Panel: Global DevRel in the Age of AI Documentation

I spent last week at DevRelCon New York and the shift in conversation was impossible to miss. Two years ago, every panel was about community building and developer experience. This year? Half the sessions were about one question: how do you make your platform visible to AI agents?

The developer discovery pipeline has fundamentally changed. It used to be simple: developer has a problem, searches Google, finds your docs, reads them, evaluates your API. That model still exists, but it’s no longer primary for a growing segment of developers. The new path is messier: developer has a problem, asks Claude or ChatGPT, gets a recommendation that either includes your platform or—more likely—doesn’t.

GitHub Universe 2023: The Power of Micro-Mentoring

Yesterday was the application deadline for GitHub Universe 2023’s micro-mentoring program. If you missed it—don’t worry. I’m not here to promote something you can no longer sign up for. I’m here because the model itself is worth stealing.

GitHub offers 30-minute virtual 1:1 sessions between students and GitHub employees ahead of their annual Universe conference (November 8-9 this year). They’ve been doing it for five consecutive years now. And honestly? It’s one of the most underappreciated ideas in developer community building.

Stack Overflow acquisition and the Future of Community

I look at Stack Overflow every day—usually before my second coffee, often multiple times after that. Most developers do. The workflow never changes: paste the error message, click the first result, scan for the accepted answer, move on.

That workflow amounts to consumption, not community.

Stack Overflow’s 2021 Developer Survey surfaced a number that stuck with me: only 44% of developers consider themselves members of the Stack Overflow community. The site pulls over 100 million monthly visitors, which makes the gap even stranger. So roughly 56 million people treat it like a reference manual. No questions asked, no answers written, no votes cast, no edits made.