Interview Intro

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Richard Rodger:  [0:00:00] Welcome to the Voxgig Podcast. We talk to people in the developer community about developer relations, public speaking and community events. For more details, visit voxgig.com/podcast. All right, let's get started. 

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This is a high-energy podcast. Tejas Kumar is a super guest and he is here to tell us all about the difference between dev rel and dev sell, which you must not do. Tejas has had a really comprehensive background as a developer relations person, working in a whole bunch of different well-known companies, and has picked up a ton of experience. 

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We talk about all sorts of things, but one interesting place that the conversation went was about how to pace yourself as a dev rel, when you're out at conferences, go to speaker dinners, maybe drinking a little bit too much, all that sort of stuff. A kind of a hidden dark side of the industry that you have to learn to manage to keep your health and your mental health. Without further ado, let us get started. [0:01:06]

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Main Interview

Tejas Kumar

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Richard Rodger:  [0:01:07] Hey, Tejas, welcome to the Fireside with Voxgig Podcast. I am so excited to have you on today; I was really looking forward to this talk. How are you doing, sir? [0:01:16]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:01:17] Hey, Richard. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm really excited to talk to you about all things dev rel: community, the lines between sales and marketing, all of it. I'm excited; I'm really high energy today. [0:01:28]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:01:29] Excellent, and I can totally feel it. So, you do developer relations. Oen of the questions I love asking people, because the answers are so varied, is how do you end up doing developer relations? Just looking at your history and all the stuff you've done, the places you worked, wow. You've covered quite a bit of ground. [0:01:51]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:01:52] Yeah. I – it's such an interesting journey, because I've never been an academic. I've never – I barely finished high school, and that's because I've got major health issues that I've been pretty public about it; I talk about it on YouTube. I've got a 48-minute video about my health and how it's been pretty bad and pretty traumatic. 

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But the health disease that I had that I thought was a curse is a blessing and it led me to code. Because any physical motion would land me in the emergency room as a kid, and except the tiny little physical movements of typing on a keyboard. So, since age eight, that's all I could do, and I started with video games, to Prince of Persia on Windows 3.1. [0:02:35]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:02:36] Old days, marvelous. [0:02:37]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:02:37] Yeah. But then they got boring and I was like, 'Okay, what else can I do? How do I make a game?' And then got put onto html, CSS, JavaScript. But we had Dreamweaver and FrontPage and things like that back then, and started playing; eventually built a website when I was thirteen. That was later in magazines and everywhere, in my local community in Doha, Qatar. 

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And at that point, it became prophecy. I'd go to school and the teachers and the students were like, 'Oh my gosh, you're going to be a web person when you grow up.' And indeed, many years later, I had my first job as a front-end engineer, doing – and that ties in. And we'll come back to that in a second, because front-end and dev rel are inextricably connected. And yes, there are back-end folks who do dev rel as well. But there's a presentational component that I feel like this idea of being public facing translates well across front end and in dev rel. 

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But as a front-end dev rel I grew at some point very frustrated about the fact that my web user interface is ready to go, but it's blocked by some API that isn't ready or some Kubernetes thing that went and that I couldn't talk to. And so, a perennial question was, why is the back end not ready? To the point where I got so frustrated that I arrange to quit front end and started doing back end. I was like, 'Why does all this stuff take so long?' And I found out- [0:04:05]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:04:05] I'm just going to do it myself. That's the- [0:04:07]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:04:09] Yes, it was – I was very annoyed, and so- [0:04:11]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:04:11] Tejas, that's an interesting thing, because what I've noticed in projects is that the front end code, - and maybe that's a more modern thing – is about four times the size of back end code these days. Because the front-end code has got lots of stakes and it's really interactive. Has that changed? Have things flipped around, do you think? [0:04:33]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:04:34] I think they are flipping around. A big trend that we're seeing is the rise of doing a lot of stuff on the server. So, there's this newer – or not newer, but there's a – it's more prevalent, this notion of the back end for the front end, which is a tiny little microservice that sits between the actual back end and the front end. And that is doing more work now, so front ends themselves in isolation are getting a lot smaller, because of the BFF component. [0:05:00]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:05:01] Yeah. Okay, so you're a self-taught coder- [0:05:04]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:05:05] Yes. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:05:06] -which is very common in dev rel. The ability to self-learn is one of those important skills. [0:05:16]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:05:17] Yes, definitely. Yeah, and after the back end, I realized, there's a lot of complexity here, so pivoted to dev ops a little bit, Kubernetes, Docker, all that stuff. And all the while, I've been talking to people, teaching people what I'd learnt. Because I'm a huge proponent of this idea that you don't know something unless you can explain it to someone in plain English. 

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And earlier in my career, there were lots of very smart people who – or I perceived them to be smart, but they could not explain things to me. And I felt stupid, because I thought, I can't understand this. And looking bac, I suspect that maybe they didn't know enough to explain plainly the things that I asked. 

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But anyway, through teaching, through talking about these learnings publicly, that was probably a precursor to dev rel, until I landed my first dev rel position at ZEIT, which is now Vercel. That was a very short thing; I think it was three months or something. But that's when I got into vocational dev rel. [0:06:16]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:06:16] Fascinating. Let me ask you about that one. Was the developer culture, the developer focus there at the start for Vercel, or was it something they pivoted into and learned later? [0:06:27]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:06:29] Yeah, ZEIT – no, I have a huge respect for ZEIT and specifically the founder, Guillermo, because he is a developer. And it's this company started by a dude who loves and works heavily with code. And we see technical founders and CEOs, but I'd say Guillermo is one of the- [0:06:47]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:06:48] He's a machine. 

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:06:49] He is a machine. Started with Socket.IO and then he created Next.js from his brain with a few collaborators, if I remember correctly. And this is very code heavy. And when I worked there too, it was very code heavy. I remember meetings with certain database providers, talking about the different types of consistency. And at the time I was very young; I didn't even know what he was talking about. And if I was to work with him today, I'd still – he'd be on another level. So, it was – since he is a developer, the developer focus was from day zero, for sure. [0:07:21]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:07:22] That's an important little point. Because some people suffer from a lot of imposter syndrome, especially if you're entering industry, and they see people being so productive. I don't know about – I'm only going to speak for myself. I'm never going to catch up to Guillermo; that's never going to happen. That guy is – he's gone; he's a machine. But it's okay. Not everybody has to operate at that level. It's okay. [0:07:50]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:07:51] Yes, I completely agree. I look at even modern day little Guillermos almost. And that's maybe minimized; I don't mean to minimize. But I look at people like my good friend Hassan El Mghari. Hassan created this thing called RoomGPT among other side projects that are viral, and he's also a machine. And he's trading up side project after side project and doing fulltime dev rel at Vercel now. 

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And I look at him now and I go, 'Dang, bro, that's impressive.' And part of me feels like – maybe not imposter syndrome, but I feel motivated. I'm like, 'Gosh, I want to be like Hassan.' But at the same time, what you just said, Richard. I have to tell myself, it's totally fine to not be that way. I'm wired differently.' And that's actually good, because then we complete the ecosystem. If everyone was like Hassan or Guillermo, I don't know that we'd do much of the other stuff that matters just as much. [0:08:41]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:08:43] Yeah, and they say this, the three pillars of developer relations, so code, content and community. But it's okay not to be one-third split on all of those. Some people are much better at community. Not me, for example, so I'm much more in code. You're killing it on content. I have to ask; how do you manage to maintain that consistent content delivery? [0:09:09]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:09:11] That's a great question. I also – this is maybe the first time I hear these three pillars of code [Loss of audio, 0:09:20]; that's really cool. Because for me as a dev rel professional, what I'm visualizing in my head is these three continuums, 0-100% sliders. Where am I on each of these? And community and content is probably equally high. So, they're, I'd say, 45:45 and then code is 10 right now. And it's an indicator of where to focus for any dev rel professional, so that's awesome. 

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That's – if anyone's listening and wants to measure their own dev rel, that's a great tool. But how do I churn out as much content? It's usually through panic. I'm speaking at 32 conferences this year, and there's a reason for that that we can get into later. But most of them are different topics; I'm not reusing the same content. And I decided to do that; I decided to do that earlier. [0:10:08]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:10:08] Really, dude! That's- [0:10:10]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:10:11] It's a forcing function and now I'm forced to. So, literally, two days ago I did a talk on Zod and TRPC in depth. And it was a 45-minute code-heavy live coding. We did demos; it was very intense. [0:10:25]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:10:26] That's intense, yeah. [0:10:27]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:10:27] And it's great, because I got to learn. And that bumped up my code percentage on code, community and content. So, I'm forced by my own compulsion to say yes to things. [0:10:38]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:10:39] Conference driven development, that's what they call it. [0:10:41[

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:10:42] That's right. But as a consequence, my YouTube content has suffered. I haven't put out a new video in two months, but it's – there's a balance. I can't do everything and that's also okay. [0:10:54]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:10:54] I want to focus on one thing – we were having a little chat before we came on – that you mentioned that really struck true with me. Which is, back in the day, maybe 10 years ago, a lot of the talks that developers were giving at conferences – those developers fitted into the basic idea of developer relations, even if we didn't call it that. 

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But a lot of the talks they gave were – I got a Raspberry Pi and I made a smoke machine. And I happen to work for this company and we're hiring, but that's the very last slide and the only time they mention their employer. So, talk to me about – this is something you value, you hold very near and dear – which is the difference between dev rel and dev sell, right? [0:11:41]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:11:42] That's right, yeah, that's something I keep coming back to, I keep seeing over and over again. That's dev rel, not dev sell. And I've consulted for and worked at a lot of companies who struggle with this. Because you'll go to a conference and you'll come back and they'll be like, 'Where's our leads?' That's not how it works. 

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And if you wanted leads, then maybe hire a sales or a marketing team. Because it's in the name: developer relations, not developer sales. And I'm very passionate about that as a former director of dev rel at various places. I've had a standing almost rule in my teams, that if I get the sense that you're selling too much, we're going to have a talk about it. And we're going to adjust that; we're going to dial that in.

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Because one, it's not the team's responsibility to sell, contrary to what people may think. And two, if you're selling, that's probably costing relationship quality. Now what do I mean by relationship quality? I mean showing genuine interest and investment in people in general, but for a company that is seeking profit in strategic partners as well. And that's really important. 

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But it's genuine investment; it's like, how can we support you? Tell us about your initiatives, not so that we can do better than you but so that we can support you. Because that's how you build, in my opinion at least, relationships, is through genuinely being interested, invested and supporting other people. [0:13:12]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:13:14] I could come back to you and I could say, 'You know what? I'm going for my series B and gotta hit my quarterly numbers. And I have this team of people that I'm paying for. What is the insight? What is the core benefit to the company that is greater than just getting the developer relations people to sell? [0:13:35]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:13:37] That's an excellent question. What I'm hearing is, what's in it for the company outside of sales when it comes to dev rel. And it's relationships, and the really good companies get this. Vercel just partnered with Neon for example, to unlock Vercel PostgreS. That comes out of good relationships, and as a result, both companies grow. Vercel makes money; Neon makes money from Vercel. Similarly, Cloudflare has this thing called – what is it? Workers for Platforms, similar thing. That's the fruit of really great dev rel, is partnerships, is alliance, where the rising tide raises all boats. [0:14:16]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:14:18] Yeah, there's some value is- [0:14:20]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:14:20] Among other things. That's right. And another thing that is in dev rel rather, that companies can get beyond just sales, is free community efforts. And this is, I feel like, a huge win, right? A great example of this is React. React has zero dev rel people at this moment; I think they hired two at Metta and then laid them off very quickly, unfortunately. But for an open-source project with absolutely no dev rel, it is phenomenally successful in terms of community. 

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And that's an example where there's people in Lagos, Nigeria, who will organize some React conference that the React core team, that Metta itself is divorced form. So, you have people across the world doing dev rel for you for free because they love your thing so much and because that's the relationship you've cultivated with them. And that is huge, because you have not just your internal dev rel team doing dev rel, but the whole world. So, your dev rel workforce has multiplied, and that is the fruit of really good dev rel.

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It is a long game, as with any relationships. You go for a date with a male, female or non-binary person; you go for one date and you're like, 'All right, when are we getting married?' That's not – that's probably not going to work in most cases. And a lot of companies probably see dev rel like that. You speak at a conference; where's our customers? But that's so far from reality, whereas you build a rapport, you go on a few dates, you get engaged; there's a whole timeline. And that's true for dev rel. [0:15:54]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:15:57] And as an activity, we need to scale back this focus on metrics that we have. You see a lot of people talking about – I got to figure out some metrics from my boss. [0:16:05]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:16:06] Yes. Metrics can be good and the metrics ought to be focused on what we're producing, what we're giving as opposed to what you're getting. So, I love your matrix of content, community and code. What are we putting out there? And it has to stop there; we can't measure after – what's the impact of – that's going to be hard to measure because dev rel is a long game. 

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But something that would be reasonable is, these are the conferences we're sponsoring. These are the side – these are the – not side projects. These are the demos we're doing; these are the blog posts we're writing in numbers and looking at impact over time, over a long period of time, and then adjusting as we go. [0:16:44]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:16:46] Your point reminds me of some random quote that I saw, attributed to Bill Gates. I'm an open-source person, so this really pains me to say it, but he got this right. He said as a business strategy, Microsoft probably captured only 1% of the value that Microsoft Word or Excel ever created, 1% of the value accrued outside of Microsoft. But that was the key to their success. They weren't greedy about capturing too much value initially. [0:17:21]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:17:24] Do you think that worked? I guess it did work for them in hindsight. They are still Microsoft and successful. But I wonder if capturing more of that value would have been even more beneficial. [0:17:33] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:17:35] They probably could have dialed it up to 2%, instead of being – I don't know; what were they, $500 billion? It could have been a trillion. Maybe they would have been a trillion-dollar company. Yeah, it is a very good point. I've seen it in my own business, that emphasis on just the relationship building generates sales. And they may be two or three years down the line, but they're very solid relationships. [0:18:05]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:18:06] Exactly. I think of – as a great – I've been watching cal.com's development a lot, with Peter, who's a friend. And the way they do it is phenomenal, because they focus on – he tweets a lot of controversial things. And he said – he's like, 'Customers we don't want is, hey, can we get an extension on our free tier?' He's like, 'Customers we do want is one really good enterprise that's like, "Here, have $10,000 a month. Sort us out and let the problems go away."'

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And within relationships, quantity leads to filtering for the quality ones that you want to have and invest in. And you can only do that with wide-reaching dev rel initiatives like conference talks or blog posts or – until you find the few people that your product resonates with and then you have more focus. So, you start broad and then narrow, and I feel like- [0:19:05]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:19:05] You mentioned a person that's doing it really well. Are you familiar with Matteo Collina's new startup, Platformatic? [0:19:13]

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Tejas Kumar: [0:19:14]  I am, yeah. I'm excited about it. [0:19:16]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:19:16] He's doing a fabulous job on this dev rel. [0:19:19] 

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Tejas Kumar:  Yeah, and he's just like a one-man dev rel team. I see him streaming on YouTube and every time he does YouTube content, I'm pretty sure the graphs at Platformatic are going up. Because it's – he's an interesting person; his projects are interesting, therefore, Platformatic must be interesting. So, I wonder if that's something transferrable to more people. [0:19:40]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:19:43] There's an interesting challenge with that which I've seen. You’ve been a dev rel leader, so I wonder if you've come across this as well. Is sometimes if you have a developer relations team that is executing really well, generating a lot of buzz and good relationships, the way the dev rel team is out at conferences – you're doing 32 this year, you said, I think? [0:20:08]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:20:09] Yeah. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:20:11] Those are not holidays; that's hard work. If you've ever done – you know that is tough, doing that work. [0:20:17]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:20:18] Yes. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:20:20] But a lot of people who haven't done that work look at that and go, 'That guy's on holiday. He's having great fun. Look at him tweeting out in speaker dinners.' There was always a challenge to communicate the value internally of the work and the fact that it wasn't a junket; it wasn't just messing around. [0:20:44]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:20:45] Yeah. I hear a lot of people, especially – so as a dev rel leader, specifically in director-level posts, I've heard my reports saying things casually, off the cuff. They're like, 'Man, I'm so glad I'm back from this conference. Now I get to do some real work. [0:21:03]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:21:03] Real work. 

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:21:05] Yeah, and I come down so hard on this type of language. Because it shows that there is a core belief that travelling and doing the speaker dinners, the talks, the workshops, is not real work. When in fact, I know especially for the introverts among us, that can be incredibly taxing, just having to be so alert all the time. And then having to navigate jetlag and then having to navigate maybe some pressure to drink alcohol if that's not your thing or just for the sake of the relationship. 

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There's so many layers to it. I call it – I'm actually working on a blog post called The Dark Side of Dev Rel that goes into detail on all of this, and I'm happy to go into detail about it here, but yes, it is not just work; it is very hard work, especially for me. And I'm not crying like a victim or anything. 

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But with the 32 conferences a year, or this year, it does also place, as you can imagine, reasonable stress on my family life and things like that. So, yes, it's not glamorous; it's not a holiday. In fact, what I've learned is, holidays are awesome. It sounds obvious, but I was just on holiday about a month ago and it's great. You just wake up and you're like, 'Wow, the whole day is – we can do whatever we want.' [0:22:21]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:22:22] Just to give you an example, I have been to Barcelona I think about five times. Barcelona is famous for the Sagrada Familia, which is this amazing cathedral which everybody has to see if you go to Barcelona. I've never seen it, not once. [0:22:36]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:22:36] Wow. Right, because you've got conferences and you've got speaker dinners and plans and- [0:22:43]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:22:43] All that stuff. Let's talk about the alcohol thing; I think that's really interesting. I'm Irish; would have been fond of a drop in my younger days. But during COVID, decided to give up. And just a combination of circumstances and COVID pressure and that ty[pe of stuff. And I don't miss it and it's great. And I can actually drink more beer than ever because hey, it's alcohol free, so zero guilt. But one of the things I don't miss at conferences is that pressure to drink, and collectively, that's still an issue we need to deal with. [0:23:29]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:23:30] Yes, it's not even jus the pressure to drink but the pressure to eat. At the beginning of last year, I was in the worst shape of my life physically, overweight, tired all the time, bordering on depression etc. And it was because I was stringing conferences back to back and reveling in all of the speaker dinners and the unlimited amounts of alcohol, all of that. 

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Again, it wasn't a holiday, but it was 'networking,' and I looked at myself in the mirror with a shirt off and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, what happened to me.' And at that point, I decided, 'Hey, it's time to get serious about self-control.' And I started avoid – eating right, avoiding alcohol etc. I decided to just do it. 

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And it's not bad; I can't call it negative, because for the conferences and the attendees, it's a one-time thing. Oftentimes, it's once a year and so, of course you want to have a little party; you want to live a little, that's great. But for those of us in dev rel who string these together, it's not once a year; it's a lifestyle. And then it comes down to, do you – what kind of lifestyle do you want? 

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So, oftentimes, I'm the person who – at the speaker dinner, I'll be like, 'No thank you' on the potatoes or the whiskey or the beer or whatever. And sometimes people do go, 'Oh my gosh, that's weird.' And then I explain to them; yes, I can see how that would be weird, but imagine if this was every week for you. And then they get it. [0:25:02]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:25:05] Yeah. I think you're right. And to those of us – to those of you listening who are just starting down this path and starting to go to conferences, all you have to do is, you have to give a talk once, one time when you're hungover and you'll never do it again. [0:25:24]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:25:26] Yeah. And I wonder also, because you're just addressing the listeners. It's a very – it's important for the listeners to know who are maybe getting into dev rel that it is totally valid and fine to say no, to things like food and alcohol, depending on their preference, but also to the pressure of having to attend the entire conference if you've been invited to just do a talk. 

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And you may be missing out on learning and things like this, but I've been in situations and my reports have been in situations where we have travelled for 14 hours and we are jetlagged, unhealthy; we're showing signs of mental illness. But they'll still spend the entire day at the conference and feel destroyed after. 

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And nobody wants that, so it's important for people to – there is a valid feeling of pull to – I need to go to the conference and be present because they brought me here. But they didn't bring you there to watch the entire conference. They brought you there to do a talk and bless their community, which you will do. But what you do outside of that is entirely up to you and whatever you choose is totally valid and safe. I do think that's an important message for people getting into- [0:26:32]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:26:32] 100%, yeah, pace yourself. I would add a tiny little bit of advice on top of that one, which I have learned through hard experience of annoyed conference organizers. If you are doing that and your talk is coming up, just send them a text message to let them know you're in the city; you're on the ground, you're going to be turning up. You will be giving your talk. Running – I don't know if you've ever run events directly, Tejas, but running events is super stressful. [0:27:02]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:27:04] I can imagine. A good friend of mine, Jessica West, she was formerly at MongoDB; I don't know where she is right now. But she used to run DinosaurJS, which I think is the best name of a conference ever. And she said to me – I said, 'Jess, what's it like, organizing a conference?' And she said, 'It's like organizing a wedding but with many brides.' I thought that was really funny. [0:27:25]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:27] Yeah, totally. And for the tech conferences, there is no way you're getting the slides in advance. I'm bringing my own laptop and I have my own slides and I just finished them while the other speaker was talking, so there's my slides. [0:27:40]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:27:42] I don't know if you were serious about that or not, but that's- [0:27:44]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:45] I'm serious. 

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:27:44] -that's my experience every single time, is I finish the slides while the previous speaker is talking. And I finish the first draft of my slides on the plane to the location, so- [0:27:56]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:57] We should be – okay, we should stop that, right? Again, if you're only getting started in dev rel and you're doing conference talks, give yourself 10 years and then you'll get to the point where you won't completely die of a heart attack if you're still doing that last slide with five minutes to go. [0:28:12]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:28:14] That's the other thing is- 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:28:14] Prepare in advance. 

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:28:16] Yeah, definitely. I see so much variance over slides as well. Part of the work that I do, Richard, is I coach speakers and teams of speakers, and oftentimes, there's new speakers. So, two days ago, I was coaching a phenomenal speaker; her name is Nidhi, Nidhi Kumari, so she has my last name with an I at the end. 

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And she had a certain style of slides, and so many speakers, either new speakers or old speakers, have different styles of slides, and that's fascinating. Because for me, why I finish my slides last minute is because there's usually six of them. Most of my talks are predominantly writing code live and showing things working, and the slides literally are one big word and then I talk about that word, so that's why I don't feel the pressure. But if your slide decks are more complex, then I would highly recommend taking as much time beforehand as necessary. [0:29:10]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:29:12] Yeah, you're right, and it is wonderful and that's one of the great things about going to conferences is you see that variation. I saw – I was at one conference years ago where the speaker, he would only do one or two conferences a year. Ad for every talk, he would commission a cartoonist to do a slide for him. [0:29:33]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:29:34] Wow, that's amazing. [0:29:35]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:29:35] Every one of his slides was a new cartoon on the same theme, but he knew the people. [0:29:39]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:29:40] That's awesome. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:29:41] He would take months to prepare. [0:29:43]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:29:45] I feel compelled to share with your listeners two things: one, the best slides I've seen and two, slide no-nos that I think should be avoided. [0:29:57]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:29:57] Yeah, let's do it; let's do it. [0:29:59]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:30:01] The best slides I've seen – obviously, I feel like this should be obvious – is Apple. They have – they used to have at least, when Steve Jobs was around, really nice slides. But if we talk about dev rel folks in the web ecosystem, I want to shout out to Janni Evacoliou. He's on Twitter at J Evacoliou, whatever; it'll be in the show notes, I assume. 

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He does this talk about AI and he works at an AI company. And his slides are phenomenal, because they're generated by AI, the illustrations, and I'd recommend them. And there's a talk of his on YouTube; I'll send it to you if you want to include in the show notes. But he – also people like Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine, always on point. And the common theme among these slides is, there's usually just a word and an illustration, nothing more, and the speaker fills in the actual content. 

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And this is also very close to the no-no I was talking about, because I've seen – probably the worst slides are where there's just paragraph was on the slide. And what ends up happening is the reader ends up just saying what's on the slide. And at that point, for me as an attendee, my experience is divided. I'm trying to read the slide, but I'm also trying to listen to the speaker at the same time. 

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But they're same thing, but the speaker has a different intonation and body language. So, I'm – in terms of sensory input, I'm confused; I don't know where I am. And this ruins my talk experience. So, for anyone listening, slides with paragraphs and lots of text, verbose slides, I think is a definite no-no. [0:31:32]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:33] Yeah, and we often see that with first-timers because they are thinking that a conference talk is like a conference room presentation to 20 people. Totally different. [0:31:43]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:31:45] Yeah, right, and what I've done with people I've coached who – it's so prevalent. So many speakers do this verbose slide thing. And a simple hack we do to help is, we cut a lot of the text out, and by cut, I mean in the context of cut and paste. And then we cut it from the slide and paste it into the presenter notes. [0:32:02]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:04] That's a great idea and that solves the problem straight away, right? [0:32:11] 

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:32:12] Yeah, exactly. And so, the slide becomes more terse and the presenter notes are visible to them and everybody wins. [0:32:17]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:19] Awesome. Tejas, we are going to have cut it; we're going to have to stop there, because we're already over time. And I could go for another 45 minutes, easily. We will have to have you back on. Because you are an advocate of dev rel, not dev sell, I know you won't do it yourself, so I'm going to do it for you. Tejas runs an absolutely amazing developer relations consultancy. If you need developer relations, go talk to this guy. He knows what he's doing. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. [0:32:47]

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Tejas Kumar:  [0:32:48] Thank you so much for having me, Richard. It's an honor to share this with you. [0:32:51] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:51] Awesome. Bye-bye. [0:32:52] 

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Endnote

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:54] You can find the transcript of this podcast and any links mentioned on our podcast page at Voxgig.com/podcast. Subscribe for weekly editions, where we talk to the people who make the developer community work. For even more, read our newsletter. You can subscribe at voxgig.com/newsletter, or follow our Twitter @voxgig. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. [0:33:21]

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