It’s been a year since we published the first issue of The Developer Avocados🥑 Weekly newsletter. We’ve published issue number 49 yesterday, and we wanted to reflect on the amazing journey this has been.
We’ve always thought there are not enough Developer Advocates out there, and we wanted to help change that. When we started dreaming about one day doing this job, we used to read every resource we could find! There are a few other newsletters out there, geared towards professionals in the industry, but there was no dedicated resource for people trying to break into the industry. Over this past year, the newsletter has morphed into a resource to help you hone the skills required to become a (better) Developer Avocado 🥑!
We’ve spent this weekend looking at stats and analytics and we thought it would be helpful to share them with the world. We looked at the weekly newsletter stats and the @DevRelAvocados twitter account to see what our readers found useful, and what people got excited about.
The Newsletter
We’ve had 49 issues to date. In order to create those 49 issues, we’ve read thousands of articles, 964 of which made it on “the shortlist”. Out of those, only 281 actually made it into the newsletter. Our format has evolved over the year, with feedback from our subscribers, from 3 articles per issue to a flexible 5-7 articles, podcasts and videos per issue.
We’ve looked at the authors of those 281 articles, and saw that Mary Thengvall, the curator of the DevRel Weekly newsletter was the most featured author, with 6 articles so far. Followed closely by Olle Pridiuksson, Dave Nugent and Jeremy Likness, with 5 articles each. Thank you all for consistently writing amazing content and sharing your experience with the community.
We’ve also featured 143 Conference Call for Papers so far, all of which follow the same minimum criteria: they have to have a Code of Conduct, an inclusive speaker lineup and to at least offer travel and accommodation assistance for the speakers. We like the ones that offer assistance for all speakers, but we’ll accept the ones that only offer it for the speakers that otherwise couldn’t be there.
Our subscribers have steadily grown over the year to 551 at the moment of writing this, and that’s an amazing number considering the niche audience. We’ve mapped out the available data, like subscriber counts, open rates and click rates, here are the graphs:
The Twitter
Twitter’s been growing steadily as well, we’ve got to 1426 followers and 760.8K impressions so far. We usually tweet out the release of a new issue, and that’s always popular, and all the articles and CFPs from the newsletter, as well as some of the ones that we thought were great but we couldn’t quite fit them into the newsletter. We’ve looked at the analytics, and here are the most popular tweets from the year:
📖Should you use Medium or dev.to'>dev.to? - @DavidMM1707 wrote about the pros and cons of writing on Medium and dev.to'>dev.to and came up with a set of recommendations for when to use one over the other.
dev.to/davidmm1707/sh…11:10 AM - 29 Sep 2019
🔈Establishing Your Personal Brand - @cassidoo chatted with @kentcdodds about the power that comes with establishing your personal brand.
kentcdodds.com/chats-with-ken…13:00 PM - 13 Aug 2019
📚Open CFP 📚 @jsconfjp - docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
⏳Deadline: August 30, 2019
🍡Location: Tokyo, Japan
🗓Date: November 30 - December 1, 2019
🛩Travel & Accommodation: Yes
🦄Code of Conduct: jsconf.jp/#h.p_E0KQdI8YY…09:25 AM - 25 Jun 2019
7 Tips for Breaking Into DevRel - in which @dabit3 shares the things that he believes will help you land a position in Developer Relations
dev.to/dabit3/7-tips-…21:20 PM - 17 Mar 2019
From Building Sets to Building Developer Communities - in which @ChloeCondon lists several posts and podcasts talking about the transition from theatre to engineering.
medium.com/@chloecondon/f…10:25 AM - 20 Nov 2018
Next Year
We’ve enjoyed curating this newsletter over the past year, and whenever we receive feedback like this, it makes our days a little brighter. So we’ll continue putting out the newsletter every Monday for another year. If you want to get Issue 50 in your inbox, do subscribe!
@sehurlburt The amazing @iza_biro is one of the curators of @DevRelAvocados newsletter.
The best part of the newsletter? The adorable illustrations of developer avocados.
Thank you for meticulously picking articles across various topics. I've found them helpful.07:05 AM - 09 Jul 2019
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LOVE seeing my writing in @DevRelAvocados - One of my favorite email newsletters. Y'all should subscribe. 💌💌💌 twitter.com/DevRelAvocados…22:26 PM - 01 May 2019Developer Avocados 🥑 @devrelavocados📖So, You Wanna Submit a Proposal to Speak at an Event - @rodriguezcommaj wrote about a number of habits you can develop and questions you can ask yourself before submitting a CFP. https://t.co/mfCgDzpHGz
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HJ Chen@hj_chen
latest issue of @DevRelAvocados newsletter is out and that sign-off graphic alone should be enough to get you to subscribe if you haven't, right? 😍
tinyletter.com/developeravoca…01:10 AM - 12 Feb 2019
This blog post is brought to you by two developer avocados: Julia & Laka
Top comments (2)
I just wanted to say thank you for the newsletter. In fact dev avocados weekly newsletter was among the strongest motivations for me to blog. Since, we all know, it takes a lot of time to work on a long read. And then it takes even more time to convince people on the internet to give that long read a chance. Especially beyond one's network.
Thank you for writing! It's because of feedback like this we keep sending the newsletter every Monday 😊