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?
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.)
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?
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.