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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

I do the DevRel* for Chrome DevTools. Dan is remarkably good at DevRel. I've pinged him on a few occasions, and to my recollection he's always replied very promptly, always with a helpful answer. My impression is that he's like that with anyone who has a reasonably well-thought-out question. Which, if true, is amazing considering the size of the React community. Aside from React's own merits, I would wager that Dan's DevRel superpowers have been a non-trivial factor in React's success.

* Developer relations, on the off chance anyone is unfamiliar with the term. A DevRel team for a developer product like React would be in charge of communicating new features, changes, best practices, etc. to the React developer community, answering technical questions on how to use React, and relaying community feedback to the React team.

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I just learned that DevRel is a thing, I just thought it is a non-trivial part of a normal project but not that it was categorized separately (or I'd call it tech advocate). Not only that, I think that DevRel is the best indicator of success of any project! Basic design, documentation, etc are needed, but once those are covered it's DevRel what sets projects success apart.

Famous DevRel I know and what they've been promoting to great success:

- Dan Abramov, Redux and React.

- Evan You, Vue.js

- Lea Verou, Prism, Bliss and CSS in general.

- "@dhh", Ruby on Rails.

- Sindre Sorhus, npm and indie JS.

Note: I just say they have greatly helped to the success, no that these are their projects.

On the other hand, we all know some projects that succeed despite their founders being really bad at DevRel... but those are so rare and basically just put a lot of efforts in something related but not the same (marketing, first to the market, 10x better technically, etc).

My main focus right now is learning how to get better at this since I'd love to do OSS fulltime. Any tip on how to get there would be greatly appreciated. I'm trying to learn mainly from Dan and Evan since IMHO they are next-level in this specific area :)

PS, since you work for Chrome DevTools, I imagine you are in Google. I think, besides the issues of Angular 1->2, the real reason Angular stayed behind is that there were no highly visible DevRels.

FWIW my job role is just software developer. I try to help people because I like being a part of the community and like explaining things to others that somebody explained to me. But I’m not officially a DevRel. Although I guess I fit the shoes.

Right, didn’t mean to imply that you only did DevRel. I think most React users know that you’re on the core team. Just wanted to suggest to the general HN community that your consistent efforts around helping the React community might be a factor of React’s success. Whenever there’s a post here on HN about why framework A is a success whereas framework B is a flop, the focus is usually on technical factors or developer ergonomics.

> But I’m not officially a DevRel. Although I guess I fit the shoes.

Those are usually the best DevRel folks imho. Love the work you do!

Taylor Otwell with Laravel definitely fits this category too.

- RhodiumToad on Postgres

Is there any way (other than the chrome bug tracker) for devs to talk to you guys about Dev tool bugs, or suggestions?

There are definitely some lingering low pri bugs in the issue tracker that would improve the QoL that would really help the dev tools experience.

Example: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=771144

This happens every time. So I just stopped moving the tabs, but if the dev tools are not wide enough to show the (ever increasing) number of tabs, it’s always the 3rd party ones that get pushed off.

I would LOVE if this was fixed in Chrome.

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