This was originally posted on my medium but I thought Dev.to readers might like to see it as well… mainly because it’s such a silly way to invite you to get some really tactical advice on developer community building.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen (to your devs) on April 17th

As I started to put this post together, something hilarious and borderline weird hit me… there’s a perfect anthem for what I want to share today:

Why is this (very) early 90s jam by the artist born Robert Matthew Van Winkle so perfect? A few reasons:

• It immediately lets you know how old I am
• I’ll be speaking at a virtual workshop on April 17th for Vanilla I recently moved back to very ICE-y Montreal
• The first two words of this song (“alright” doesn’t count OK?): The virtual workshop I’m speaking at is all about how developers should Stop (and) Collaborate… with each other in their communities...
• ...And Listen is the name of the developer community consultancy I just founded after years of building inclusive developer communities for tech companies!

I’m super excited to not subject you to Vanilla Ice on April 17th, but here’s what you will learn if you join us:

• How do you encourage dev to dev support from day one of community building?
• When to jump into developer community conversations, and when to lay low
• Approaches to monitoring and engaging with proprietary developer communities (online communities, docs, etc) vs. external developer communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, etc)
• Stories of successful developer community collaborations: from bug fixes, to hires, to business building

This workshop should be especially interesting to folks who work with developer communities. If you’re in a developer relations or developer advocacy role definitely join us! However, anyone who works with developer communities will get something out of this.

If you’ve got a (dev community collaboration) problem, I’ll solve it:

Anything you want me to address in the workshop? Hit me up!