“What actually is Developer Relations?” is a question that I see almost every week as I’m compiling tweets and articles for DevRel Weekly. The confusion doesn’t stem from the fact that it’s never been defined (narrator: “It has!”), but rather from the fact that if you ask 10 different people in the tech industry for a definition of Developer Relations, you’re likely to get 12 different answers.

In this fourth and final post in our series about encouraging developer community collaboration, we’ll take a look at how some established and newer developer communities including Slack, Shopify, Atlassian and Stoplight fostered collaboration from the earliest stages of their developer community.

Managing your own developer community spaces is enough of a challenge, so how do some of the most successful platform companies approach developer magnets like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and how do they decide whether or not to join in or let developers collaborate on their own in these spaces?

In the last post in this series, we illustrated some of the beneficial outcomes of a collaborative developer community. But how, and when, as a devrel or representative of your company, should you step aside, join in, or stoke the community fire? Our friends at Slack, Shopify, Stoplight and Atlassian have some answers.

If you’re involved in community building, it’s no surprise to you that while it’s rewarding, it’s also incredibly difficult. As CodeNewbie Founder and CEO, Saron Yitbarek said in a recent interview,

Community building is hard. It can look warm & fuzzy from outside, but you're taking on a lot of emotional labor & there's invisible work that no one will ever see. It's ok to be frustrated, fed up, & lonely sometimes. Find those who understand.