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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!