The Developer's Journey

Every developer you’ve ever met who loves Rust, or Kafka, OpenSpec, or whatever—and wants you to love it too—didn’t start there. They went through something. A predictable and wonderful something. I know, because I’ve been through it myself.

I’m not the only DevRel leader to propose a Developer’s Journey, but I’m the one telling you right here and now why it matters. Discovery, Understanding, Play, Building, and Advocacy aren’t a funnel metaphor or a marketing construct. Rather, they’re a genuine description of how the our minds works when encountering a new technology. You see it. You decide if it’s worth caring about. You build a mental model. You kick the tires in a safe, contained environment. Then you build something real. And if things go well, you become the person who can’t stop talking about it.

That last stage—Advocacy—is the one most programs underinvest in, and it’s actually the most strategically important. A de facto developer advocate who came up through the community, who’s building real things and sharing genuine enthusiasm, carries a kind of credibility that no documentation or sponsored content can replicate. They do it for love, not the paycheck. That detachment is the whole point.

This framework is the strategic north star of every serious DevRel program. Understanding it shapes how you think about content, events, staffing, metrics, and results.

Full post on my site: The Developer’s Journey. Next up, I’ll get into what successful execution on this framework traditionally looks like—and why AI is disrupting it in ways that aren’t obvious.