The Role of Community in Developer Experience - Cassidy Williams (Netlify)

On today's episode, our hosts Sarah and Bryan are going to talk about the role of community in Developer Experience.

We're all part of communities, whether we participate in them or not.
Are they any major differences between developers centric communities and more traditional ones, centered around geography or interests? We're also seeing more and more developers communities popping up, usually launched by tech companies. What is the value proposition for those developers? How do you take care of a global community, where anything can be happening 24/7?

To help us answers these questions, we're super happy to welcome today our guest Cassidy Williams. Cassidy is Director Experience at Netlify. Outside of that role, Cassidy runs her own community newsletter, is a mechanical keyboard enthusiast and is arguably one of the funniest people on developer social media.

• Cassidy Williams: @cassidoo
• Bryan Robinson: @brob
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io
• Netlify: @netlify / netlify.com
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com

Transcript

Cassidy Williams: 0:01

I think a tech community is a step beyond a tech audience where if you have some kind of audience, you're presenting information to them, and then they're just like, okay, great. And then they leave with a community, you present them with information and they talk about it with you and they talk about it with each other. And it it's something that can grow beyond that. And sometimes it's a ton of people talking about it. Sometimes it's as small as like a group of five or 10 people talking about it, but that's, that's how these communities start. And that is where it crosses the line from audience to community because of the conversation, rather than just the receiving of information.

Bryan Robinson: 0:46

Hello everyone. And welcome to developer experience a podcast by Algolia. We chat with guests who build products for developers about their developer experience strategy, what it means for them, why it's important and more. My name is Brian Robinson and alongside Sarah Dayan. And today's amazing guest. We're going to explore the role of community in DX to help us along this path. We have casidy Williams casidy is a director of developer experience at neti outside that role. She runs her own newsletter in community is a mechanical keyboard enthusiast and is arguably one of the funniest presences on developer social media. Casidy welcome to the

Cassidy Williams: 1:24

Thanks. Wow. The funniest stop, please.

Bryan Robinson: 1:28

I mean, Hey, I, I threw in arguably, just so people would, would know that I'm not just throwing it fully out there. So yeah. So I, I, I kind of wanna chat a little bit today with you about community. We're all part of communities, whether we participate or not, maybe it's geographically built like a neighbor hood or town. Maybe it's just a group of folks that enjoy the same activity or share similar interests communities are I think relatively innate to the way that humans go through life. So in your experience, are there any differences between say developer centric, communities like product communities, framework, communities, language communities, and communities of like geography or interests? So for example, like the global or maybe local JAMstack community versus like a group of people who enjoy something like board games in a small town together.

Cassidy Williams: 2:13

Hmm. I think the main difference between those is that I think the latter can happen a little bit more organically, where if you have a local group of, for example, friends who play board games together or something like that, that tends to happen because people are just happening to find others who like similar things. Meanwhile, I feel like if you have some kind of global community and especially some kind of community that is developer centric, you tend to look for that to better yourself in some way, or to find other people who have similar interests. And that being said, there's plenty of overlap. I feel like if anybody is looking for any sort of community, it'll probably be some flavor of both where I know plenty of times I've looked for some kind of board game group or something like that. And then it happens to be a bunch of nerds who are software developers. And then we end up going to tech meetups together or something like that. Or I go to some kind of tech event or whether it's virtual or local. And then I end up hanging out with these people outside of the technical space. And so I, I do think that they can go hand in hand, but it kind of depends on intent, I guess.

Bryan Robinson: 3:23

So you said something in that about people in dev centric, communities going with like the express intent to like better themselves. Do you find that that typically is what we're looking at in terms of like general tech communities or maybe even product centric tech communities? Is there a difference there?

Cassidy Williams: 3:41

So first of all, I do wanna clarify. It's not always to better themselves. Sometimes people just wanna make friends who are also dweebs like us. I see that often it's the kind of thing where people will go to a meetup where people will go to a virtual event or something like that because they wanna figure out how can they refine how they build something or the direction that their products should go in, or they want to figure out what are topics that I should be aware of so that I can bring them into the workplace at some point or into my side projects, into my business or, or something like that.

Bryan Robinson: 4:16

Whether these people are kind of looking to, to better themselves or get help with like, or just looking for inspiration. I feel like these developer communities are popping up kind of everywhere. Seems like most companies that are focusing on some sort of developer-centric product either have a community, or they're really trying their hardest to form a community. What do you kind of view as the intrinsic value of a community developers that are using services or products? What, what is that kind of value proposition for them?

Cassidy Williams: 4:46

Honestly, developers are very loyal folks where if they find something that they like, they will stick with it forever. Maybe there will be something good that comes along, but they'll be like, okay, well, I don't know if I'll change I'll exp, but they more often than not stick with what they know and stick with something that they know that they like and that they can build with. And so for companies having a community of people who are loyal, who will be using your product, who will give feedback on your product good and bad, that's huge. Uh, because you'll, you'll be able to not only use those developers to get that kind of feedback and stuff, but also give back to them in some way and, and hopefully help them feel valued. And a part of your group of people who like your product. And I think for developers being a part in these kind of communities, first of all, it's good networking where you can get to know other developers in the community. Uh, you can get to know this company very well. If you wanna eventually work for them, you, you never know that happens plenty of times. And kind of just building that sort of bonding experience with other developers is so useful. And then also on the product side, if you do give feedback that ends up being valuable to the company, then the product gets kind of bent to your will. Or I guess maybe that's a silly way of saying it, but the product ends up becoming something that you help shape. And there's a lot of fun in that because you end up getting to be one of the first developers to experiment with something, or you end up getting to be a developer who has helped shape a product in some way, and you get to use it in the way that you want to. And so there's definitely pros for both, for sure.

Bryan Robinson: 6:29

It seemed almost like you had like that Mr. Burns Simpson's fingers going for you get to bend the product to your will.

Cassidy Williams: 6:35

Yeah, well, I've, I've done that too. And it's amazing when I get to tell a company that they implemented something because of my suggestions, first of all, I'm just like haha and powerful, but also I get to actually use it. And it's so nice to actually be heard in that way and, and get to use what I've built or I at least idea it.

Sarah Dayan: 6:57

I feel that there's something really unique in the dev world in general. It it's not necessarily just the, the tech world and the tech industry, but first, as you said, like, there is this kind of closeness. Like people want to get together. They want to meet each other. I don't know of many other industries where professionals want to meet other profess and like share tips and tricks. You're usually like, keep your things for you and secrets for yourself. But in the tech world, people want that connection. And they also want to feel a connection to the tools they use and like what, what products they use and this feeling of, oh, I'm not just talking to this big corporation that never going to answer me. Like when you get to talk to directly to a developer on the team, who's building a product that you use every day and you feel like, yeah, they're gonna take into account your suggestion. It feels amazing. And it reinforces that connection that you have. And so I feel that there is like the sense of community, not just only, oh, we're gonna build this new circle of developers and they're gonna be the blah, blah, blah. Community is also the kind of values and the kind of feeling that you create whenever people talk to you and how they feel, uh, they feel towers. You like you work at nullifying to me, ified kind of exemplify that whenever I tweet at Nety and I get an answer, I know it's not just a bot or, you know, someone who's just paid to answer me and is gonna answer the same way to everybody. And so I feel a much deeper connection to Netlify that I would for maybe other companies that build products that, that I use every day.

Cassidy Williams: 8:38

It's very real and reminds me of a class. I took way back in the day. I'd like ethics and technology. And I was talking about the intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation that drives different industries. And with tech, there's a lot of intrinsic motivation and it's, it's amusing because it's such like a high earning field where people can make a lot of money doing a lot of things. And yet the open source community exists. There's people who are motivated by things, not just money or rewards and stuff, but by building relationships because they wanna build cooler things because they want to just kind of feel like they're a part of something. And it's, it's a fascinating thing that is not entirely unique to, to tech, but is definitely huge in tech that you don't see as often in other industries. For sure.

Bryan Robinson: 9:28

Yeah. I think that's interesting talking about open source. So, so far we talked about like general communities, product focus communities, but really with open source, oftentimes the community itself is the product team. Is, is there a difference in your experience between those two kind of kinds of communities, the community that is the product team versus the community that's communicating with the product team?

Cassidy Williams: 9:54

You know, it can definitely vary from project to project. There are some open source projects I've seen where it's, it's truly just like, I don't wanna say a trash fire, but it's, it's a, it's a spinning chaotic tornado of people giving feedback and being just like, why hasn't my feature been merged? I made this gigantic PR, even though you don't know me and stuff like that, it can get very disorganized of people who want to contribute, but there aren't any processes for how that will work. And I say that not to bash anyone, I have been one of those maintainers who did not organize anything before. And then there's some open source communities where they have a plan where if you really want to have communities of people who are contributing, they say, okay, well, make sure you post an issue, make sure that your issue is tagged by certain people, some open source groups. They say, Hey maintainer, can I work on this issue? And then if you've got an approval, then that's your issue that you work on or some, some kind of process like that. And so the, the community can definitely be on I, their end of the spectrum, even outside of that spectrum. But it, it does tend to fall somewhere between those where there's E either a lot of organization or none at all. And it's, it's chaos and it's kind of cool in that way. It's still in a way, feels like the wild west of software development and in some aspects, because you, you kind of get to build anything from scratch and, and four different projects that you care about. And there's no real rules around it at this point in time.

Bryan Robinson: 11:28

Do you think there's a place where those worlds merge? Like it's, it seems like it very easily falls into one camper or the other, like one of my questions that I wanna get into in a minute is around like how community informs DX. And we talked a little bit about it, but in the open source world, is there a place, and is there a way that community can inform process like outside of like true DX, but maybe in community X CX?

Cassidy Williams: 11:54

I think so. And I've seen that happen, like, for example, with Dino, for example, the runtime, I know that they have quite a few issues around that. And like the community has advised how their code of conduct should be established and things like that. And, and that kind of contribution is significant and it's not code, but something that will benefit their open source community for years to come. However long these projects tend to last, the web is a wild place. I think that there's a huge, huge value in that. And people being able to say, Hey, I think there should be a process around that. Or, Hey, I think that there should be a code of conduct. Hey, I, I think this might be valuable if maintainers are willing to listen to that. It's so, so important and not just open source maintainers, which we can transition into other things, but even on discord, I see that all the time with various communities there, or, or different chat groups and stuff where I know I added certain things in place because community members suggested that that I should, and I've been the person to suggest certain workflows and, and maintainers of community or, or moderators of a community will do that. And I think that is a huge way to maintain the health of a community. In general.

Sarah Dayan: 13:10

I like that you, you talked about discord and forums because it really re reminds me like back in the days, like once upon a time I was a forum administrator and it, it kind of feels the same way. Like you cannot just like full chaos. People will self organize. This will not work. Uh, but at the same time, you cannot be too rigid because at the end of the day, you are this discussing with people they're not your, your employees. So they don't have to abide by a set of rules to like it, it doesn't, uh, regulate how they make a living. There needs to be a balance between full chaos and full rigidity. And at some point I think it's, uh, it's interesting to, to have maybe role layers of moderation, but also give people an opportunity to pick up a topic and self organize and see how they can contribute. Uh, and I think that there's something to learn, especially for, for companies looking to build communities and, and involve more people who are not employees in the processes that it's gonna take work. It is not going to magically happen just because you, you asked for it just because you are going to distribute some swag or whatever it'll require work and hiring people who have done that before, because this is a different ball game. This is not just men managing employees. You are talking to people who literally have no obligation to you and who are going to most likely give you more than what, what you give them. So there needs to be something in it for them. And you need to be aware of all the work that is going to require.

Cassidy Williams: 14:55

Community management is so difficult. It's harder than any coding problem. And I run some online communities and it's the most challenging thing where, where I genuinely love it. I think it's, it's so, so fun and, and truly is the most rewarding thing, but things go bad. Like you said, it is a lot of work and, and it takes a lot of work with the community. You have to rebuild trust with certain people. You have to refine the code of conduct. You have to potentially bring on more moderators. It is a job. Whether you do it for your work or, or you do it as a side thing where you just wanna have a space for people.

Bryan Robinson: 15:31

Yeah. I actually used to run a local user group in my old hometown. I'm still in the slack community. I'm in the mod section and in the past few years, right. With all of the turmoil in the world that mod channel has taken up more activity than it was back in the day when I was moderating actively. So yeah, it's full time. It's not just time though. Cuz like in this kind of real time world where your community might not be in a locality, it might be global. It's literally 24 7 because it's, it can always be happening. And that's a, that's a significant challenge.

Cassidy Williams: 16:09

Right? And unfortunately issues, aren't always black and white too. And I know I've personally made moderation mistakes because I was like, well, it's not exactly this. It's not exactly that. Maybe I could try to make these people be friends and no, that was the bad move and stuff like that. And I feel awful even thinking about some of these times, but it's, it's just what happens and force when you have a bunch of humans from all over the world in one space.

Bryan Robinson: 16:37

I mean, even, even before I got fully into tech, I was managing a form for a newspaper website. This was before comments were like super big on most sites that was like supposed to be like 5% of my job. And it was easily 50% because people who read newspapers as it turns out, have very strong opinions and want to express them. And yeah, it is nuanced. It's never black and white and everyone feels that they're in the right. And it's definitely a subtle line that you have to walk to make all that work.

Sarah Dayan: 17:06

Yeah. I, I feel it really makes you practice humility because you mentioned that it is worldwide now. And so it means that it's 24th, seven and yeah, guess what, it's also people from all over the planet with different cultures and there are different things that offend different people and that can be like, there's nothing invalid and not because you are the, like you could take the shortcut of, well I'm the admin. So my culture is the one that regulates it. If it's that easy in your head, it's probably a bad move. So, and to be honest, like nobody solved it. Uh, if you look at the common section of most newspaper, you can see how a dumpster fire this is. So nobody has solved it. Nobody knows how to make everybody friends on the planet. But, but, but definitely if you approach that with a mindset of humility and not trying to make like blanket rules that apply in all situation and try to maybe solve things one at the time, except that there are things that you will not be able to solve. That's probably an approach that might last longer.

Bryan Robinson: 18:17

It sounds like we're all kind of in agreement that community is hard is by no means an easy task. Like I said earlier, like tech tech companies are striving for their own immunities. Let's talk a little bit about why they might want to do that. We talked a little bit about getting feedback, but how can a company or a product or even an open source product, right? Use this community to actually craft a better developer experience, craft a better product, get this sort of thing rolling so that the cost of, of having to maintain and maintain it properly, doesn't go, uh, I suppose unreturned,

Cassidy Williams: 18:54

I think it definitely has to start with some level of trust with users that, you know, will be valuable. Cuz if you just open the floodgates to anyone, unfortunately it will be a lot of noise to cut through. And if you want to start with valuable feedback, it's helpful to say, okay, we can identify 10 people who will be really great at giving us feedback. We can email, we can email them a gift card. We can send them some stickers or some swag or something like that. And, and we can start with that and then slowly but surely introduce more and more people to the community until you, you feel like you're at a good size and maybe open the flood gates later. But you, you do wanna start with kind of a core group of people to see is this something that we want to maintain because a lot of people wanna have a community, but then like you said, they don't wanna put in the work cuz it is so much work to maintain it. Or they end up kind of just wanting to have user testers, which you can schedule that. And you don't have to have a, a community for that. You can have a user researcher for that. And so it's good to assess if this is something that you actually wanna do and, and starting with a small group of people I think is really, really helpful.

Sarah Dayan: 20:07

Yeah. I totally second that I feel like it's the same thing. As when people say I, we need to have a video show, we need to have a conference. We need to have our own podcast. You know, it's like, do you really like maybe start thinking a little bit at what do you wanna get out of it? And then it will inform what you need instead of starting with the basis of, we want a community because all those other companies of a community, because as you said at the end of the day, if what you need is user testers, you might ask them for things that you might not be able to get from a community. So yeah, definitely agree on that. And again, it's a different ballgame. It's not gonna go the same way. You're not gonna have to hire the same people, what you will expect from them and what they will require from you is gonna be definitely totally different.

Bryan Robinson: 20:58

I think that key on trusted individuals internally on, on the devil team at Algolia, we, we talk about finding these individuals and there's the there's different types. But one of the things we, we like try to find is like trusted advisors. And they're the people that if they say something is wrong in the product, you know, it's wrong. They've been using the product they've been using the service they've been using whatever. So when they say this is a problem, you know, it like, it's not, it's not a stack overflow question complaining about something. It's not somebody asking a question in a forum. It's like I use this day in, day out, we need to fix this. And that to me is like the root of a strong community. Whether or not you take it and make it into, I guess, a tree in this analogy or not like that itself, I think is, is kind of where it, where it comes from.

Cassidy Williams: 21:42

It's very real. And, and I've seen that done really effectively in quite a few different companies where, for example, but when I worked at Amazon, they had small trusted groups of people just for the Alexa SDK, which is a very, very specific product. That's small compared to the behemoth of that company. But we had a group of 30 to 50 people where if, if one of them said, Hey, this is wrong. The product teams would rush to fix it because there they're this small group of people that, that was really, really trusted. And that's what programs like GitHub stars or the Microsoft MVP program or Google developer experts. These really famous programs. That's how they started, where it's these trusted people who can know the product deeply, who can get early access to things and really grow from there. And I, I think most companies can probably say that they can identify who their loud users are, who their active users are, where when I worked at CodePen, there was probably like three people I could still name today where I'm just like, they were the people where if something went wrong, we would know it. They were first to email us. They were really active of always making different pens on the site. Code one was relatively small compared to some of these communities, but we still knew. And, and we were ready and, and yeah, like you said, if it's someone that's using the product every single day, you are very aware of their existence.

Bryan Robinson: 23:05

One of the things we've mentioned a few different times and we, we just kind of mentioned it in like stack overflow versus is, you know, trusted user. But like we haven't actually talked about what a tech community is. I suppose that could have been the first question, but obviously there are places and there are companies that have slack communities, discord communities, there are companies that have forums. There are companies that have none of these things, but still have kind of organic things kind of grow up around it. What is a, a tech community, I suppose, like what, what is the, the umbrella that we might throw over? All these things?

Cassidy Williams: 23:36

I think a tech community is a step beyond a tech audience where if you have some kind of audience, you're presenting information to them and then they're just like, okay, great. And then they leave with a community, you present them with information and they talk about it with you and they talk about it with each other. And it it's something that can grow beyond that. And sometimes it's a ton of people talking about it. Sometimes it's as small as like a group of five or 10 people talking about it, but that's, that's how these communities start. And that is where it crosses the line from audience to community because of the conversation rather than just the receiving of information.

Sarah Dayan: 24:17

Yeah. It's really people who are in, are involved in what you make or what you, what, what you have to offer. But beyond being just consumers. And when you look at popular projects, like, uh, view and react, for example, they, they have a community of people that like there's no, uh, there's no question. And what what's interesting is that it's also people who, yeah, they feel like they have some skin in the game and that they need to contribute because they want to influence what this product is going to become because it's going to affect how, like what's what, what they work with on a daily basis. But also these community can only exist because there are people listening to them. If you have a community, or if you have people talking to you and you don't listen, if you have a community that feels like all the decisions are happening without them, no matter how much they voice what they have to, what, what they have in mind, whether you take it into account or not is totally a separate issue, then your community fizzles out. So the fact that you have a community also depends on you and your ability to do that. And I know that from Ango perspective, we do open source. We are a company and we, we do open source, but there is a, a difference in, do you do your RFCs in public? Do you participate actively? That's also a thing that to me is really close to developer experience. Is that, do you have your developers, like the actual people who work on the projects on the product talk to people, or do you have people doing that for you and your community can never discuss with someone actually actively touching the code? Recently? I did, uh, one hour zoom call with, uh, with someone from Prisma. And it was amazing just doing that call after tweeting at each other because it felt like, okay, there's value in me having that conversation for them. And I'm talking to an actual engineer who works on the product and yes, it takes time. But at the same time, I'm, it's gonna make me an ambassador of, of your product. Like I'm going to go from consumer to ambassador. And if you have ambassadors that are part of your community, it is invaluable because people will trust another developer who says this product is great much, much more than your whatever ads you have or campaign that you have on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever.

Cassidy Williams: 26:54

It's so real. And yeah, I think a big part of having a community is being able to create ambassadors and advocate it's out of your community members, because I know with a lot of products that I use very similarly because they listen to my feedback. I'm like, I, I love them. I'll totally recommend them to other developers because I know that they listen. And so if, if I ever have trouble, I can talk to them. And if other developers or friends of mine have trouble, they can ask and it'll it'll work out well. And, and it's such a very real feeling, cuz you're just like it having the, the privilege of being listened to by people who don't necessarily have, have to listen to you. It's really great and empowering and, and it, it makes you feel like you're, you're a part of something.

Bryan Robinson: 27:46

Sorry, just letting that sink in a little bit. Uh, the power, the privilege, all, all that. Yeah. I think that itself breeds the champ, the, the kind of champion, the ambassador vibe, it breeds at that point community out of it, out of curiosity. So, so you're, you're obviously very active in multiple communities. You're active around the JM stack and obviously Nety sphere of influence. Uh, I, I know you've done work in the react community. You've done work in the, in the now forming Astro JS community. Um, you also run your own community. What do you kind of view as maybe the biggest differences between these communities that can of spring up organically on their own, like your own community versus communities that kind of start from this seed of trying to find those champions and ambassadors and growing from that, maybe it's like a difference between communities of practice and communities of product. What, what do you kind of view as the differences there and how they feel and how they form?

Cassidy Williams: 28:46

I think the main difference is people's purpose for joining the community and, and that can tend to drive the direction of the community, but, but for a lot of the organic ones where it's not tied to a product and stuff, a lot of people join cuz they wanna make friends or, or they, they wanna network in some way and, and see like, Hey, could these people potentially get me a job or could I hang out with these people on the internet? And it's, I really love that because seeing people actually get to know each other and stuff because of these online communities, I think is some of the most powerful things I've, I've seen where even just in, for example, my own little personal community, I've seen some people, well, they flown to meet each other and then they've hung out at like sporting events or, or they've gone to a pub together or something like that. And that's the coolest thing for me to see, to be just like, oh my gosh, this formed organically in this space. And it's, it's so exciting. And then with product communities, people tend to initially join because they are interested in the product, but depending on how a community is curated, you can really get to know people in there and it, you have this common interest in the product, but it can really grow beyond that. And probably my best example of the, is the obsidian community. The note taking software, I'm very into obsidian and note taking, and I will not change the subject cuz I could talk about that a lot, but their community, they have like an open source plugin system that you can use. And then you can also theme it with CSS and everything. And then also people just wanna talk about how they write no notes. It's a thriving, fascinating community because it's both developers who wanna build plugins or who wanna optimize certain things, but also just people from very random industries where they're just like, oh yeah, I use it to take notes. And these are kind of how I think about notes and, and people learn from each other in very unique ways because we have of this common thread of, we take notes for ourselves. How, how do we do it? And, and I've learned how to structure certain notes of mine from people who are PR people who, who, who do public relations for other companies or from people who are students who study history completely different industries entirely, but we kind of feel, think differently. And so it kind of adds to the, the diversity of the community. And so yeah, I think the purpose can initially be different, but it can really turn into almost anything depending on how the community is run.

Bryan Robinson: 31:17

So with these organic ones, I, I think that, that we can probably say there's value to companies looking to them, but it's also kind of a, a danger zone to a degree. Are there ways that for those that are interested in, in DX to look to these external communities of practice or interest to increase the developer experience for their service, their product, obviously from both a, an outreach perspective, but also a listing perspective, what, what are some, some ways they can look to these external communities?

Cassidy Williams: 31:45

Yeah. And so I think kind of like you said, because there's the difference between them companies should be looking at other technology or company discord groups or forums or, or, or slack groups and stuff. Look at those. And don't look at the organic communities cuz they will be different, especially initially. And, and they might turn into something else, but they, they will be different. And then also again, you're gonna want a code of conduct. You're probably going to want to have shifts of people who keep an eye on it as, as moderators, uh, as you kind of figure out where you want it to go, but then getting it to be an active space of people will be completely and entirely on you. At least initially, cuz uh, at first it's not gonna be just like, if you build it, they will come. They might, but they're not gonna say a word unless you do. And, and there are some company groups that I'm in where it was very exciting to be a part of it. There's some really cool names in here, but they never post in there. And so I kind of am just like, Hey, how's it going? And, and occasionally chat with them maybe once a month, if that, and that's because they just occasionally pop in and say like, Hey everybody, hope you're doing well. Look at our post by and, and that's it. Meanwhile, other company groups or, or other organizations you'll see them saying, oh, we're doing a weekly live chat in, in the voice chat. We're going to be playing some video games together. If you wanna chat with us while we play Fortnite, Hey, here's various blog posts. Here's different announcements. It, you are in involvement will definitely guide that direction. Um, and so again, look to other companies and then kind of determine how involved you wanna be. Because if you just want it to be a news channel for people, yes. That works. And it's another avenue to get into someone's inbox, but that's also not necessarily a community.

Sarah Dayan: 33:38

Yeah, totally agree with that. Especially like always remember what's in it for people joining your community. If you're building a community, it should be your first and foremost thought what's in it for them before what's in it for us. Because as you said, if initially you try to attract people with, Hey, we have this and this and this and people that you will get to interact with. And then at the end of the day, you don't get to interact with anybody that they said you would just because you just want people to get together and chatter, that's not gonna work. So yeah, definitely agree with that. Like be honest about the purpose of it and be honest yourself with what are you going to be able to deliver on a consistent basis. And then is it compelling enough? And if it's not, what would be compelling like a, again, it, it's also, it's also business strategy. At some point, if there is work that needs to be done for something to be compelling, you have to, to do the work. And if you're not able to then maybe it's too soon, uh, too early for you to, to build a community. If you don't have anything that will make people want to come to your it's, like if you're throwing a party, like if there's no food I'm not coming, you know? So at some point like be aware that you are throw, throwing a party, you're throwing a dinner party, try to make it compelling for people to come and for people to stay,

Bryan Robinson: 35:08

Be the proper host, whatever that means, right? Like whether that is be welcoming at the door, you open the door, you don't just be like, you don't just leave the door open and then assume people are gonna walk in. You open the door for them, you greet them, you are enthused that they are air, but then there's interest like there's food. I think that's important. Right? That would be the product in our analogy maybe. But I think another thing is there's interesting people and, and Sarah, you mentioned earlier, like engineers and, and product builders being available. Um, and, and not to like, to like Algolia is engineers horns, but like Sarah, like I, I love waking up in the morning and going through the Twitter messages and realizing that I've got very little to do because you responded in Paris time and me over here in the states, like, I'm just like, oh, Sarah or another engineer was active of in our little Twitter sphere. And I didn't have to worry about that. So I think that goes a long way. There's interesting people, there's people that can talk about the things that the community is interested in your role as a host, not just connecting people internally to interesting people with a product it's maybe also finding the other people that have those same interests. Oh, you're talking about Island's architecture in transitional web apps, right? Like let me introduce you to this person that gave a talk@jams.com and they're very, very interested in this and like y'all should have a conversation. Congratulations. I can just step away cuz maybe I'm not nearly as into that as, as you are a lot of things that we can do as hosts in a community to make that networking a little bit easier. All right. So I've got a big question for you. Casidy to kind of start, start bringing this in, bringing this, uh, rapid this episode up a little bit, very broad. How do you define great developer experience and kind what's what's your personal level and your personal level of expectations around that?

Cassidy Williams: 37:05

Oh man, I have to measure it. Watch out. Uh, I think the, the metric that I use in general for developer experience for most things is to time to hello world, how fast can a developer get to a very basic understanding and get something running. If that time is very short, then it's time to like counter or, or some kind of really small function that works and, and kind of stand beyond that because if you are able to get someone up and running quickly, then they can kind of take it and run with it. And then once you've gotten beyond that very quick time to hello world, then it is how good are your docs? How clean is your API? Is it easy to use and intuitive? Are there any things that you can do that are more like low code type of things or more customizable types of things, um, and, and kind of just grow from there. But I think the very initial metric that I look at and that I kind of determine this is solid, is that, that time to hell a world. And I use that not just for company services, but for web framework for, for pretty much anything.

Bryan Robinson: 38:22

I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'm, I'm, I'm a abbreviated right? TTH H w that way we can put it into, into, into the web metrics and all that good stuff, but that makes a, a ton of sense, especially like in framework land, how do you kind of view that in bigger things, like, obviously Netlify has tons of things that could have individual TTH HWS how can products and companies that are bigger than frameworks. Look to that and measure that and think about that.

Cassidy Williams: 38:47

I think for that, you'd have to determine what is your world that you want people to get to. And that's something like, for example, a Netlify we have so many different things that people can do. We've had to define for ourselves what is the first step that we want people to just do. So that way they can be successful on the site. And we're just like, okay, well we want them to deploy a website. Okay, great. How can we make that happen faster for them? And so we've, we are just like a, okay, well, we could start with templates. We could start with connect your GI repo. We could start with drag and drop. We can try all of these different things to figure out what, what is that way to deploy a website as fast as possible. And so I think defining what you want that hello world to be. I think it can change over time, but, uh, I think that can kind of help you speed up your processes and, and refine how you want to focus on your DX

Bryan Robinson: 39:41

To my mind, you're everywhere on the internet, but where specifically, can people go to find, you find what you're up to find what you're doing?

Cassidy Williams: 39:50

Yeah. And so if you do Google capacity Williams, you'll find me in a Scooby do character, and I'm not this Scooby do character. So are you sure? You know, I chose the username CAOU without even realizing the Scooby do character exists. And now I'm just like, I think we're intertwined for life, but anyway, otherwise you couldn't find me ad Casa ADU, C a S S I D O O on most things, GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn code, and poly work. All, all of those things. My website is@casa.co. And if you'd like to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, it's casa.co/newsletter. And that is where I post a joke every week, as well as useful things. A lot of people, I know, just read the joke, but an interview question of the week link dumps of, of web news and stuff, and that's sort of thing.

Bryan Robinson: 40:38

I'm pretty sure I saw somebody ask you the other day, if, uh, why don't you put the joke at the beginning of, of the newsletter so that you'll read the newsletter.

Cassidy Williams: 40:45

Yeah. And I'm like, nobody will read the rest. Yeah.

Bryan Robinson: 40:49

Awesome. Well, Cassie, thank you so much for joining us today. And we hope to, to see more communities stuff coming out from you in the future.

Cassidy Williams: 40:56

Yeah. Thank you so so much for having me,

Bryan Robinson: 41:01

This was developer experience a podcast brought to you by Algolia. You can find this podcast on your favorite podcast platform or on Spotify, apple podcasts, Google podcast, Pandora, overcast, everywhere. If you wanna know more about Algolia check us out@algolia.com and check us out on Twitter at Algolia.