Daily Archive
Find all my writing below or use the search in the top menu.
Helping learners become a better version of themselves
With learning experience design (LXD), you are encouraged to create learning objectives that help learners change their behavior. I've talked about Terminal and Enabling learning objectives before but when I said those were the only two types of learning objectives, I was wrong. There aren't any.
Do we need a developer learning experience design system?
This talk of neurodiversity, tutorials, and shareable open source components brings up a thought I've had in the past but haven't written much about yet, which is the idea of developing a "developer learning experience (DLX) design system" (or maybe, "developer experience design
GitHub Copilot is the real deal
This past week I got access to the preview of GitHub Copilot X aka the one with Chat. I've been heads down delivering my next Pluralsight course on React debugging and between ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, I can tell you first-hand that AI copilots will change the way
The Developer Pour-Over
Let me introduce the Developer Pour-Over, a way to think about how the culture and practices of DevRel really enable developer adoption. The marketing funnel sits on top of an upside-down adoption funnel, and the critical chokepoint in the middle is the DX & UX onboarding and DevEd learning. You
Not the first and not the best
ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in the world. It wasn't the first to showcase GPT and it's not even the most advanced. So if it's not the first and not the best, then what is it? It's easy. Do you know what
Here's a taste of Developer Content Meal Planning
Right now I'm designing integration guides for 3 major cloud platforms, one with multiple languages, and each docs how-to will have a corresponding video version. But they are not exactly the same, the videos are beginner-oriented and targeted at 5-8 minutes and the docs are more comprehensive so
Webinar Recording: Driving Developer Adoption with Higher DevEd
A few weeks ago I mentioned I had the opportunity to host the first Developer Marketing Alliance Drop-In webinar. The topic I chose was Higher DevEd, sometimes called "developer learning experience platforms" which is a mouthful. Talking Points * Why does upskilling matter for developers (and for you)? * What&
5 ways to watch your GitHub topic to see what's new in the community
I mentioned last week that your community can curate your product's GitHub topic. I also made a side comment that you could watch it to spotlight new community projects. However, watching topics is not as easy as it sounds. I'll go over 5 ways you can
How to generate wildly unique combinations of different ideas
Yesterday I shared a creative thinking tool I never leave the home without called attribute listing. That should get you unstuck immediately but it only gives you a 1D-view of the topic you need ideas on. To generate 5-10X more ideas that will likely lead to totally unique combinations that
The simplest creative tool anyone can use to cook up unique ideas
Stuck trying to come up with ideas on a topic? There is a classic design tool that you can learn in the next minute to get you unstuck on almost anything (and get you excited in the process). When we design games for game jams, we only have 72 hours.
Gamification vs. game-based learning
What's the difference between gamified learning and game-based learning and how does it apply to creating effective DevEd?
What's a developer learning experience platform (DLXP)?
A Learning Experience Platform (LXP) is a new generation of learning software that replaces the more traditional Learning Management System (LMS). LMSs are used a lot in corporate environments to host all the boring training 😉 In fact, that right there is the differentiating factor. An LXP is focused on providing
What's a Developer Learning Experience (DLX)?
You will probably hear me (or see me) use the term "developer learning experience." An experience leaves an impression on us. If I go to a restaurant and the food comes out cold, I will experience a negative impression of the restaurant. A developer learning experience is any
Umami content
Umami is a Japanese word for an off-the-wall taste experience – to say it's simply "savory" is to sell it short. It's umami. If your content is food (which it must be because we consume it), then you want your content to have that umami
Tell me what you lived through
Don't just regurgitate the docs
The bad kind of tension
Continuing in this series of examples of tension in technical storytelling (part 1, part 2), I said previously that it's important to close the loop and release tension after you create it. Because if you don't, it will eat at the learner, at best distracting them,
The Why Won't That Work method
I just wrote about creating tension by showing The Wrong Way First, but there are other ways to do this, too. I said the Wrong Way First method isn't as effective when introducing new concepts. So, how can tension be created effectively in that case? This example comes
The Wrong Way First method
I have written before about the strategy of creating tension in storytelling – and I get that it might seem abstract so I wanted to share a concrete example (a tactic!) of one way to create tension in teaching technical content. I am reviewing an upcoming Pluralsight course that deals with
Storytelling in technical courses
Hint: Tell a story
N+1 content strategy
Recently for Excalibur we've been seeing some success driving traffic through blog posts cross-posted to Dev.to (with canonical source set to our blog). These are not written by me or Erik, they're written by some of our amazing community members and contributors. Excalibur — DEV Community
Think of it this way...
One of the roles I get to take on at Pluralsight is being a technical content reviewer for other people's courses. This is a great way for me to help other authors make better courses and also helps me identify common pitfalls new authors fall into. I often
Dates are hard
How to hide system time and date for Windows and Mac while recording screencasts
What size sock do I get for my daughter?
My middle daughter is five years old and is outgrowing her socks. As with most families, we have a resident sock ghoul who hides them and makes them disappear for weeks at a time, only to reappear in random locations – amongst the Goldfish cracker crumbs on the floor of the
Helping learners become a better version of themselves
With learning experience design (LXD), you are encouraged to create learning objectives that help learners change their behavior. I've talked about Terminal and Enabling learning objectives before but when I said those were the only two types of learning objectives, I was wrong. There aren't any.
Exporting your slides as a video for faster editing
One production tip I implemented recently I got from my team at Pluralsight was something I had never thought of. Exporting my PowerPoint as a MP4 video. 🤯 That way, you can easily keep it updated, and video editing software can handle replacing it in place. Before, I was recording the
The pain of live video
My latest course on React performance is my first time doing live video. Here's the course introduction that I iterated on until I got my set up in order: 0:00 /1:15 1× I have to admit, it's a pain – and if someone asked me,
How web.dev Handles Courses and Creates a Growth Loop in Their Docs
When I say "course" you say...? "Video!" But a course is just format and structure (with learning objectives) – the implementation could be through email, podcast, Slack messages, video, or... docs. For a dev tools docs site which is chock full of written content, one idea for
Ending a video on a cheat sheet
At the end of a video, how can you drive people to take action? After all, for videos you post on YouTube, you are hoping to get people to go visit your product and use the dang thing. Unfortunately, most videos end with... nothing. No call to action, no next
The million-dollar slide
I shouldn't be writing this blog post right now – I should be trying to deliver my course. But I can't help it. I shared in my last post an example of a Wardley Map but didn't really explain what it was or why you
Fundo Friday: How to (Quickly) Extend the Last Frame of a Clip in DaVinci Resolve
So I've been learning Davinci Resolve lately for my upcoming course because I'm, gasp, doing L I V E V I D E O. Anywhoo, one of the nice things about my old editor, Camtasia, was it was well-designed for "slideware". For example, you
Do we need a developer learning experience design system?
This talk of neurodiversity, tutorials, and shareable open source components brings up a thought I've had in the past but haven't written much about yet, which is the idea of developing a "developer learning experience (DLX) design system" (or maybe, "developer experience design
Reader response: I summon the Astro-nomicon (Neurodiversity and long tutorials, part 2)
Last week, I asked what your experience has been with neurodiversity and long tutorials, and I got some great responses! Fellow educator and trainer Kevin Cunningham (@dolearning) shared his recent experience learning Astro (shared with permission): Super interesting article Kamran. I recently migrated my website to Astro and was super
Neurodiversity and long tutorials
As much as 15-20% of the population are neurodiverse – and plenty of developers are part of that population. StackOverflow wrote about developers with ADHD and what they want you to know. Speaking for myself, I suspect I'm neurodiverse in some way – though I've never officially been
An Agile Approach to Developer Content
This week on DevEducate, Shruti Kuber from Restack joins me to talk about how her startup uses an iterative, collaborative approach to planning developer video content that works for their small team – and why starting with a niche audience is helping them create content that is getting noticed.
*whistles*, here boy! 🐶
Ever found yourself staring at your video editor after doing a long recording session and wish you could figure out where you messed up? (because you DID mess up, stop trying to hide behind the couch! I SEE you!). Here's a hot tip from Mason Egger, Sr. Technical
[Free Template] How to help developers help you
When I worked at General Mills, I evaluated a bunch of artifact repository vendors, did all the research, and put together POCs (even bringing in on-site solution engineers). At the end of the day though, it was my manager's decision on which vendor to go with. Not a
Guides are a proxy for what you (actually) do
Imagine you were taking a look at PostHog and as a developer, you skip the homepage and shoot on over to the docs (like you do). What do you think is happening in your mind IF you see a Guides section with things like... * Create cumulative time series charts * Send
From Developer Fashion Lines to Onboarding Games
In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Ivan Burazin to talk about his creative approaches to developer marketing – from designing custom fashion to an API onboarding game.
Creating an empathy map for developers
After chatting with developers in your community and diving into how they learn, you'll have a pile of notes and data you can use to improve your marketing and DevRel efforts. What do you do with this data? Turn it into insights! One of the tools I use
Design better DevEx by asking better questions
In part 2 of the Uncovering your product's unique insight email series, I teased that having developer chats can help you design better developer experiences. How so? You can ask questions related to how people learn. By doing this, you can start to form a picture of how
How to have better chats with developers (Uncovering your product's unique insight, part 2)
In the previous email, I shared how April Dunford says to lead with your unique insight when pitching your product. But how can you uncover insight if you don't really know what it is? Let me share a tip that's worked for us as we work
Uncovering your product's unique insight
This week was the Product Marketing Summit, and Richard, the CEO, posted a clip of April Dunford's talk related to her new book, Sales Pitch. If you don't know April, she's a positioning expert, and her previous book Obviously Awesome is a "classic&
The State of DevRel Report 2023 is out!
Some DevEx and DevEd highlights from the recent State of DevRel 2023 report.
Telling Delightful Stories for Developers Through Doodling
In this week’s episode, we unpack the transformative power of illustrations in developer education with David Neal.
There's been a kidnapping
Creating content and marketing to developers without positioning or messaging is like driving up in a white van with fire decals with the words "BLAZING FAST," asking which devs care to hop on in, and they immediately report you for kidnapping. And you're like, "What
Resources for Launching Dev Tools on ProductHunt
I see a lot of questions about launching on ProductHunt in the developer marketing communities I'm in, so I thought I'd keep a running tab on some good resources I've come across in the dev tools space. GitHub - fmerian/awesome-product-hunt: awesome developer tools
Generate faux code in a jiffy
Working on technical content means that you usually need to show real code. But other times, you need to show something that looks like code but isn't – faux code. These are super useful in explainer-style videos where you want to use placeholder code and not distract viewers with
Tension is the magic that keeps you watching
You need to create tension to tell a good story, inspire someone to action, and get them to pay attention. And not just any old tension: generous tension. A concept I learned from one of my favorite (copy)writers, Margo Aaron. But what does that look like in practice and
Video length doesn't (really) matter
Here are two video stats from the top 2 Pluralsight clips I posted on YT. They are different in length; one is 6 minutes the other is 3. Both are informational-style videos. Notice how one has a marked drop-off in viewing retention, whereas the other has a well-sustained viewing retention:
What's the ideal video length?
There's not an "ideal" video length, but there are guidelines. TechSmith (creators of Camtasia) found the preference by viewers falls into two primary buckets: 3-6 minutes and 10-19 minutes. When planning videos, I usually have "explainers" (informational) be less than 6 minutes long. "
Don't ignore competitors.
I specifically included competitor comparison info when I made the Time Series feature explainer video for RavenDB. Why? Because that's exactly the info developers evaluating you are researching themselves. Your dev tool doesn't exist in a black box, so don't pretend it does. Know
Fundo Friday: Using an AI voice to narrate a rough-cut video
I'm working on a showcase video for RavenDB this week, and part of my video creation process is creating a storyboard. It's nothing too fancy – just Google Slides with screencaps, rough diagrams, and placeholders for what the video will eventually contain. A storyboard is supposed to
Developer waypoints, part 2: Learning paths
Last week I talked about developer waypoints and said that even in open-world games, designers intentionally guide players to parts of the world on purpose. They do this by creating "quests" (in RPGs, at least). A quest has a narrative that provides the motivation as to why. Medusa.
Here's a big list of DevRel metrics
Whether you are focused on developer marketing, experience, education, community, or success, you need metrics and measurements. But it can be tough to know what exactly you could measure. I've collated almost 50 metrics and measurements that span across DevRel practice areas from multiple sources. Since you'
Developer waypoints
As I mentioned last week on the heels of my course release, I have been absorbed in the loot-fueled hellscape of Diablo IV (I'm level 32, btw). As I was playing today, I was thinking about waypoints. Players need quick ways to get around in large sprawling games
📢 New course release and React Summit recording
Today I have two, okay three, quick announcements for you. 🎉 New Course: React 18 Debugging Playbook First, I am excited to share that I finished my 8th Pluralsight course this week on React debugging. You can watch the course trailer below (we're allowed to post it on YT
Disney-style DevRel
Brand affinity is hard to measure, and that's why it's everything.
Gameplay-first
As a reward for finishing my latest Pluralsight course (releasing soon), I told myself I could buy Diablo IV. I played the early access weekends in May and was sold immediately – I've always been a fan of Diablo games since the days of having LAN parties in high
Inconvenient content
Yes, creating educational microsites, interactive learning experiences, game-based learning, and involving your community in co-creation is not as convenient as churning out fast food content burgers. That's what makes them valuable. Successful competitors can't be bothered to experiment or invest in creative development beyond articles and
Chock full of empty calories
If you rely on AI to create your content for you, you might as well hang a sign outside your dev tool office that resembles a golden arch. "Over 1 Billion Content Burgers Served" Because it's now really easy to generate 1 billion fast food content
Every link is a potential distraction
"Links are the currency of the web." That might be some kind of SEO proverb, I'm not sure but I swear I've heard it before. It's true to some extent – cross-linking between blog posts and web pages helps search bots index your
4 short AI development courses to go deeper
Developers and customers will likely start to ask you questions about how your dev tool integrates with AI or how you plan to leverage AI so it pays to know the details – like that "AI" is really a bunch of different kinds of things, like text-to-speech, stable diffusion,
GitHub Copilot is the real deal
This past week I got access to the preview of GitHub Copilot X aka the one with Chat. I've been heads down delivering my next Pluralsight course on React debugging and between ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, I can tell you first-hand that AI copilots will change the way
5 moments of developer learning need
There are 5 moments of learning need: 1. When you learn something for the first time 2. When you want to learn more, 3. When you try to apply and / or remember 4. When something goes wrong 5. When things change This has subtle power when you think about how
Start thinking about AI integrations for your developer product
This week is Microsoft Build and it's often an exciting week for me. I was lucky to attend a few times throughout my career – and now, I have no boss that can tell me to stop watching videos (but I do have a course to deliver, which is
What are some ways to slow down developer evaporation?
Developers will evaporate throughout the process of interacting with your dev tool. That's natural. But... in real life, there are ways to slow down evaporation: * Use filtered water * Use cold water * Don't heat the pot How would these translate? Are there more ways? I have my
Fundo Friday: How to Use AI Voices for Videos
To continue this trend of playing with AI tools to speed up developer content production (see previous Fundo Fridays), today I'll be showing you how good ElevenLabs is. ElevenLabs is an AI text-to-speech (TTS) service that has really good trained voices (and lets you train your own) – importantly,
Evaporated developers (Pour-over, part 5)
Previously I discussed the invisible sub-process of boiling developer water on the pour-over diagram (email titled, "Developer temperature (Pour-over, part 3)"). As I hoped, this brought up more questions that we can explore together. Lovely reader Stephen asked: Can you elaborate on "Evaporated developers"? The phrase
Developer absorption >>> adoption
Developer tools want to increase developer adoption. Duh! But let me pose this to you: If 1000 people adopted your tool, then left after a year, would you consider that a success? I think I hear you shouting NOOOOO all the way from here in my basement. You want adoption,
Fundo Friday: Automagically extract screenshots and animated clips from tutorials to include in docs
I'll show you how to embed short clips or screenshots into your docs that are taken straight from the source video without any manual work.
Aim to be missed
Metrics are hard, especially in DevRel. How do you tie your work to the bottom line? A while ago I came across an article about Slack and how they measured PMF early on. To measure how much traction they were getting, they asked their customers a single question: Would you
Entertaining and Educating Developers Through Music
In this week’s episode, literal developer rockstar Dylan Beattie joins me on DevEducate to talk about writing parody songs for developers, handling live performances at conferences, and creative ways to incorporate music into developer content and education.
Fundo Friday: Cut long-form videos into shorts in a few minutes
Most AI tools at the moment are over-hyped which is why I try to take a pragmatic approach. I'm most interested in ones that can augment and shorten mundane workflows – like slicing and dicing content, which is something we have to do a lot in developer relations. I
Flaunt your lower third
Did you know "lower thirds" refers to the kinds of motion graphics you see on videos that appear in the, ahem, lower third of the video? In technical videos, these would be used for adding extra annotations or callouts, visually reinforcing or augmenting what is being said – like
Reaching for the developer water (Pour-over, part 4)
In the previous pour-over part 3, I pointed out that the heating sub-process represents positioning and messaging. So what does the kettle of developer water represent? Clearly, you cannot just take all the city's tap water to brew your coffee. You're taking a slice of the
Developer temperature (Pour-over, part 3)
In part 2 of the developer pour-over metaphor, I zoomed in on what kind of developer water is used to make community coffee: distilled or filtered, referring to the "richness" of persona development. But there's another aspect to the type of water... the temperature. I'
Distilled vs. filtered developers (Pour-over, part 2)
Coffee is 98% water so it makes sense to think about what kind of water you use to brew your Jet Black Potion of Stamina. So in the developer pour-over, if we zoom in on what type of developer water are we using, what could we say? Talk to a
The Developer Pour-Over
Let me introduce the Developer Pour-Over, a way to think about how the culture and practices of DevRel really enable developer adoption. The marketing funnel sits on top of an upside-down adoption funnel, and the critical chokepoint in the middle is the DX & UX onboarding and DevEd learning. You
Engaging Developers with Edutrainment
This week Dale Meredith, cybersecurity expert and recovering Batman addict, joins me on the show to talk about how to engage developers with “edutrainment”, how to work in branding with developer content and education, and why he owns a business named Wayne Enterprises.
Getting reviews and feedback on your videos without the headaches
One of the benefits of doing custom video for clients is that I can work with them directly to incorporate branding, visual design, and get SME review. After all, they're the experts in their product. So... am I sending zip files around in Slack or attachments via email?
Intent to implement
In the sample dev journey audit I'm putting together (more on that soon!), I am tracking "intent to implement" which I see as a contextual input to developer onboarding. You can think of it like this: if you intend to go to the coffee shop tomorrow,
Dang cursor, GTFO
Sometimes when you're recording video, your cursor is not in the right spot because you aren't thinking about it at the moment. No matter. Through the magic of screen recording software, you can deal with this "in post", as they say. In Camtasia, there
Information hiding
Information hiding makes for great software but poor developer education and marketing. I read a tweet recently lamenting a runaway serverless edge function leading to a $3,000 bill in just 6 hours! One reply in the thread from another customer said they might leave the provider due to this
On Windows? I use Fancy Zones to help with recording
My primary machine is a PC, not a Mac, and for the longest time, it was lacking good tools to use for managing windows (oh, the irony). I have an ultrawide monitor and I love it but it makes window management hard. On Windows 10+ you can use the Windows
There's a fly in my soup
Ever had hair in your food? Did that make for a positive or negative impression of the restaurant? Now: how do you think developers react when running into broken links, outdated versions, non-working code examples, a required dependency that wasn't listed, or just plain obtuse explanations of complex
Developer Content That Lives Through the Seasons
This week on DevEducate, Jason Alba joins me to discuss evergreen content – what it is, what it's good for, how it applies to different formats, and why it's not really the panacea you'd expect it to be.
How babies see
At the science museum, there's a tiny little exhibit where you can put on some glasses with special lenses that emulate how babies see. How well do they see? Spoiler: not well. Everything is like a big blurry shape moving around. Here's the thing... When you
Open core is a dual flywheel
Please shoot me if you ever see the word "flywheel" in my website copy but... I'll admit it does convey meaning. If you checked out GitLab's latest investor presentation, you would have seen this slide which caught my attention: This is a great visual
Jump to recipe
Having to read through the text in a content marketing post just to get to the actual code so you can complete the JIRA task is like wanting to just get to the bottom of the page and view the godforsaken recipe so you can make dinner. Have a lovely
Take the Developer Program Leaders Survey
What metrics do you use to measure the success and ROI of your developer program? Do you segment your audience?
Speeding up templated onboarding experiences
For a developer service that has an integration starter or template, you often need some form of prerequisite before the experience can be fully "connected" like a database connection or API auth token. The default experience would be the template not working or throwing an error without this
Not the first and not the best
ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in the world. It wasn't the first to showcase GPT and it's not even the most advanced. So if it's not the first and not the best, then what is it? It's easy. Do you know what
A trick to hide sensitive info without video editing
Often when making training videos for software, you need to be signed in to some account and deal with API keys or other sensitive info. The common approach is to use blur effects with the video editing tool, and since I use Camtasia primarily, it's not too difficult
Here's a taste of Developer Content Meal Planning
Right now I'm designing integration guides for 3 major cloud platforms, one with multiple languages, and each docs how-to will have a corresponding video version. But they are not exactly the same, the videos are beginner-oriented and targeted at 5-8 minutes and the docs are more comprehensive so
Lowering concept count
In the announcement blog post for the 5.0 release of TypeScript, they used a phrase that caught my attention: In 5.0, we’re cleaning up some of these problems, as well as reducing the concept count needed to understand the various kinds of enums you can declare. Reducing
You can use GPT with your docs now
It's official: the AI hype is in full force. One of the things I'm thinking about lately has been what this can do for developer tools and the answer is: a lot. Last week I tweeted wondering whether you could now use GPT to ingest your
I once made a documentary
And it is still being shown in the town museum in Hibbing, Minnesota. It's still being shown because it was evergreen – it was about the history of the town, its inhabitants, and how they fought against the mining companies who were taking their land through eminent domain. It
Webinar Recording: Driving Developer Adoption with Higher DevEd
A few weeks ago I mentioned I had the opportunity to host the first Developer Marketing Alliance Drop-In webinar. The topic I chose was Higher DevEd, sometimes called "developer learning experience platforms" which is a mouthful. Talking Points * Why does upskilling matter for developers (and for you)? * What&
So What is DevEd Anyway?
This is a short interstitial episode featuring some past notes from the DevEd Test Kitchen that elaborate on some thoughts I've had about what DevEd means and why it's critical for product adoption. Listen to Episode
Provide directions to your backyard docs BBQ
Imagine getting invited to a friend-of-a-friend's house and then when you get there, there's no indication of where to go. Do you knock? Go through the house? Around back? Do you need to 'beware of dog'? Oh CRUD, did you forget to bring dessert?
A developer opens the door to your house and finds...
A dirty pile of landing pages lying on the floor? Dried copy stuck to the ceiling? An evil onboarding cat – HISSSSSS (BAD kitty, NO)? Stale docs milk in the fridge? Here's the thing... Awareness is great and all, but if your developer house isn't in order,
5 ways to watch your GitHub topic to see what's new in the community
I mentioned last week that your community can curate your product's GitHub topic. I also made a side comment that you could watch it to spotlight new community projects. However, watching topics is not as easy as it sounds. I'll go over 5 ways you can
Mini case study: Bubble Academy's no-code Responsive Game
Bubble.io is a no-code platform for building apps. Recently they introduced a new engine that lets you design responsive pages that adjust based on device dimensions. In order to introduce the idea to users and get them acquainted with the way it works, they built a game – which is
Have you curated your GitHub topic for your product?
On GitHub, topics are used in the Explore section of the site. Topics can be used by developers in your community to "tag" their repositories – and it's very likely if you have any ecosystem at all, people have added a topic for your product (they just
Educate Tomorrow's Buyers with a Developer Content Program
This week on DevEducate, Erik Dietrich joins me to discuss what we need to think about when creating an effective developer content program.
How to generate wildly unique combinations of different ideas
Yesterday I shared a creative thinking tool I never leave the home without called attribute listing. That should get you unstuck immediately but it only gives you a 1D-view of the topic you need ideas on. To generate 5-10X more ideas that will likely lead to totally unique combinations that
The simplest creative tool anyone can use to cook up unique ideas
Stuck trying to come up with ideas on a topic? There is a classic design tool that you can learn in the next minute to get you unstuck on almost anything (and get you excited in the process). When we design games for game jams, we only have 72 hours.
McMansion strategy
There is a phrase we use to describe those suburban developments with tract homes that all look the same – McMansions. They are builder homes and they all follow the same architectural design and layout. They are modern and look nice but they all look the same. You can go ahead
Here are some reasons why developers are motivated to learn
Ever asked what motivates your community to learn? It's not your product. The reason lives at a higher abstraction than that. Here are some examples: "I think about the future I want to live and then remind myself I can’t show up for others and not
No users, only learners
Unless you believe that learning suddenly stops at some point, when I think about the audience of a development tool, there is never a point where someone stops being a learner. If someone is trying to understand how to integrate Kafka with your API, they want to learn. If someone
"I'm going to ask you to stand up."
Oh God. Every developer just felt a chill go down their spine. 🥶 You see, effortful learning isn't always fun. It's hard! And we as humans generally don't like hard things, we prefer things to be easy. "Please don't pick on me.
Effortless vs effortful
What's the best learning experience you've ever had? Could be a university course, could be something your parents taught you, or could be a lesson learned from a failed startup, think about it. How did it change your life? How were you better off after experiencing
Self-centered marketing
The easiest place to start when creating content is from our POV – to be self-centered. How can our product be used with X? How can we make people aware of feature Y? How do we drive people to this landing page? You know you suffer from this if most of
Marbling
There is a design mantra that goes something like, "A designer is not a typical user." This is because a designer looks at something differently than a non-designer. It's like how someone who knows how to make great steak will look at a steak and see
