When many people think of DevRel, they think of meetups around the world and tickets to the coolest conferences. Those are perks of the job, sure, but the day-to-day is much different.
As developer advocate for Amadeus, I spend most of my time implementing developer tools, building tutorials, and communicating with our users to support them and gather their feedback. To do that effectively and efficiently, you need tools.
From running API health checks to efficiently handling user feedback, having the proper tooling is key to improving developer experience and engage with your community. In this article, I’d like to share the tools we use on daily basis as Developer Advocates for an API product.
Postman
Postman is an API client that lets you create, share, test, and document APIs easily. We maintain a Postman collection of our APIs so developers can play with them without having to write any code. Developer experience benefits aside, Postman is also a huge time saver for day-to-day DevRel tasks. Looking into support queries, writing an API tutorial, or even mocking an API to prepare content ahead of launch are all easy using Postman.
Runescope
It's very important to identify any bugs or issues with the APIs before your users do. Runescope is an API monitoring tool that continuously checks uptime, performance, correctness, and other factors that indicate the health of your API. Using Runescope helps reassure your DevRel that all your APIs are running correctly and - more importantly - notifies them immediately when an issue arises so they can start on a fix before your users are affected.
Apigee
Apigee is an API gateway that Amadeus and many other companies use to let developers connect with their data and services. As all the traffic passes through Apigee, it's also a great tool to gain insights into your customers and how they're using your APIs. Which of your APIs are used the most? What days do you see the highest traffic? These meaningful insights that Apigee provides are key to helping your DevRel analyze and optimize the developer funnel.
GitHub
Amadeus for Developers publishes as open-source all the SDKs, code samples, and demo apps on GitHub. After all, we love using open-source tools so why not give back to the community? Publishing your code as open-source makes it easy and efficient for developers to integrate your APIs, and is a great way to get contributions and product feedback from the developer community.
Discord
Discord is a group-chat platform that helps people create and join communities. For DevRel teams, creating a Discord server is a great way to engage with your users, provide support, or host activities like workshops or networking. Amadeus for Developers created a Discord server to provide our users - both current and potential - a meeting point to talk, share, and interact with the community.
Salesforce
If you ask your marketing team about Salesforce, they'll tell you it's the world's leading CRM platform. For DevRel, Salesforce's value is in managing support. Salesforce provides tools to help your DevRel team track and solve support tickets in an easy and productive way and it's built-in metrics also give you insight into your users' needs, pain points, and even market trends.
Trello
Most people know Trello as a project management tool, but it can also be used for handling user feedback. Consolidating and sharing user feedback is one of the main pillars of DevRel, and your team needs to ensure that feedback is passed smoothly from users to product teams. At Amadeus for Developers, we've used Trello to built a complete feedback management framework, complete with rules to help consolidate and prioritize user feedback in a scalable way.
And this is just the beginning. There are lots of tools on the market today to help you be a more effective developer advocate. Do you have a tool that's making your DevRel life easier? If so, share in the comments below.
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