Category: What I’m Up To

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Conferences Developer Relations What I’m Up To

My talk next week at DevRelCon NYC 2026: “The Market is Trying to Tell You Something”

I don’t think I’ve ever put in as much work into a talk as I have for my upcoming talk at DevRelCon NYC 2026 (that’s “DevRelCon” as in “developer relations conference”), The Market is Trying to Tell You Something. It’s a lightning talk meant to fill up no more that 10 minutes including Q&A and the transition between talks, but the ratio of hours-of-prep to minutes-of-actual-talk is massive.

What is DevRelCon?

DevlRelCon NYC 2026 logo
DevRelCon NYC 2026 takes place July 22 – 23 at Industry City, Brooklyn, New York.

DevRelCon is the long-running conference series for people who do developer relations/developer advocacy, which once upon a time also went by “developer evangelism”. This line of work involves helping software developers discover, understand, and actually stick with a product, whether that’s through a combination documentation, demos, community, and developer experience.

DevRelCon was created by the developer relations agency Hoopy and began in London in 2015. It’s since grown into an international series of conferences with editions in London, Prague, San Francisco, Tokyo, China, Latin America, and online. I’m speaking at the New York 2026 edition, which is organized by Mike Swift and Major League Hacking, the global community for early-career developers and software creators.

DevRelCon is positioned as the premier conference for anyone working to grow developer adoption, spanning developer relations, developer experience, product marketing, platform product management, and everyone’s favorite three-letter acronym, GTM. In other words, it’s a room full of exactly the people my talk is about, which is either the best or the most terrifying possible audience for a talk on what the DevRel job market is really telling us. (Probably both.)

Joey de Villa’s NetFoundry business card
My business card. Click to see at full size.

DevRelCon NYC 2026 will take place July 22 – 23 at Industry City, Brooklyn, New York. It is the first conference I’m speaking at as an official representative of NetFoundry.

What’s The Market is Trying to Tell You Something all about?

Arms in Christmas sweaters toasting with cans of beer under a Christmas wreath
Join me at the DevRelCon afterparty and I’ll tell you the Christmas Eve “homework assignment” story over a beer.

The talk is based on my experiences in 2025, when I did something I don’t recommend as a hobby but made for a great natural experiment: I let the DevRel job market interview me a couple dozen times. That’s my dressed-up way of saying “I was looking for a job”.

I went through recruiter screens, faced hiring panels, did take-home demos (one on Christmas Eve, based on the urging of a recruiter), and went through final rounds — across AI-native startups, enterprise infrastructure shops, and everything in between.

Somewhere around the tenth interview, I stopped just trying to get hired and started noticing a pattern:

  • Job descriptions had quietly rewritten themselves.
  • Interviews are testing for things the job description never mentions.
  • And “DevRel ROI”, which used to be a phrase that was thrown in with an accompanying hand-wave, now means something specific that it didn’t mean in the zero-interest 2010s or the Great Resignation hiring frenzy of a couple years ago.

My talk is my attempt to decode those signals: what the market is actually screening for, how what it says and what it wants are often different, and what any of us (whether you’re job-hunting, hiring, or just trying to make sure your role survives its next budget review) should do about it. It’s eight minutes. There will be an accordion. That’s all I’ll say for now.

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Conferences Developer Relations What I’m Up To

I’m speaking at DevRelCon NYC 2026 (July 22 – 23 in Brooklyn)!

DevRelCon NYC is the developer relations conference for North America, it’s happening in Brooklyn on July 22 and 23, and I’m a speaker!

Here’s a quick writeup of my talk, as it appears on the schedule:

The Market is Trying to Tell You Something

The DevRel job market has been sending signals for two years. Most of us have been too busy surviving it to read them. After 15+ years in Developer Relations and a recent job search that took me across a couple dozen companies, I came away with both a new role and something just as valuable: a pattern.

Job descriptions have quietly shifted. Hiring panels are asking different questions. “DevRel ROI” means something specific now that it didn’t mean in the zero-interest 2010s or the Great Resignation era of a couple of years ago. The skills companies say they want versus the skills that actually get you hired don’t look like they come from the same list.

This talk is an honest, experience-based, practitioner-level read of what the market is telling us about where DevRel is headed. It doesn’t have any LinkedIn takes or recycled frameworks; just patterns from the front lines, with implications for how you position yourself, make the case for your team, and think about the next few years of your career.

In addition to giving a talk, I’ll be there to learn as well as represent NetFoundry.

DevRelCon typically brings in about 300 attendees, mostly professionals from developer relations, developer experience, and developer community-building roles to discuss industry trends, methodology, and as of late, AI integration, as well as to do some networking (a key part of DevRel).

DevRelCon was created by the developer relations agency Hoopy and began in London in 2015. DevRelCon NYC is organized by Mike Swift and Major League Hacking, a global community for early-career developers and software creators, of which Mike is co-founder.

DevRelCon NYC takes place on Wednesday, July 22 and Thursday, July 23 at Industry City in Brooklyn, New York. I’m arriving early in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 21 and will be attending some of the pre-DevRelCon festivities.

Last year’s DevRelCon NYC talks

Here’s the set of DevRelCon NYC 2025 talks that have been posted to YouTube. I’m using these as a guide for my own talk (as well as for ideas for my own developer relations work at NetFoundry), and you might find these helpful for your own work, or to help you decide if DevRelCon NYC 2026 is for you!

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Podcasts Video What I’m Up To

I’m on “This Week in Tech” this Sunday, June 7!

I’m returning for another appearance this Sunday on This Week in Tech, which will record live at 5 p.m. Eastern / 2 p.m. Pacific / 2100 UTC!

As usual, it’ll be hosted by Leo Laporte and the other guest panelists will be journalist Jeff Jarvis (whom I know from BloggerCon and similar events in the 2000s) and priest/podcaster Father Robert Ballecer.

As usual, we’ll talk about the week’s tech events and what they’ve been up to recently, and I’ll probably talk about joining NetFoundry and working as a developer advocate promoting OpenZiti and the AI platform that builds on it.

You can watch the livestream or the recording on the This Week in Tech YouTube channel.

This will be my third appearance on This Week in Tech for 2026; here are my other two episodes…

January 4, 2026 with Dan Patterson, Sr/ Director of Content @ Blackbird.AI:

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Charts, Diagrams, and Infographics What I’m Up To

Some LITERAL back-of-the-envelope diagrams in r/NetFoundry worth checking out

“Back of the envelope” is a time-honored tech tradition where someone does a quick calculation, works out a plan, or illustrates a concept on the nearest convenient piece of paper, which was often the back of a paper envelope.

In an era over-saturated with sterile, generated pics and diagrams, I thought I’d go in the opposite direction and try to revive this tradition. With that in mind, I made these illustrations that accompany an article in r/NetFoundry: Why Claude’s new MCP Tunnel matters, and how llm-gateway, mcp-gateway, and Agora fit into the same picture.

Here are the backs of envelopes featured in that Reddit post:

Read the post to see what these back-of-the-envelope diagrams are all about!

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Career What I’m Up To

This is my new developer relations meme and mantra

Seal basking in the water with the caption “I am the Dumpling. I speak for the soup.”

It’s adorable, and it describes the job pithily.

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Artificial Intelligence Meetups What I’m Up To

“AI Is Stealing Your Job”: An online panel happening this Tuesday, May 12 at 8 p.m.

This Tuesday evening, join our online panel where we’ll discuss a question that’s on a lot of people’s minds:

Is you career safe in the age of AI?

That’s what we’ll discuss in a panel called AI Is Stealing Your Job — What can you do about it ? A Gen Alpha Perspective.

I don’t need to tell you that AI’s already replacing jobs (or at least being used as an excuse), reshaping industries, and rewriting the rules of the workforce and the ways we work. Wouldn’t it be nice to get some perspective?

Join us this Tuesday! On the panel will be:

  • Sam Kasimalla as the host. You’ll know him from all sorts of local events, including Tampa Java User Group. He wears many hats, including IT business owner, ex-FAANG engineer, and Board of Director MATA.
  • Dakshesh Kaki will provide the Gen Alpha perspective. He’s a TED Talk speaker, multiple FBLA award winner recognized by the CEO of Publix, and he’ll bring his generational lens to the future of work.
  • Your Truly will be the Gen X representative.

Each of us has their own take and tactics for the era of AI. Come watch this online show and learn!

Find out more and register here.

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Developer Relations Hardware Reading Material What I’m Up To

Stuff that arrived over the weekend

Joey de Villa’s NetFoundry business card

A few goodies I’d ordered all arrived nearly at once on Saturday, and I thought I’d share them here.

Business card

A snapshot of Joey de Villa’s desk, showing two boxes of his business cards. One business card is raised so it is readable. Beside the boxes are a mechanical keyboard and a steel mug with a stciker on it that reads “Punch today in the face”.
New business cards! Tap to view at full size.

It’s been a while since I’ve had an honest-to-goodness business card, but since NetFoundry makes them available to employees and since a good chunk of my job is about making myself available to the public, I placed an order and received two boxes containing a few hundred cards in total.

These days, I tend to simply display my LinkedIn QR code on my phone when exchanging contact details with people, but I still like the old-school feel of giving someone a card (which just so happens to contain my LinkedIn QR code).

Book: Developer Relations Activity Patterns

Joey de Villa, smiling and holding up a paperback copy of the book Developer Relations Activity Patterns.
It arrived! Tap to view at full size.

Another thing that arrived on Saturday was my copy of Developer Relations Activity Patterns, written by Ted Neward, Scott T. McAllister, David Neal, and Chris Woodruff, and published by Apress, which is now an imprint of Springer Nature.

I know a couple of the authors. Way back in 2016, Ted reached out to me after I’d landed a developer relations job with SMARTRAC and wanted to see how they did developer relations. I also know David from my time at Auth0, because shortly after I joined, Auth0 merged with Okta, where David worked. In fact, to prepare for my technical interview with Auth0, my primary resource was David’s 2019 article in the Okta Developer blog, An Illustrated Guide to OAuth and OpenID Connect.

Since I’m now pretty much Supreme Developer Advocate at NetFoundry (I’m the only one; it’s a small, scrappy company that punches above its weight class), I figured the book would be useful.

Also, I have a policy of buying books written by people I know, as illustrated in the meme below:

Meme with title “When you tell someone about your book and they say ‘oh cool’ instead of buying it immediately.” Below the title is a cat wearing cool sunglasses and a gold chain necklace saying “That wasn’t very cash money of you”.
I try to be cash money all the time. Tap to view at full size.

You may have noticed that I bought the dead-tree edition instead of an electronic one. This also follows a rule of mine:

  1. If the content is ephemeral or likely to be outdated in a couple of years (or a couple of months, given the pace of change these days), get the electronic version.
  2. If the content is likely to be longer-lasting or seems timeless, get the paper version.

Also, it’s nice to get away from screens from time to time. I’ve carved out a little time each day to sit on the rocking chair on our front porch and read paper books, and  Developer Relations Activity Patterns will be one of them.

Teeny-weeny hard drive

Joey de Villa holding up his Lexar external drive side-by-side with his NetFoundry business card. Viewed from the top, they’re the same size.
Nice and compact! Tap to view at full size.

Between the RAMpocalypse brought about by AI data centers hogging all the storage chips and the war in Iran blocking off access to a large chunk of the world’s helium (it’s a key part of making high-end chips; see my earlier article for an explanation), SSD prices are climbing.

Fortunately, there was a very short-time deal for a two-pack of 2TB Lexar SL500 SSDs for about $400, so we placed an order so that Anitra and I could each have one. They arrived on Saturday, and they’re about the size of my business card!

Joey de Villa holding up his Lexar external drive side-by-side (and on its side) with his NetFoundry business card. The drive is quite thin!
Skinny! Tap to view at full size.