4. • How is your API unique?
• What is the purpose of
your API?
• Commercial
• Partner/Private
• Experimental/
Research/Government
• Who do you want to use
your API?
• Tell the world with a great
developer website.
Birth of an API
Music Education Hack Day, New York 2013
5. How do you grow your API
program from nothing to
something?
6. • Product owner of the API
• Developer experience
• Tools, libs, changelog
• Education
• Docs, tuts, workshops
• Partnerships/BD
• Marketing & community
• Internal advocate
What does a
developer
advocate do?
Music Hack Day Edinburgh, 2012
8. • Socially fluent
• Fosters community
• Clear, coherent speaking
• Willingness to learn
• Patience
• Eagerness to teach
• Technical
• Empathetic
• Lack of ego
• Readily available
• Inspirational
• Time management
• Product management
• Fun
Skills of a
great
developer
advocate
Tim Falls, keen.io
10. • Logical, inventive, pragmatic.
• Always looking for the next big
problem to solve.
• Learning new technologies
constantly.
• Testing the limits.
• Independent, sometimes
stubborn.
• Day jobs feed their weekend
hack ideas.
• Short attention-span.
• More than a developer, many
personalities.
Understanding
the hacker
ethos
Music Hack Day NYC, 2012
11. • Add them on Github, DevPost,
Lanyrd, Github, Twitter,
Dribbble, and even LinkedIn.
• Engage again and again.
• Encourage them to contribute to
open source projects.
• Send them monthly
newsletters.
• Vote up and answer on Stack
Overflow.
• Invite them to all types of
events.
• Offer office hours.
• Continue their hacks.
How to flirt
with a
developer
online
The (not too distant) Future
14. • Monthly active API users
• Daily API calls
• Apps/projects published
• Pull requests/forks/stars
• Website analytics
• Social media
• Email signups
• Partners
• Meetup attendees
• Hacks created
• Swag given out
• Feedback reported
• Beers consumed
Success by the
numbers
Way Out West Hack 2013, Göteborg, Sweden
16. • Developer happiness
• Event interaction
• Word of mouth
• Good will in the community
• Time spent hacking offline
Measuring the
unmeasurable
HackMIT, 2015