The activities of Developer Relations (DevRel) are many and varied, often defying neat boxes of practice to bind them to. This paper does not set all the activities in stone, but does provide a frame of reference you, the reader, can use to orient yourself to the unique brand of Developer Relations we practice here at the LEGO Group. It is a practice that takes a step back to view human inputs and the software produced by them as one sociotechnical system and produces holistic, high impact solutions in collaboration with, and for, software developers.
Developer Relations has most commonly been adopted as a sub-field of technical Marketing for companies selling their products intended for use by software developers. DevRel at these companies is an external function, where developer advocates--professional practitioners of DevRel--market a product to developers outside their company.
Internal DevRel, like the kind practiced at the LEGO Group, and external DevRel, are only loosely related. Internal DevRel is not concerned with selling products, but with empowering developers to do their best work by improving Developer Experience (DX).
According to GitLab, a developer advocate, "acts as a liaison between developers and the DevEx team, gathering feedback and advocating for developer needs". The word "advocate" has its origins in Latin. It comes from the Latin participle "advocatus," which means "to call to one's aid" or "to summon". Also in Middle English as "one who intercedes for another," and "protector, champion, patron.". When viewed from the root, a developer advocate has a duty of care to the developers they serve.
A sociotechnical, or holistic, practice of DevRel, is deployed to treat developer needs at the root, attending to the issue of developer happiness as arising from cultural, technical, and process-driven factors.
In, "An Actionable Framework for Understanding and Improving Developer Experience", Michaela Greiler, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Abi Noda define Developer Experience (DX) as, “how developers think about, feel about, and value their work.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.06352
Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization or society as a whole. Sociotechnical and holistic should be considered interchangeable when referring to a holistic or sociotechnical Developer Relations practice. Our field of practice as developer advocates at the LEGO Group, does not start and stop with the tools used by the developers in our care but extends to the well-being of the developer themselves and the groups they participate in.
Furthermore, technology is constitutive of human cognition — that is, our use of tools and technology fundamentally shapes our minds and our understanding of the world.
A practitioner of sociotechnical developer relations accepts the interrelatedness of software tools and the developer powering the tool with cognition and direction.
DevOps is a methodology. A methodology is action-focused. According to its inventor, DevOps is, "optimizing the human experience and performance of operating software... with software... and with humans".