Most people would probably respond to these “Menthole XXtreme” Dude Wipes with these responses:
But my first thoughts were:
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.
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.
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:
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.
Happy Saturday, everyone! Here on Global Nerdy, Saturday means that it’s time for another “picdump” — the weekly assortment of amusing or interesting pictures, comics, and memes I found over the past week. Share and enjoy!
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, July 13 through Sunday, July 19!
This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:
✅ When the event will take place
✅ What the event is
✅ Where the event will take place
✅ Who is holding the event
How do I put this list together?
It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list?
I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
It’s been announced on the Claude support site: access to Fable 5 has been extended to July 12!
Tuesday, July 7th, 2026: If you’re on Claude Pro (the $20/month plan), Claude Max (the $100/month plan), or Claude Team ($25/user/month for Standard, $150/user/month for Premium), it’s your last day to use Claude Fable 5 bundled within your existing subscription limits. Starting tomorrow, you’ll need metered usage credits to get your paws on that sweet super-inference.
I suspect a lot of power users are going to be mainlining Fable 5 today; I myself will be availing myself of it via NetFoundry’s team plan (hey, if a company offers a perk, you use it!).
If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas for what to do with Fable 5 on this last day, I have suggestions:
In the spirit of “meta”, I also asked Fable 5 what one should do on the last “free” day of Fable 5. Its answers:
I also asked for some of the answers to be impractical and humorous. Its answers:
Happy Fable 5 Day!
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.
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!
Happy Saturday, everyone! Here on Global Nerdy, Saturday means that it’s time for another “picdump” — the weekly assortment of amusing or interesting pictures, comics, and memes I found over the past week. Share and enjoy!
