Last month I had a wonderful opportunity to be on the Day Two DevOps podcast and talk with π³οΈβππ³οΈβπ Kyler Middleton and Ned Bellavance about community management, how community works in the AI era β including the impossible challenge of detecting AI-created content β and some delightful topic side quests, including the first public sharing of my vibe-coded solution for movie collecting that has been tremendously effective at draining my wallet. π
π I had a lot of fun connecting with these two great people and I encourage you to give it a listen/watch.
We had an excellent conversation about building communities, the importance of the tone early members set, and how metrics that matter to community program managers β such as community active rate β might have no relevance to senior leaders. Community managers need to be prepared to answer the “So what?” question and point to metrics that impact team goals.
You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if that’s your thing! Here’s a summary from the Gainsight blog post:
Two hands. A free Slack channel. A spreadsheet. That was the entire toolkit when AWS asked Jason Dunn to build a developer community.
Jason Dunn spent five years on building something people actually want to belong to. He grew a developer community into thousands of members spread across more than a hundred countries, working with far less budget and tooling than you’d expect.
This conversation digs into what separates a living community from a glorified contact list. Why your earliest members carry so much weight. When to keep the door open and when to guard it. How to prove value when your best wins resist a dashboard. Why technical people walk the second something smells like a pitch. And how one small, slightly absurd reward became a badge people chased for months. A Real talk on getting people to show up for each other.
My friend Todd Ogasawara invited me to join his MobileViews podcast, so along with Jon Westfall and Sven Johanssen, I joined in the conversation. It’s always great to get together and talk tech with like-minded folks.
Todd kicked off the podcast with what didnβt get announced:
A Surface βamateurβ 4 to follow-up the popular low-priced Surface 3
A Windows Hello mouse with fingerprint reader
An affordable (sub $900) Macbook anything
A refreshed Mac mini β has not been refreshed since Oct. 2014
There’s some ranting me from about the new Macbook Pro, and some thoughts about Microsoft’s Studio Pro.