Wishlists may have marked the start of the holiday season when you were a kid. As adults, wishlists get harder to make. The things you want rarely make it onto a list.
To help you get started, we’re recommending nine books every developer marketer needs:
- Developer Relations
- The Business Value of Developer Relations
- Ask Your Developer
- Developer Marketing and Relations
- Docs for Developers
- The Accidental Community Manager
- Getting Started in Developer Relations
- Badass
- Developer Marketing Does Not Exist
1. Developer Relations
The first book we recommend is Caroline Lewko and James Parton’s Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program.
With combined 30+ years of developer relations experience, Lewko and Parton advise what’s needed to create a dev relation program and the steps to take in order to improve an existing one in this exciting 2021 release. Both the eBook and paperback versions are out now.
2. The Business Value of Developer Relations
The second dev book you should be pining over is the 2018 The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success by Mary Thengvall.
The book focuses on the power of positive relationships with developer communities and includes interviews with Developer Relations professionals from Google, Mozilla, Twilio, and many more.
3. Ask Your Developer
If you’re keen on learning how to better utilize the developers at your company, this next recommendation is for you.
Twilio CEO ​​Jeff Lawson wrote Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century. While the paperback hit shelves in early 2021, we highly recommend the audiobook version narrated by Lawson himself.
4. Developer Marketing and Relations
Book #4 on our list is Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide by Andreas Constantinou of SlashData and Nicolas Sauvage.
It reveals developer relations best practices that the top companies typically keep secret. Developer Relations author Caroline Lewko (our #1 rec) edited the third and most recent edition of this essential guide.
5. Docs for Developers
You won’t want to skip this fifth book.
Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing by Jared Bhatti, Zachary Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nunez, and Heidi Waterhouse is a must-have addition to your bookshelf. The guide contains everything you need to know about creating the best documentation from draft to publish.
6. The Accidental Community Manager
Our sixth recommendation focuses on managing online communities and will be especially helpful if you’re newer to the space. The Accidental Community Manager: A Guide to Building a Successful B2B Community by Adrian Speyer offers tips, tools, and frameworks to ensure you’re successful in the community industry.
7. Getting Started in Developer Relations
While you may not be able to get a physical copy of our next rec, this ebook from Sam Julien might just save you more than space on your bookshelf. If you’re not quite sure if dev rel is the right career for you, Getting Started in Developer Relations can help you “dip your toes into the water” right away.
So if you’re uncertain, read this before you fill up your shelf with the rest of the dev rel books on this list.
8. Badass
The next book on our list is a classic, even though it’s less than 10 years old. While not particularly developer-focused, Kathy Sierra’s Badass: Making Users Awesome has wide-ranging applications and we think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in dev rel or marketing who wouldn’t get a lot from it.
The book begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others? Badass theorizes the answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services but in those who use them.
9. Developer Marketing Does Not Exist
Our final book recommendation is one we know well. Written by EveryDeveloper founder Adam DuVander, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist is the authentic guide to reach a technical audience.
The 2021 release will help you understand why typical marketing tactics fall flat on an audience of developers that sniff out anything promotional. In order to uncover what actually resonates with your technical audience so that you can start to reach more developers, you’ll need to know:
- What it means to reach “the right developers”
- What types of content you should create
- How you should approach sponsorships
Add Developer Marketing Does Not Exist to your wishlist now.