Ideas, lessons, and field notes
Long-form lessons from founders, marketers, and the teams making developer products.
All writing
31 articles
PlanetScale is a cloud database provider. On 6th March 2024, PlanetScale faced trial-by-tech-Twitter for dropping their free tier. Fast forward to today, they are on a winning streak. They launched Me
Read article →All guests on my show fall into at least one of two categories: People I already have some relationship with People I’m genuinely interested in speaking to Category 1 – Relationship These are people I
Read article →I just interviewed the founder of Mastra, Sam Bhagwat – a TypeScript AI agents framework. Before Mastra, Sam was the founder of Gatsby, the React framework. Here are three things I learned from him: 1
Read article →Note: this is mostly for me. I started using Mastra for some projects recently. It's a framework for working with agents. You don't need a framework. I've also played with agents without them. But her
Read article →DevTools I've interviewed: WorkOS - Enterprise features integration platform Daytona - Open source development environment manager Trigger.dev - Open source background jobs and workflows Browserbase -
Read article →There are more and more open source DevTools startups. I've interviewed dozens. But I am still confused about open source licenses. So I decided to ask questions to two people who actually understand
Read article →In the last two years, I've recorded 100 episodes of Scaling DevTools; a developer tools startup podcast. These 100 episodes have featured the founders of startups like Supabase, PostHog and WorkOS. A
Read article →One of the things I get asked a lot is "How do open source projects make money"? This week I chatted with Vlad Matsiiako from Infisical - an open source secrets management tool. So I decided to delve
Read article →I host a small podcast that has had 70+ guests so far. This is my guide on how to 1) be on podcasts as a guest and 2) be a good guest (from a host's perspective). One thing before I start: this is not
Read article →At 8 years old I remember reading the SAS motto "Who Dares Wins" on the wall of my Scout hut. Almost 24 years later, I'm finally beginning to understand its significance. Fear rules my life. My achiev
Read article →Photo by Jonathan Kemper / Unsplash Logan Kilpatrick is a member of OpenAI's developer advocacy team. Logan has sometimes been described as OpenAI's first DevRel. This is a summary of Logan's intervie
Read article →For most founders, landing Fortune 500 customers like GrubHub, Warby Parker & RBC Royal Bank is the definition of success. Imagine then, telling these customers that you're deprecating your successful
Read article →Traditional software engineers are now building AI applications. But the tools used for building CRUD apps may not work for reasons such as: GPUs for training/inference Libraries can be BIG Long-runni
Read article →This talk from Shawn Wang (aka swyx) provides mental models on how to think about Developer Experience. I'm writing non-exhaustive notes for this talk so I can remember some of my favourite ideas but
Read article →I enjoyed this talk, where Phil Leggetter shares a framework for a DevRel funnel. Below are some summarised notes of what I took from this talk. Base funnel Acquisition - signs up Activation - using y
Read article →Here's how some code led to 60+ GitHub stars, 30+ retweets and 150 likes in 24 hours. I love Awesome lists like Awesome Python, Awesome iOS and Awesome Swift. And I'm not alone. Awesome iOS has more t
Read article →It was an unremarkable April evening as I jogged through a nondescript suburban neighbourhood. I was lost in thought. Nodding along to HAIM's Women in Music Pt. III album. The only sound to be heard w
Read article →Nimrod Kramer, CEO of Daily.dev, was recently interviewed on the Scaling DevTools podcast. In the interview, Nimrod shares his insights on developer marketing, and how Daily.dev has scaled quickly to
Read article →Overnight success is rare. Quite rare. Many variables must line up to become successful. It usually takes longer to gain traction with customers than anyone would like. Let's look at what may delay yo
Read article →Below are five of my favourite examples of developer-focused companies creatively marketing to developers. Atom 1.0 from GitHub This video from GitHub might just be the Dollar Shave Club of the develo
Read article →Photo by Matt Botsford / Unsplash Marketing is hard. But developer marketing is marketing on hard-mode. Listening to experts on podcasts is one way to make developer marketing a little bit easier. Bel
Read article →Photo by Brianna Tucker / Unsplash "So, it's share the knowledge first. Educate people, make them better at what they do, and then demonstrate how to implement those things through [what] you're tryin
Read article →From day one, Stripe has been adamant about ease of use. Its installation process is a breeze ' just copy and paste seven lines of code to get up and running. And its documentation is famously clear a
Read article →Photo by Markus Spiske / Unsplash "Being able to take those real problems that you notice when talking to real [developers] and turn that into content. That's the best type of content." Adam DuVander
Read article →Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk / Unsplash If developers use your product, you probably spend a lot of your time wondering how to do dev marketing. If you want to succeed in marketing to
Read article →Flatlogic Flatlogic has $10k MRR and was created by software developers for software developers. The team know exactly what matters to web developers. This leads to consistent messaging about solving
Read article →Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng / Unsplash Everyone knows it's hard to get software engineers' attention. So I asked Twitter for advice. Here's what I learned. Connection and clarity Being clear and
Read article →When I think about most of the DevTools I've bought, it's almost always learned about it through some combo of: A cool tutorial or article A friend or or community recommendation Stumbling over a prob
Read article →Landing pages are extremely important pieces of the marketing puzzle. A landing page is a one-page website that serves one purpose, and one purpose only, and that's to get visitors to follow through o
Read article →According to Stack Overflow, more than half of developers now have influence in their company's buying process for tools, so it's absolutely essential you build a great experience for developers into
Read article →My name is Jack Bridger and I'm a software engineer, but that wasn't always the case. When I was at university in 2013, I founded Code at Uni. Code at Uni was as an indie business before I knew what i
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