Search engines are less useful than before, communities have scattered, and content drowns under a flood of other content, written in seconds by something that has never felt a room go quiet at the right moment. All of this is real and shakes up the job as we built it. But what is being shaken is the packaging: the distribution, the metrics grafted onto DevRel to satisfy finance. Not the thing itself. No algorithm produces the spark in someone's eyes, nor can it take that away.

So

I do not know whether DevRel survives everywhere as an official title. Many companies will keep cutting it, because they never understood what it brought them. That is a real loss.

But I was already doing this job before it had a name, and I will probably keep doing it in one form or another, even if that name disappears again. Not because I am immune to burnout. Because deep down, it was never really a question of labels.

I am writing this on my way to Nice, for Riviera Dev, where Thierry will be too. Part of me would rather leave the rest of this discussion for a beer with him there than for a blog post. That, too, is what DevRel means to me.