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I've been in devrel and dev community for a long time, and lately I can't stop thinking about what the new "developer first" strategy looks like in the age of AI
some of you may not remember but Twilio and Stripe were the original "developer first" companies and developer education was their strategy. (circa 2014 infamous "ask your developer" twilio billboards)
starting roughly around 2012 they were baked in to just about every web developer educational resource: tutorials (shout out @railscasts), example apps, in-person and online bootcamps in the world
as you know, Stripe focused on world-class docs, case study / use case first and beginner-friendly SDKs. twilio went boots-on-the-ground / dev advocates at every web dev conference big or small, workshops on workshops
i lived this firsthand...i taught at @trybloc as a web dev mentor for years and later spent around 5 years as a dev advocate at Square trying to convince developers to switch from Stripe APIs to Square APIs. HA. no small feat
developers don't learn, evaluate, and adopt tools the same way they did 10 years ago. being a developer and being a developer advocate/evangelist, has shifted significantly with AI. so let's talk about this
as the race for the agentic infrastructure layer plays out, this is a question i'm spending a lot of time thinking about, and one i hope to help crack during my time at @arc @circle
some of you may not remember but Twilio and Stripe were the original "developer first" companies and developer education was their strategy. (circa 2014 infamous "ask your developer" twilio billboards)
starting roughly around 2012 they were baked in to just about every web developer educational resource: tutorials (shout out @railscasts), example apps, in-person and online bootcamps in the world
as you know, Stripe focused on world-class docs, case study / use case first and beginner-friendly SDKs. twilio went boots-on-the-ground / dev advocates at every web dev conference big or small, workshops on workshops
i lived this firsthand...i taught at @trybloc as a web dev mentor for years and later spent around 5 years as a dev advocate at Square trying to convince developers to switch from Stripe APIs to Square APIs. HA. no small feat
developers don't learn, evaluate, and adopt tools the same way they did 10 years ago. being a developer and being a developer advocate/evangelist, has shifted significantly with AI. so let's talk about this
as the race for the agentic infrastructure layer plays out, this is a question i'm spending a lot of time thinking about, and one i hope to help crack during my time at @arc @circle
