Sarah Lean, Author of Developer Relations for Beginners: What to Know and How to Get Started

Len: Hi I’m Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this episode of the Frontmatter podcast I’ll be interviewing Sarah Lean.

Based in Glasgow, Sarah is a popular international speaker, Cloud Architect, Microsoft Azure MVP, and founder of the Glasgow Azure User Group, in addition to her role as Lead DevOps Advocate at Octopus Deploy.

You can follow her on Twitter @TechieLass and check out her blog at techielass.com, and watch her videos on YouTube at youtube.com/techielass. You can also support her work at buymeacoffee.com/techielass.

Sarah is the author of the book Developer Relations for Beginners: What to Know and How to Get Started.

In the book, Sarah gives you a behind-the-scenes look at Developer Relations or “DevRel”, sharing experiences from her work in the industry, and helping readers decide if it might be the right career path for them.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about Sarah’s background and career, professional interests, her book, and at the end we’ll talk about her experience using Leanpub to self-publish her book.

So, thank you Sarah for being on the Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast.

Sarah: Yeah, that was a great introduction, and thank you for having me.

Len: Thanks very much. I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up, and how you found your way into a career in tech?

Sarah: I ended up in tech, maybe not necessarily by choice? I grew up on a dairy farm. I was big into farming. Maybe not enough to take on the farm at the time, but when I was starting to pick university subjects and mentioned to my parents that I wanted to go to agricultural college, they were quite against me doing that, to be honest. Probably the traditional, like, “Farming isn’t for girls. You shouldn’t be doing it,” that kind of attitude. Plus the fact that farming is a 24/7 365 day a year job, and doesn’t necessarily pay very well, or give you that proper work/life balance that we all are trying to achieve. They spotted that I was quite into computing, and that computing would be the future. They encouraged me to go down the computing route. I ended up at university studying computer science. So, yeah - that’s how I got into tech.

And then from there, I’ve had various different jobs, and stuff like that. But, yeah. I initially got pushed away from a male-orientated industry, into another male-orientated industry. I have a bit of an interesting tale there, I suppose.

Len: Believe it or not, the size of farms is something that’s come up on this podcast in the past. I’m from a province in Canada called Saskatchewan. Both my parents grew up on farms.

Sarah: Oh, okay.

Len: It’s funny. My grandfather on my father’s side, their farm was very small. My grandfather on my mother’s side, had a bigger farm. But in Saskatchewan in the middle of Canada, on the Great Plains - we had these giant farms. But it differs from place to place. How big was the farm that you grew up on?

Sarah: It probably wasn’t very big, in terms of acreage or the amount of cows and stuff like that. Probably a couple of hundred.

Because it was just my dad that worked on it. But it was enough to feed the family, and look after us, and stuff like that. But I think now, if I’d been older - I’m a bit wiser - I would definitely love the opportunity to have ran the farm, and followed on his footsteps. But when you’re 15, 16 - you don’t really know the difference, do you?

Len: Oh no, definitely. It’s funny you brought that up. That very specific idea of like, “When I go to university, should I go into agriculture?” It’s often sort of the first thing that people think of.

And actually having farmer parents who encourage you to do something else, as you know, is actually quite common, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Len: It’s not exactly that they often want a better life for you, they’re just like, “This is a very hard one.”

Sarah: Yeah, I know. I’ve got friends, obviously in the farming industry, as well. And their parents have said, “Well, if you want to be a farmer, go off to university, get another career and like get a qualification behind you. And if you still want to come back and farm, then we’ll talk about it.” But yeah, my parents never really gave me that option. It was university for something else.

Len: I was actually looking at your LinkedIn profile when I was preparing for this interview, and I saw that a lot of your - at least from what I can tell from the job descriptions - is that a lot of your jobs, from the beginning, were very rubber-hits-the-road roles. Where it’s like, this workforce of 2,000 people is changing to a new type of laptop or IT infrastructure, or something like that, and there you are, taking the calls, probably walking up to their cubicle or workstation, or what have you, and like going, “Did you remember to turn it on?”

Sarah: Yeah.

Len: But all the way, then, to product development. Was that something that you found yourself thrown into? Or was it something that you found yourself drawn to?

Sarah: I think I’ve probably had a very traditional route, in terms of IT, in the apprenticeship. I talk about - I started off at the help desk, I was at the coal face of it all. Like you said, answering all the calls. And then I just gradually built up my skillset and moved through the roles.

If you think about IT, you probably have the traditional first level, second level, third level support, that tickets go through. I’ve done that Journey. I’ve moved through those roles, and really just built my career up by learning, by doing, and taking it where it’s taken me.

Some of the options on my CV have been the wrong choices that I’ve taken. And then I’ve had to change direction slightly. And then others have been opportunistic, just right time, right place, knowing the right people. So, yeah, lots of hard graft, and a little bit of luck along the way as well.

Len: And for people who might not be familiar, actually, but are probably interested, what actually are those levels? Is it like, the person who has the customer contact, reports it up to a project manager, who then triages it and prioritizes it, is that the structure that you’re talking about?

Sarah: Yeah, very much so. Your first level will be the people that are on your help desk. The people that answer the phone call or the email. They’ll take your initial details, any error messages. They’ll just, like you say, triage it, and potentially be able to help you. If it’s a known problem, they might have workarounds to solve it instantly for you at that first point of contact. If not, they will pass it on to the level two engineers. And your level two engineers are probably a bit more experienced, and have more time to spend on calls.

Traditionally on the help desk, the phone’s going all the time. You’re constantly having to put a phone call down, next one up, type of thing. Second level engineers will also have the ability to potentially go out on site, and actually see you, so physically be at your desk. Well, at least in the past, when we were all physically in the same office space, your level two engineers would be able to go out to you. And again, if they didn’t know how to fix it, they would escalate it to the third level, and that would be your most experienced engineers.

That could either, again, spend even more time on the problem, trying to fix it, or escalate it with the suppliers. They would have the contacts with the suppliers to fix any third party issues, and stuff like that. It’s just like you would expect, the three levels of triage. Your third level would be the very top level. If they couldn’t fix it, chances are, it was really broken. Or they had to do something bigger. It was maybe a project that had to be implemented to fix it? So, yeah, that’s the three levels.

Len: It’s curious. I do a little bit of that for Leanpub myself, that kind of thing. It’s important to understand your own product, and products, and the problems that people are having, and then, feature requests that they have, and stuff like that.

But one one of the curious - I mean, I know you don’t do that thing so much anymore, obviously. But one of the curious dimensions of that work, is that it’s all negative. You know what I mean?

Sarah: Yeah.

Len: At least the thing that initiates an action, is all negative.

Sarah: Yeah.

Len: Do you have any way of handling that, that was unique to you, or -?

Sarah: I think I was very lucky, to be honest, when I worked in the help desk. I worked with a great bunch of older women, who weren’t technical, but they were absolutely shit hot on customer service. They knew how to interact with people. They knew how to calm people down. They knew the processes. They had very well-regarded processes on being able to take a fault. Everybody that phoned up the help desk knew how to - they knew the questions they were going to ask, so a lot of them were prepared for all of that, and they knew the process, and they knew that if we couldn’t fix it, we would do our damndest to try and push that along, and things like that. I had a really good grounding in customer service.

I often think that in the IT industry nowadays, we’re so focused on the technology, we’re so focused on learning what tick box I need to tick inside Azure to make something work, we forget about the human element inside Azure - sorry, inside the IT industry. We forget that we’re actually trying to solve problems for people who do jobs with the computers and the systems that we designed. I think I’ve been very fortunate in that I learned really good customer service skills, to be honest, from those women on the help desk. And I think that’s - yeah, you get a lot of negativity.

But, again, if you know how to answer those calls, and if you know how to separate yourself personally from them, because these people are not attacking you. They’re attacking the crappy computers or the systems that have broken down on them. And if you know how to do that, then you can do your job really well, to be quite honest.

Len: That’s really interesting actually. Whenever I’m calling up, because I’ve encountered a problem - it’s rarely calling, obviously. But whenever I’m contacting, I always try and be very clear that, “I know it’s not you. I know you’re not responsible for this, and you’re the point of contact to hopefully help me get over this issue.” But not everybody’s like that.

Some people really don’t - they’ve never had the experience of being on the other end of the call, as it were. Or they just don’t maybe have that much of an imagination. Or actually, it can be very random. They can be in psychological or emotional difficulty for various reasons.

Do you have any go to techniques for handling people, when you realize like right off the bat - or I mean, again, from the past. But when they’re a little bit, coming from a bad place?

Sarah: I think it’s just keeping the emotion out of it. Making sure that you’re - if you’re phoning them, the tone of the voice is very neutral, very calming. I don’t think raising your voice as much as you want to, much as I have wanted to in the past, is not going to help the situation, it’s just going to make it worse. It’s all about just trying to keep them calm. And, yeah, often apologizing, which, again, “It’s not my fault,” and things like that. But apologizing to someone saying, “I’m sorry you’re having problems. I appreciate it’s causing an issue with your boss or your deadline or whatever. But we’ll try our best.”

It’s that reassuring chat that you would just give anybody in a stressful situation. Because, as you say, they’re probably phoning up. And if they’re really angry, it’s because they are getting crap from elsewhere, or they’re missing a deadline. Or they’re just, other things are happening, family life is clashing with work, and things like that.

So, yeah, you escalating the situation, swearing at them, shouting at them, raising your voice, being short with them, is not going to help it. And that’s not to say that I’m an angel. Because the minute I hang up that phone call, or end that email, I will then go and have a bitch with the person sitting beside me or the colleagues, and moan about that person. But moaning to the person that’s shouting at you, is not going to help, ever, the situation. It’s just about trying to stay calm, and take that personal emotion out of the situation as much as you can. That’s what I try to do. Whether it always works, I don’t know.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that, it’s very interesting. If one has ever been a weird customer, one has become a story for whoever had to deal with you, that they told later. And they were probably saving it up while they were talking to you, and trying to remember the details along the way.

But it is actually really interesting you mention that. It’s a detail, but it’s a very important one, which is the apology. Just saying, “I’m sorry,” to someone who’s in trouble, just completely changes things usually, 99% of the time. And often turns it into an apology on their part.

Because when a person’s - I call it, “the hot cloud.” When they’re running away with themselves. They’re not thinking. They’re not thinking about things being a two-way street.

And the apology makes it clear that this is a two way street. That the other person regards you as a person, and once that happens, they can regard you as a person.

And often, the people who start out the angriest end up, can end up being the nicest. They just need to have a little mirror of - but what they see in the mirror - I don’t know? That’s a bad analogy. But you know what I mean?

Sarah: Yeah, I know what you mean, yeah.

Len: They need something, someone nice on the other end, in spite of their own anger, can really change the situation.

You mentioned that you leveled up, starting from one level in IT, and moving up to the senior level that you’re at now. I’m very curious, did you do that by switching jobs to level up, or did you level up within organizations sometimes?

Sarah: I jumped around, to be honest. When you look at my early career, I jumped around quite a bit. Sometimes I even moved laterally to another company, because it was maybe a bigger company, or it was a different situation, to be able to get difference experience or different exposure to IT systems. Yeah, the early part of my CV is quite jumpy.

To be honest, I think I was in a job maybe 18 months maximum at the start, just to build up that experience and exposure to different people, different situations, and to push myself outside my comfort zone.

Because you can get very familiar with a certain job. I didn’t want to do that. I had ambitions of doing the best I could. It was all about trying to move across. And if I had to leave a company, unfortunately I did that, as much as it pained me to leave like friends and stuff behind. But, yeah, I moved quite a bit in my early career.

Len: Did you stay in Glasgow the whole time?

Sarah: Yeah, I think all of my jobs have been Glasgow-based, or had an office in Glasgow. A few companies maybe were more Edinburgh-based, and then I was based in client sites in Glasgow. But yeah, I think I’ve always worked - I’m trying to remember now. I’ve always worked in and around Glasgow. I don’t - Yeah, a few times I worked in Edinburgh.

Len: And eventually you landed a job with Microsoft. There’s a video that I might link to in the transcription, where you talk about leaving that job. But in that video, you talk about what it took to get that job a little bit.

I was wondering if you could talk -? People sometimes like to hear what it’s like to get jobs at big companies like that. What was the interview process like for you, getting a job at Microsoft?

Sarah: Oh, it was hellish. So, yeah, the Microsoft job interview process is quite hellish.

It took me years to even believe in applying. Any advice I would give to anybody, is just apply. Because it’s just a company like any other company. It may be your dream company. But just go and hit that “apply” button, and submit your application and start the process. Because I never landed a job the first time I applied. I never landed a job the first time I interviewed with Microsoft. It was the third different job, and third interview process that I’d been through with them, that I then got offered the job.

And I think, to a certain degree, it’s a learning process for the job, when you apply for these big companies. Because I think they’re pretty much all the same. There’s often that first telephone interview, to check that you’re okay, and you’re pretty coherent, and you’re not lying too much on your CV. Then there’s a second one. Which is more of a technical one. They’ll ask you - certainly for the jobs I’ve interviewed at Microsoft, have been around, “Can you name some technologies? Can you answer these simple questions?” Then there’s been maybe a more detailed one around presenting something to them. And then you maybe meet another manager.

There’s three or four stages throughout the process. And certainly, when I did the in-person, it was quite harrowing. Because I had to fly down to London, down in their head offices, and go there, and have the logistics of flying down. Driving to the place, trying to find a hotel. Then making sure I was on the site. And then realizing you’re on the site of Microsoft, and inside the offices of Microsoft, your dream company. That’s just mind-blowing. The first time I ever did that, wow. I think the occasion got to me. And that’s why I interviewed really poorly the first time I did it. I probably interviewed very poorly the second time as well, because I never got offered the job.

But by the third time, I was in a, “Do you know what? If they don’t want me this time, then their loss. I know I’m good enough,” type of thing. I went in with a completely different attitude. I also dressed very differently. The first two job interviews I went to at Microsoft onsite, I was in brand new sharp suit trousers, suit jacket, proper shoes, and all that stuff. I went as if I had a court date, and I was trying to impress someone.

But the third time I went down in jeans, trainers and a comfortable shirt. I looked smart, I looked presentable, but I was very much more comfortable in my own clothes, not something I’d just bought for the occasion, and I got hired.

So, yeah, I think the other interview processes I went through at Microsoft were very much teaching me how to be myself, if that makes sense? By the third time, I’d nailed that, I think. Well, they hired me, so I must’ve done something right on that occasion.

But, yeah, that’s why I always say to people, “Start applying, because these processes are never easy.” Whether you interview for Microsoft - I think AWS have a five-hour interview process, which is quite harrowing. You have to have a bit of practice, or a bit of, not being overawed by the occasion, often, from these companies.

So, yeah, just apply. Try it out. If you get knocked back, go again. Just keep going until you feel that you’re not - you’ll be able to do your best, if that makes sense, Len?

Len: Oh yeah, it does. Thank you very much for sharing that. Actually I’m sure there will be people listening to this who will have been experiencing flashbacks like I did, while you were describing that experience. Specifically scouting out the building in advance in the big city. Making sure you know where the entrances are. And then going in on the big day, and getting signed in, and the ID badge, or what have you. And then waiting until someone calls you up, and the multi-stage process, and things like that, with so much on the line, is an experience I think a lot of us have had.

They’re unforgettable experiences. Because the first time that you’ve gone through them, you don’t really know what’s going to happen. I think part of it is that there’s this huge machine that’s you’re being pulled into, you know what I mean? And when you realize that, like how kind of - “Impersonal” has the wrong connotation, just, there’s a process that you’re a part of now, that that’s happening. It can be very bracing to experience that.

You mentioned dress there. That’s actually a really big challenge for a lot of people. I wanted to ask you about, has the pandemic and the work from home thing changed dress codes, basically, for professional interaction, in your experience?

Sarah: Probably to a certain degree. The last few years before the pandemic, when I was meeting customers, I was very much dressing down. To be honest, I was going in jeans and trainers. Like, smart jeans and smart trainers, and a shirt or a t-shirt that was maybe branded with the company that I worked for. I was very much almost - I think, I very much had the mindset of, “I’ve reached a level of seniority, how I dress should not matter about what I’m about to tell you.” That was the attitude I was taking, and it was working. I hadn’t got in trouble much.

Nowadays, I think with the virtual, people are probably a little more relaxed about it. I can’t even remember the last time I went on a virtual call, and people were wearing like shirts and stuff like that. Most people were wearing their favorite football or soccer t-shirts, or in their gym gear. Or in their most relaxed, in their favorite hoody, and stuff like that.

It doesn’t bother me. I don’t care how you dress, as such, as long as you know what you’re talking about. And I hope that everybody else would do the exact same thing.

But I obviously know that there are some people that don’t think like that. But I think most of the IT industry is very relaxed. People are well aware that half our wardrobes are corporate t-shirts from conferences or giveaways, and things like that. It’s not necessarily the same, I think, as other industries, and other departments, and stuff like that.

Len: I’ve got this pet theory, that it’s not - it’s not specific, but it’s just that the way you dress should indicate thoughtfulness, and like, you’re aware of the nature of the situation that you’re in now.

That sounds abstract, and maybe it’s easy to say when you’re not 19 going for your first job, and have no like basis of experience for it. But like, thoughtfulness. And the way you behave, obviously matters more than anything else in your interview, right? Like sussing out, for example, whether it might be okay to swear.

If you can show that you have that level of awareness, looking people in the eye, for example, things like that. Not being too uncomfortable, but not being too familiar either. And as you said, having experience doing it, really is the only way to know. And remembering that if you go through an interview process, and you don’t make it, you can always try again, and save it up.

Actually one - I’ve never done it myself, but one common piece of advice that people give, is if you have a chance, if you don’t get the job, ask questions of the person who interviewed you. If it’s email or what have you, like, “Hey, any advice?” And actually often people are more than happy, as long as you’re not like asking like ten questions, you know what I mean? If they’re just like, “Any advice?” People like to give advice. It makes them feel good about themselves, and it makes them feel helpful. That can actually really help.

One last thing, before we go on to talk about your book, and I guess, talking about your current role, are probably more or less the same thing - but you’re a STEM ambassador for stem.org.uk, I noticed in your bio. I was just wondering if we could talk a little bit about why you signed up for that, and what you do as part of that?

Sarah: Yeah. STEM means, “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” and it’s all about helping the next generation get started in one of those careers. Obviously I represent the tech element of that. But I wanted to do that, because I don’t remember anyone really being a good role model for me at school, or throughout my academic career, until I got to the very last year of my high school, around IT. I never had a female teacher. I think there was one lecturer at university who was female. But other than that, it was all male. And in my class, there were two females, and I was one of them. I just remember being - I never felt isolated, until I got into those situations, and I started looking around, and things like that.

I don’t want the next generation to have that same feeling. Often when I talk to schools, I ask the kids, “Who wants to fall into IT?,” and things like that. All the boys, their hands shoot up in the air. They’re all desperate to do it. They all want to be video game developers. They want to make the next “Halo” or “FIFA,” or something like that. And that’s fine. But then when I ask the girls why they aren’t interested in tech, they’re like, “I don’t like videogames, and technology’s for boys.”

That crushes me. Because I never thought that. I don’t know why this generation or the kids today think that. I want to make sure that I’m trying to represent a good portion of the IT industry. Show them that there are women in the IT industry, and you don’t need to like gaming, to be in the IT industry. Because, let’s face it, there are thousands of career paths that fall inside the IT industry. I don’t even touch video games at home. So, yeah, it’s about just being a good role model for the next generation, and making sure that, at some point, there’s another generation behind me, so as I can retire.

Len: And so, do you go to schools and talk to kids directly and things like that, as part of it?

Sarah: Yeah. Pre-pandemic I went to a lot of schools in the local area. Either through activities through the STEM organization, or I would reach out to teachers. A lot of teachers now are on Twitter. I’ve done my networking on Twitter, and reached out to a few schools and stuff like that, and went to classrooms and talked to them about my career. I’ve done a few virtually, which has been absolute chaos. Because the kids are all shouting questions at once, and the teacher’s trying to calm them down. But yeah, I think it’s just about showing them the possibility.

The one thing that I tell them, is that IT translates throughout the world. Like IT here in Scotland, is the exact same as IT over in Canada with you, or as in Australia. It doesn’t change. Maybe some of the terminology might change, but it’s fundamentally the same. It’s a career that can take you across the world, and has taken me across the world as well. That opens their eyes.

I see some of their eyes properly opening up about how they could travel the world, and things like that, and see the world through that. I don’t think we necessarily teach kids the right things about IT. I hopefully try and fill a bit of that void as much as I can, as one person on a mission.

Len: Actually, you said a few things there that make me want to delay talking about your book a little bit, for a few more minutes. One of them is - you mentioned getting to travel the world and talk on stage and things like that. I know you talked at Microsoft Ignite, and things like that.

And so for people listening who might be like, “How do I become - how do I get to be the person on stage?” What was your path to being a speaker?

Sarah: I actually started the Glasgow Azure User Group, as you said in the introduction, in 2017. That was a scary experience for me, because I’d never done public speaking. I’d never organized groups before, and I was worried about leading a band of techies into this user group. But once I started doing it, I obviously had to stand up in front of the group, and start going, “The fire exits are to your left, and the toilets are to your right. The food’s over here.” And be nice to everybody, and introduce the speakers, and all the stuff you do at these events. Which was massively nerve-wracking, and was probably my very first speaking gig.

But then people started saying, “Why are you not speaking at events? Because you’ve got great stories to tell, and you’ve got great experience. Why are you not being a speaker at other events?” And I was like, “Never considered it. Why would I do it? Why would anyone want to listen to me?”

Eventually someone was looking for a speaker, and they asked me, and I had no way out. They cornered me, and basically I had to say “Yes.” I went on from speaking from there, that was a local event here in Glasgow.

From there, it just grew. I started volunteering for more user groups. I then started going to conferences. I then did international conferences, and things like that. It’s just one of those organic things that I never planned out, I never thought I would do. But here I am, I think about 96 talks later, I have been speaking.

Len: That’s so fantastic. A person’s first move is go to meetups, not create one. But you jumped that first step. You leapfrogged it right away.

A lot of it is, just start doing it. It’s easy to say, and hard to do. But there it is. And actually sometimes being cornered or pushed by circumstances, can really help to get you on the way.

But basically, I mean, for anyone who wants to be the person on the stage, you can do it. There are paths. People want you up there if you do have interesting things to say, and you probably do.

And actually, on that note as well, I wanted to ask, so this became a sub-topic of the podcast, over just over two years ago, unfortunately. But how did the pandemic affect all of that for you?

Sarah: Obviously, it grounded me. I’ve been presenting from this room for most of the pandemic, or all of the pandemic. For the user group, it affected us massively, obviously, because we couldn’t physically meet. But we turned it into virtual meetings, like every other event did. We tried in vain to keep it going with the same cadence that we had in person. But the engagement wasn’t there, the community spirit wasn’t there, the fun just wasn’t there. We were getting the learning portion that you get with a user group, but we weren’t getting that community fun. We tailed it back.

But we’ve been back in person now since March or April this year. We’ve been quite lucky in that sense. We’ve had really great support from the regulars who were with us before the pandemic, and during the pandemic. Then we’ve got a bunch of new people that have never heard of us. Even though we’ve been going for five years, they’d never heard about the group, and they’re now joining us, and being part of that community. So, yeah, it’s almost been a benefit to us, in a certain way, because it’s almost like we relaunched it, I want to say “post-pandemic,” but I know it’s not post-pandemic. But, yeah, we’ve had an influx of new people, thanks to the relaunch of in-person events. So, yeah, it’s been fun.

Len: I’m really glad to hear that you’re back together in person, and naturally turning it into an opportunity to relaunch, is a really great story.

There are so many people who are desperate to get back. In that, it was a long enough time, that there are people who are like - they’ve been waiting two years to have this meetup experience that they heard so much about when they were in school, or something like that - to finally get a chance to do that, must’ve been amazing.

Finally, moving on to talk about your book, Developer Relations for Beginners: What to Know and How to Get Started. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what developer relations are?

Sarah: Developer relations is this kind of - I want to say “new,” but it’s not necessarily a new area in IT - where you take technical experts and talk to your audience. It’s often seen as a marketing funnel, a different way to talk to your audiences. Because it is technical people. I am technical. I’ve been in the industry, and I’m talking back to the audience that I once was, for a lot of the IT industry. So, it’s about engaging with your audience, and helping them either understand how your company that you work for can help them solve problems.

When I worked for Microsoft, obviously I was an advocate of all the Microsoft solutions, primarily Azure. But I was a representative, trying to help people understand the technology, and things like that.

Now, at Octopus, I do the same thing. Helping people understand the devops culture, and how Octopus can plug into that. Just generally be - this is going to sound dead cringe, but be a thought leader in that area, and be recognizable. For me, developer relations is all about helping the IT community and being there, and being that thought leader, being that go-to person, and putting out good content, that just helps people.

Len: The sales aspect of it, I find it quite interesting. For example, is this the -?

I’ve never worked for a big IT company myself, right? But is this the kind of thing where like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are trying to land a whale - there’s teams from each one that are being directed by sales, to talk to the people working at the company, that’s actually going to have to - because it’s sales, at the level of the people who are making the sale. It’s your job at the level of the people who are going to have to live with whatever the executives decide.

So your job partly is to teach people who either have had this imposed on them, or who may have this imposed on them, there’s no cloud solution or what have you. Like, “This is how it works. This is how it’s good. This is how it’s going to make your day better.” Is it that kind of thing?

Sarah: Yeah, in a sense. Developer relations will either sit under marketing, or it’ll sit under engineering. Which is really hard, and probably a weird place for it to sit in either department. But it is about helping, dispelling the myths that they may have had. Maybe like you say, the salesperson has gone in, sold the dream. Then we’re trying to fix it, dial that back, and actually implement it properly. Or just helping general areas. How do you get into cloud? You don’t have to necessarily be an Azure customer to want to contact me.

I created a lot of beginner content, and talked to a lot of people who had never used Azure before. It was just about driving that awareness, that potentially might lead to sales, five years down the line, when they left university and worked for a company.

There are multiple facets of it. At Microsoft we had different teams that talked to different audiences. We had like your IoT developers. We had ones for infrastructure. That was my area. We had ones for developers. We had Kubernetes people. We had a whole academia team that talked to students, and things like that. It can differ, depending on the company you work for, and the scale of the company as well, that you work for. But yeah, developer relations is a fun area to dive into, and define.

Len: So, do you play the role also, between like the people who are actually working on the product, and the people who are using it, and communicating back and forth between them as well?

Sarah: Yeah. That’s very much a good area to work in as well. Because at certain levels, every company will talk direct to our customers who spend X amount of money with a company. They’ll bring their engineering teams in to you, and you can feed them directly back.

But let’s face it, not every customer will have that amount of money to be able to spend every month on the product, or whatever, and not have that direct connection with the product groups and the engineering teams. That’s often where a developer advocate can come into play. Somebody could find me on Twitter. They can then reach out to me. My job is to partly have those conversations with them, try and distil either their feedback, or introduce them into the engineering team directly, so they can have that direct link, depending on what the idea is, etc.

And, equally, often if our product is developed, and maybe the customers aren’t happy, my job can be to try and advocate for why the company has made that decision, and why that feature was put over another feature, etc. Be that go-to person that talks to both unhappy parties, or whatever, or misunderstood parties, and tries to get the message across.

So, yeah, maybe “spokesperson” is another way of putting a part of the role within advocacy?

Len: It’s really interesting. One thing you spell out in the book is the difference between these roles under developer relations, like advocacy, as you mentioned. But there’s also events, community management, content documentation, and things like that. Advocacy is the one that seems to be the most like - I would imagine, taking the brunt, probably?

Sarah: Yeah. The advocates inside a developer relations department are often the most visible. They’re the ones that are potentially on YouTube or at conferences, or are writing the blog posts, and things like that. But the developer relations team is made up of potentially tons of other people, like you mentioned, community managers, events, teams, and things like that, that make up the full developer relations.

Again, it would depend on the scale of the company, and things like that. Because sometimes your developer relations is a one-person job, and you have to put those different hats on, and manage all of that expectation around what comes with DevRel.

Len: It’s really interesting, you’re very clear in the book, that - although, of course, you’re working for a company, and the company’s trying to make money - but you say, you’re very explicit, and you say, quote, “It should not be about selling,” end quote. It’s about helping people do what they need to do.

Sarah: Yeah. For me, I shouldn’t necessarily be that demand-generation. I shouldn’t be the salesperson. There are better people that can do sales than me. I’m not very good at sales. So, yeah, it’s more about teaching and helping, which will potentially lead to sales. I’m not even going to pretend that, that’s not why I put the link at the bottom. “Go and have a free trial of Azure,” or “Go and have a free trial of Octopus Deploy.” It can potentially lead to a sale, but that shouldn’t be the motivation for why I’m standing up on stage. The success of me standing up on stage shouldn’t be measured by how many licenses I sell. Because that’s the wrong thing. That’s a completely different job. That’s a sales job. That’s what the sales people are doing. That’s what sales conferences are about. But my job should be about helping people, to be honest.

Len: It’s really interesting actually, there’s a very - I was looking around trying to find a very concrete example of the work that you. I mean, you’ve got all these great videos on YouYube - I found one of these OctoChats that you do, for the company that you work for, Octopus Depoloy. It’s great. It’s once a month. I gather, like on a Friday, you’ll interview someone from the company, one-on-one, talking about the news of the month. I watched a couple of them, and they were great. I mean, I don’t work for that company. But I thought if I did, “How great would it be to just wind down for half an hour, watching two smart people from the company talk to each other?” But that idea of relations, right? That is just embodied in that fun practice.

Sarah: Yeah. That’s a fun little show that we do, like you say, once a month. We cover off things like Octopus News. We talk about if there’s any new features, or if we’re looking for product feedback. Then we start to talk about industry news, and random stuff. It could be anything from the latest price of the PlayStation. I think the PlayStation 5 price went up in the UK, and things like that. We talk about things like that, to the latest product that Microsoft may have launched, or TCP, or whatever it may be. It’s a random mix of just two people having a chat, having some fun, sharing with the community.

That’s what I want to embody as an advocate. Having fun, helping people, and sharing the knowledge, and learning things as well, as I go.

Len: One thing that I found quite interesting, is actually like people getting an opportunity to be passionate about their job, is great. They’re like, “Finally I get to talk about it with somebody.” “Here’s something I learned last week, isn’t that interesting?” Just getting to be on a show, must be fun.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s fun. Because let’s face it, we probably have these conversations in Slack or on private messages. Why not turn the camera on and do it live to an audience?

Len: Speaking of actually creating content and audiences and things like that, for the last part of the podcast, we always talk to people, if they’re content creators, we talk to them about their content creator life - how they do that, and things like that. So you’ve got your blog, and you make a lot of videos. How did you get into that, into the Techielass brand, and making videos? Which, by the way, I think, maybe people might not know, but you do that all - that’s all on your own.

Sarah: Yeah. My blog and my YouTube are all passion side products that I do in my own time. But yeah, the blog came first. The blog probably came around maybe eight, nine years ago? It was very much a dumping ground for problems that I had solved, that weren’t documented anywhere, or I would forget. It was just that kind of, “Here’s a bit of random things that I fixed at my workplace, and I want to remember, so I’m going to put it on a blog that’s publicly accessible.”

It’s never had a great audience to start with, until maybe about four years ago, when I thought, “Right, let’s make an effort here, Sarah, to actually engage with the community, share what I’m learning, and get a little back from it as well.”

Then, probably about three years ago, I was involved in the user group. I was doing presenting. But the one thing that I didn’t have in my skill set, was talking to the camera, and being confident in front of the camera. I was worried that potentially that challenge would come up. Maybe I would have to present, and they would have a camera on me, and that would faze me. Or I’d get interviewed, or whatever it may be.

I thought, “Let’s start a YouTube channel. All the cool kids are doing it, so why not try it?” That’s when I came up with the idea of doing a weekly video, where I just turned on the camera, and talked about the news. Or talked about my week, and things that had happened in the role that I was doing.

And, yeah, so the first couple of videos are really horrible. I’ve watched them back, and I’m not looking in the right direction, the audio’s horrible, the camera’s out of focus. All the things that you would imagine that you would do, the mistakes you would make.

But then obviously, as I did it every week, as I edited myself, as I listened to myself, I got better, I got more confident. I think I did those weekly videos for nearly 200 odd weeks, or 200 odd videos of them?

Then I stopped. I lost the interest in doing the weekly videos. I moved to just more long-term content, where I’d create like a five, ten minute video on how to do something. That’s been my focus. It’s just been an evolution of, me trying something, seeing how it goes, and then trying something again, and things like that.

Len: do you obsessively watch your followers or views, and things like that? That’s something that people sometimes talk about. Having to psychologically manage, when you’re in that content creator space. Sarah: Yeah, I have. I think, especially during the pandemic, when I wasn’t getting distracted by life as such, watching my followers go up, and watching my YouTube channel go up. Obsessing why one video only got three views, versus one that got like 100 or 200. Really trying to learn everything I could about the YouTube algorithm and how that worked, and things like that.

I got a bit obsessive about it, and it was mentally challenging when I didn’t see the results that I wanted from it, or expected from it, or assumed I would get. But now I - I’m not going to say, “I don’t care.” Because there’s a tiny bit of me that still cares about it. But I definitely don’t obsess about it. I’ve uninstalled the apps off my phone, so that I can’t really check it, and things like that.

So, yeah, I went through a period of obsession, but I’m trying not to. Because it’s not a good place to be.

Len: One of the reasons I asked, because that actually is something I’ve talked with people about, who - particularly, if they get some success, you develop a baseline, if you know what I mean? That you need to hit.

Sarah: Yeah.

Len: Regarding the YouTube algorithm, I’m going to ask you in a moment if you have any advice, because I only know from the consumer side, apparently YouTube thinks I’m an awful person, based on the videos that it tries to show me.

It wants me to click on lots of alt right intellectual dark web stuff.

Sarah: Oh wow.

Len: Yeah, I don’t know why. I hardly use -

Sarah: That is really bad. I’m laughing here, and I didn’t realize you were going to say -

Len: No, no, I hardly use YouTube at all, but whenever I go on, that nonsense is just every other video. Actually, basically, the only time I spend on YouTube is searching for podcast guests, when I’m doing my research.

I’ll type in “Sarah Lean,” and then it’ll be like, “Jordan Peterson,” “Ben Shapiro.” I’ll be like, “What’s -?”

Do you have any advice for people who are creating content on YouTube? What can you do? Is it in the title of your video that helps? Is it the content of the description? Is there any advice you can give for people who are trying to get viewers?

Sarah: It’s such a black art, to be quite honest, how to - no one really knows how the algorithm works. But things that typically work, is good headlines, get straight to the point. If you’re solving a problem, tell them you’re solving a problem. I have a video up there that is, “How to delete a repository in GitHub,” that’s the title, “How to delete a repository in GitHub.” There’s no sensationalism there, there’s no hiding the fact that that is exactly the problem that I’m about to solve in this really short video. My thumbnail is very simple.

Description, very simple. It tells you about the problem, it’s not telling you my life story, and then at the very end, I’m like, “I’m going to solve you this problem.” The keywords and tags that I’ve used, again, are the search queries that you would get if you were - if someone was putting that into YouTube, “How to delete a GitHub repository.” There’s no hidden way to do that.

So, yeah, some people will say, “Keep it simple. Tell the people what you’re doing.” Other people will be like, “Oh tell them, something sensational, make it clickbait,” and things like that.

But I think in the tech industry, people are trying to find the solution to a problem. They’re trying to answer a question they haven’t been able to find. Because a product’s UI is really bad, or they’re just tired or whatever, or not experienced enough. Trying to keep it simple works for the tech industry, I think, from some of the success that I’ve had. But it’s a bit of a shitshow, the algorithm. Sometimes it works, and other times you’re just like, “What did I do wrong today?”

Len: It’s funny you mention that, the very specific things that actually step-by-step show people how to do things are - one of the ones I watched, that I didn’t know how to do this, but you can file search in github by typing “T” on GitHub.

In your browser at github.com, you type “T,” and a search shows up. Then you can type, and there’s this fuzzy file search. I was like, “Wow, that was the best minute of my day, in terms of productivity.” Those kinds of things can really help. One of my most successful blog posts from Leanpub, is about like - it’s from years ago, but it’s got like a huge amount of views, or readers, compared to our normal ones. Which was, “How to use Dropbox to get an ebook on your iphone.”

Because it can sometimes be - in the past - it’s better now. But in the past, it was tricky sometimes to get certain kinds of content on your phone. That just got this extraordinary amount of views. Because people are searching specifically for that. If they can find something that actually shows step-by-step, in a video, or shot-by-shot shows them how to do it, that’s just amazing content.

The last question I always ask of a guest on the podcast if they’ve done something on Leanpub, is, it’s a selfish one - if there were one thing that, when you were using Leanpub, you were shouting at the screen about, that we could fix for you, or of there was one magical feature we could build for you, is there anything you can think of that you would ask us to do?

Sarah: I think my only complaint is the UI for an author. Once I published my book, I couldn’t find how to get back into the author dashboard. Because the dashboard had defaulted to the buying. I’m trying to remember, I’m explaining that right, Len, does that make sense to you?

Len: We’ve gotten that feedback before. There’s this inherently tricky thing when your site - I mean, YouTube has it. I mean, they’re way bigger than we are. But obviously if there’s both creating and consuming happening on the site, there’s just this inherent problem of like, what do you prioritize in terms of what people see? How do you get to the place? If you’re a content creator, how do you get to that place? In Leanpub, what we have is like, I call it the “escape hatch.” There’s a hamburger menu on the top right.

If you click there, there’ll be three columns. The leftmost column has the names in it, like “Library,” which is where - well, that’s pretty clear. But we also have “Author.”

“Author” - that’ll open up a little menu with your author dashboard, and stuff like that. It’s a bit - it’s one thing, that like, we’re always working on it, as you know, everybody always is. But if you click on “Library,” you’ll see a menu that shows like “Books,” “Bundles,” “Courses,” and “Course Sets.” If you click on “Author,” of course, you’ll see “Bundles,” “Courses,” and “Course Sets.” There’s no visual cue, other than the highlighting of the word, “Author,” as opposed to the word, “Library.”

That actually is something that we’ve got feedback before from. I really appreciate that. Because sometimes - I mean, when people are shouting at Leanpub, “Where the hell’s my damn book? I published it, and I can’t find it.”

By the way, for anyone listening who’s curious, actually the main way that people usually do that, is they just go to the landing page for their book. If you’re signed in as the author, you’ll have a little “Edit” button that you’ll see on the book cover image. Instead of using our escape hatch menu, actually a lot of people use that. They’re just like, “I’m just going to go where my book is. If I’m signed in, I can click ‘Edit,’ and there I am in the author dashboard for my book.”

But thank you very much for that. We always internalize when people say that, because we know that’s very important, when we get a chance to hear about that from people.

Well, Sarah, thank you very much for taking time out of your evening to talk to me and to talk to our audience. Thank you very much for using Leanpub as a platform for publishing your book.

Sarah: Thank you for having me, it’s been a pleasure chatting.

Len: Thanks very much.

As always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the Frontmatter podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it, and if you’d like to be a Leanpub author, please visit our website at leanpub.com.