podcast

Jen Aprahamian is passionate about developer education put her extensive experience as a software engineer but also as CTO of her own startup and used to empower uh developers at big companies like  Netflix and Twitch.

Building developer communities need a whole strategy

When working on a SaaS product, most companies consider building developer communities at a later stage. Jen emphasizes that educating your developers around your product is a long term game that requires a lot of energy and consistency.

She said: "If you have a developer facing product like a B2B product like what twilio does and you want people to be able to use it very quickly and you want them to have as minimal friction as possible in being able to use what you've built and documentation is one step but There's so much more that you can do besides documentation. You can have effective code samples. You can run in person classes and workshops. You can do webinars. There's lot of different ways to reach people and so it becomes education at scale."    

The secret to overcoming productivity bottlenecks

Developers face productivity challenges on a daily basis.  Exposure to distraction is often the primary reason. Jen explains:

"For a while when I was working as a developer, I actually would turn off my Slack I would just sign out of it entirely until I needed to check something which I'm sure drove my manager crazy, but I had to because otherwise I would never keep a focus zone and it's because they're just too many things to look at. I think you just tapped into something very crucial. Right which is the manager. Like that's the biggest thing like especially for developers. Like what if my magic shoes out to me and like I'm not answering her they had all these scenarios, but I think there is a trooper. Communication there, because you know, I don't think if you tell your manager. Hey, this is how much is this killing my productivity and

I'm wasting this many hours into doing things. It's better to organize our communication unless there's an emergency like they will see themselves. Like it's to benefit everybody in the team the manager and yourself as a developer and I think is very very crucial."

Listen to the full episode with our CEO Emna Ghariani on your favorite podcast platform.