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To support, grow, and engage the GitLab community through collaboration, content, and conversations.
Developer relations and developer evangelism is an evolving, complex field. At GitLab, we chose the title of Evangelist as defined as "an enthusiastic advocate." Our team works to engage, enable, and support our community by creating content and programs that help them to achieve their goals as members of the GitLab community.
When differentiating this approach from traditional developer relations programs or groups, we want to focus on areas that are often overlooked, including:
The FY24 Marketing Strategy (internal only) shows a Customer Journey with five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Expansion, and Evangelism. While our team can influence people at each stage, we are primarily focused on Awareness and Evangelism.
Awareness and Evangelism are generated through the content we create, the events we support, and the other activities that help us reach more developers. The KPIs we use to measure our impact on these two stages are:
We recognize these KPIs don't capture the impact of the diverse range of work that our team does but understand that tradeoffs can be necessary to effectively communicate our impact within GitLab.
When we are reviewing opportunities or requests for support, we must be able to answer yes to each of these questions to move forward with the work:
If the answer to any of the above questions is "no", we ask the requestor to take one of the following actions:
We are members of the Community Relations team.
| Team member | Focus areas | Language skills | Projects | Technologies | Speaker Portfolio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abubakar Siddiq Ango Developer Evangelism Program Manager |
Program management, team content creation and repurpose. DevSecOps with a focus on the Cloud Native Ecosystem | English, Yoruba, Hausa | DE Bot, Evangelists Dashboard | Kubernetes, CI/CD, Ruby, JavaScript, Rust | Website |
| John Coghlan Manager, Developer Evangelism |
Strategy and Planning in Developer Evangelism | English | Website | ||
| Fatima Sarah Khalid Developer Evangelist |
Community Engagement, DevSecOps | English | Beyond Code Series | CI, Verify, PHP, JavaScript | |
| Michael Friedrich Senior Developer Evangelist |
DevSecOps with a focus on the SRE, Ops and Sec engineers' perspective | English, German, Austrian | EveryoneCanContribute cafe meetup, opsindev.news newsletter, o11y.love | CI/CD, Observability, SRE, IaC, Security, Python, Go, C/C++, Rust, Ruby | Talks, Portfolio , cfps.dev |
Inspired by GitLab's collaboration value, the Developer Evangelism team has chosen to align ourselves as stable counterparts with divisions outside of Marketing. The alignment is as follows:
| Division | Stable counterpart | Activities |
|---|---|---|
| Alliances & Infrastructure | Abubakar Siddiq Ango | Infrastructure Meetings, Alliances |
| Product | Michael Friedrich | Monthly Verify Field Sync (internal), Ops: Monitor:Observability direction, Sec section: Secure, Govern |
As stable counterparts, Developer Evangelists are expected to actively engage with the divisions to identify collaboration opportunities and act as the primary point of contact for requests for Developer Evangelism support from these divisions.
Collaboration examples that source from stable counterpart activities:
Our developer evangelism team can be summarized by the "Three Cs":
We build our thought leadership on social media. See Developer Evangelism on Social Media to learn more about our strategies and become an evangelist yourself.
We build out content to help educate developers around best practices related to DevOps, GitLab, remote work, and other topics where we have expertise. Content includes presentations, demos, workshops, blog posts, and media engagements.
We maintain a YouTube playlist with our talks, workshops and community engagements.
The Developer Evangelism team works with the Community Relations Team UTM Strategy, which is based on the larger Marketing UTM strategy. The utm_content prefix for the Developer Evangelism team is de_, this allows for easily filtering of the team's data in Sisense.
You can use the UTM Generator on the Community UTM Page to easily generate UTM Codes for your campaigns.
We write across diverse platforms, but a primary destination for our writings is the GitLab Blog, where all our blogposts include the dev-evangelism postType in their frontmatter for proper tracking.
The Developer Evangelism team creates alot of content that can be reused for any campaigns. All contents and activities the team participates in are added to the team's activity tracking sheet. You can search for relevant content and contact the author or the team on slack in the #dev-evangelism channel for clarification where needed.
Speaking at events is an essential path for our team to connect with the wider GitLab community and the tech community at large. We love to support to team members and members of the wider community on their presentations, too. We also help with the organization and execution of GitLab events and other tech community events.
Recordings from past workshops and other team activities can be found on the Developer Evangelism Team playlist on the GitLab Unfiltered channel on YouTube.
Our Developer Evangelists directly contribute to the wider community by speaking at conferences themselves. We also support and manage responses to CFPs for team members across GitLab through our issue boards.
Our team provides support to new and experienced speakers where necessary. These can range from presentation review, CFP ideation, or dry-run. We also host a monthly Speakers Lean Coffee to help folks prepare to speak. You can also learn more about the different resources and activities you can benefit from or drop a message on Slack if you need direct support.
People who regularly speak about GitLab may be interested in joining the GitLab Speakers Bureau.
Developer Evangelists are subject matter experts (SMEs) in their focus areas, and collaborate with the Corporate Communications team to provide media coverage in the form of interviews, podcasts, content by-lines, etc. Developer Evangelists are GitLab spokespersons and are required to take relevant training as determined by the Corporate Communications team.
Our team regularly engages with the wider GitLab community. We do this organically on social media when prompted by our social media team or other GitLab team members and by monitoring GitLab and other selected keywords on Hacker News. We also manage a few social media platforms ourselves.
The Developer Evangelism team is the DRI for questions and strategy on the platforms below:
| Platform | Description | Workflows |
|---|---|---|
| Discourse | The GitLab Forum is a place to ask and respond to questions and share projects or snippets of code. | Forum Workflows |
| The GitLab Subreddit r/gitlab is a place to ask questions and share interesting use cases of GitLab and related workshops and tools. | r/gitlab Workflows | |
| StackOverflow | Use gitlab tags for programming questions related to GitLab or the GitLab API. | GitLab on StackOverflow |
| Discord | A GitLab Community Discord is a place to connect with the community, join pair coding sessions and live streams, and discuss all things GitLab and contribution. | Community Discord Workflows |
| Meetup | Our GitLab Virtual Meetup includes Office hours, GitLab deep dives, Hackathon calls, project specific office hours, and more! | GitLab Meetups, GitLab Meetups Checklist |
The Developer Evangelism team is dedicated to building, supporting, and retaining a strong and engaged community through initiatives, including newsletters, mentoring, badges, and sharing resources.
Given the Developer Evangelism team's understanding of our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we regularly engage in the response of situations that require intervention to address urgent and important concerns of our community members. We have a documented process for how we manage these situations.
We run a monthly Community Newsletter dedicated to sharing relevant developer content, highlighting contribution opportunities, and updating community members on upcoming events. We aim to keep our contributors involved and connected with the wider community.
We make our practices and processes publicly available to foster a diverse and inclusive community. We also offer mentor and coaching opportunities to share our expertise, encourage professional growth, and promote a welcoming environment.
Developer Evangelists should always be prepared to promote our monthly release and engage in community response on release days given the historical performance of release posts on Hacker News.
Once a month typically a few days after the release, we work with DevOps.com, TechStrong TV, and Highwire to produce The Lab. For more details see The Lab Handbook Page
Our team uses different tools to grow and analyze our thought leadership, automate workflows, and improve written and presentation skills. See Developer Evangelism Tools for a list of all of those tools.
Our team maintains many projects to help show off technical concepts, engage with communities, provide examples of using GitLab with other technologies, and automate our team processes. See Developer Evangelism Projects for a list of all of those projects.
We actively contribute to OSS projects and share our technical expertise. You can learn more about our ideas and visions in our OSS contributions handbook page.
Measuring what we do is very important to understand our impact and how we are able to reach our OKRs. A key metric is the Developer Evangelists' cumulative Twitter impressions. Learn more about the our tools, data collection and how to access the data sources for integrations.
GitLab team members can also reach us at any time on the #developer-evangelism Slack channel where we share updates, ideas, and thoughts with each other and the wider team.
We use dev-evangelism-updates for content shares and other updates that don't warrant generating noise in the larger channel.
The Developer Evangelism calendar provides insights into speaking engagements, important events, CFP timelines, and other dates. Learn more in our CFP handbook.
