The document discusses strategies for engaging developers through events. It notes that in the past, developers needed funding to access necessary tools, but today infrastructure is more open through services like cloud computing and open source. It recommends learning from how web companies engage developers and provides tips for effective events, like being personable, putting others first, and sharing failures. It emphasizes the importance of inclusion through a code of conduct and calls readers to contribute to event guidelines.

1. 10.20.2005
Building Developer Engagement with Events
IBM Interconnect 2015

2. 2
About Me
@monkchips

3. 3
About Us

4. 10.20.2005
Software is Eating the World

5. 5
Permission-based Development
“Operating systems, databases, web and application servers,
dev tools all required money. To get anything done, then,
developers needed someone to write checks for the tools they
needed to build.”
Stephen O’Grady – New Kingmakers, O’Reilly
Publications

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Yesterday: farming

7. 7
Today: foraging

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The Post Permission Era
Infrastructure
Proprietary Software
Banks
VCs
Companies
R&D Labs
Universities
SOA
Cloud
Open Source
Crowdfunding
Accelerators
Co-working
Maker Spaces
The Internet
APIs

9. 9
Infrastructure Fragmentation

10. 10
Learn/Steal from Web Companies

11. 11
The Business Case for Events
IPO planned for 2015
Annual revenues $100m in 2014
Adding $1m in annual recurring revenue every seven days.
Participated in more than 500 developer events in 2014
560k registered developers, near 100% growth in 2014

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Unleash the Monkey

13. 13
Hacking with People

14. 14
Hiring People

15. 15
The Hallway Track

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10 Things You Need to Do
Go to a developer event
Talk at a developer event
Host a meetup
Invite an outside speaker to talk at your internal event
Go to a hackathon
Run a hackathon
Sponsor a developer event – but make sure its craft beer
Create a budget for your developers to go to events without asking
Have a bias to saying yes – trust and responsibility count
Run Regular “Office Hours”

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Size Matters

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Do Don’t
Be personable and (if possible) humorous
Use the slang and idioms developers use
Use pictures rather than bullet points
Try live coding, even if it’s scary
Put the spotlight on other people’s tech
Use data-driven graphs and charts
Allow for tension
Tell war stories
Tell customer stories
Describe all components and APIs.
Use slides prepared for you by Big Marketing
Use Corporate Speak
Worry about the font size
Make everything canned
Pitch your product directly
Use marketecture stack diagrams.
Smooth out every rough edge
Be afraid of discussing failure
Say “we were working with a F500 bank”
Expect people to love all your stuff

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Always have a Code of Conduct
tldr; be excellent to each other
Our conference is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference
experience for everyone, regardless of gender, age, sexual
orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or
religion (or lack thereof). We do not tolerate harassment of
conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is
not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks,
workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. Conference
participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled
from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the
conference organizers.

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Call To Action
jgovernor@redmonk.com
Working on Developer Events Guidelines for IBM – please contribute.
Questions? Thoughts? Ideas?
Join us for the open talks tomorrow at 10-12 and 3-5