content, culture, and devrel w/ colby fayock

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Colby, let's get to people what they want. Who are you? Let's do it. What do you do and we'll go from there? Sure. So I'm Colby Feacak, as you've mentioned. I'm a senior developer experience engineer at Cloudinary, which is a media management platform, media management and delivery.

So day to day, I've been doing things like creating content, whether that's writing articles or creating videos for YouTube, or I'll be head zen in code all day. So it's a mix of those things, trying to help provide developers an easier way to learn awesome tools on the web. I love it and speaking in Brazil, which I love it. And then and then what's the conference in Brazil you're speaking out again? I'll be speaking at CityJS. It's in Sao Paulo, Brazil at the end of the month. Do you speak any Portuguese? Very little, very little. I'm trying. I always try, but it's so difficult, but I try.

That's awesome. Kylie, what's going on? It's great to see you this morning and and then Trey, it's always good to see you, sir. So Colby, I wanna dive in, man. And I would say, let's just, let's get to the first thing, which I think is a topic that you and I both passionate about is content. And then DevRel, right? DevRel, Dev Advocate, DevAvocado, whatever you wanna say, right? So first off, let's talk about the importance of content right now, and let's talk about as a job seeker, but then also as maybe a corporation and why you maybe need to consider DevRel moving forward. Sure. Should I just go into it or?

Yeah, I just go into it. It's just going to be all the thoughts and then if we get tracked, I'll bring it back. Sounds good. So yeah, we can break it down kind of into perspectives is if you're looking for a job and just writing or, you know, developing content personally. So from a job perspective, I mean, you're giving more material to show your perspective, employers as to what you know. And that might be simply just writing something down that you just discovered that you figured out that day. And that's going to be something that your player can go through and say, oh, hey, I can see that they're actively learning.

That's awesome. I want somebody who's trying to actively learn on my team. You know, looking at it from a different perspective, you know, from just a self improvement, you know, it's by writing it down or creating videos or whatever you're doing by creating that content. You're also helping reinforce your learning. So by writing that down, you're kind of making your mind go that extra mile to kind of make sure that you understand that concept. And on top of that, if you ever forget about it or want to loop back, you can see all your writing and just look at your content to see, to get a refresher, right?

So there's a lot of great things to that come out of kind of creating content, writing, blogging, whatever it is. And I feel like people too, I feel like people in their heads make things more than what they need to be, right? So for example, like networking, right? And that's why I've been so big on this show about learning how to network, how to network virtually, which is kind of just liking and commenting on people's stuff. I mean, that's kind of what networking is now, and this digital age is just engaging on social. What, what, break it down for me, content. Like, what is it?

I mean, I have my thoughts, but I wanna hear it from you. Like, what's bare bones? Like, someone's watching just like, great, we're talking about content again, what is it? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Content can really be anything. And I think it also kind of depends on what, what kind of content. So I specialize in educational content. So you can really think of anything that's going to help somebody learn something. Content can simply be a tweet. It can be just writing something down for somebody to see on social networks. But then you talk about the more substantive, the bigger pieces of content, which might be an article that could come from a tweet.

Maybe you spurred an idea, or maybe you did a Twitter thread that you're converting into a blog post after you kind of fleshed out your ideas. but it's really anything, any piece of, I wanna use the word content again, but it's something that you can share and like give others information, yeah. And I think too, so then let's talk briefly about the role of DevRel, right? So I've had a few DevRel folks on here on the show, Ali Spedil being one of them, the goats, when it comes to content. I've also had Demetrius Clark on the show as well. He's awesome. You know, I And my misconception with DevRel was I thought y'all didn't code and I brought that up to Ally and Ally was like no No, no, no, no, she goes I probably code more now than I ever have so can you talk about what DevRel is in your eyes?

Because I don't think there's a wrong answer but then why companies why should companies consider this position moving forward? Sure, so I'm gonna give you kind of two perspectives like because I have my personal thoughts on it But also, it really depends on the company because different companies have different needs. And maybe they also have a developer relations team where they see different people doing different things depending on their strengths. So maybe somebody might be doing full time good. Maybe somebody might be doing full time content. So to start off, it is very team based. That said, I really am on the page of having somebody that can do kind of all the things in one way or another.

Of course, everybody has their strengths as to what they can kind of excel at. But being able to express your thoughts on things like articles, like blogging, or being able to create maybe even simple demos, just something that can show conceptually how it's working in the code. Being able to do all those things as a mixture really helps to provide that educational means of helping people learn the tools. And honestly, having that coding experience also helps because you can kind of empathize with people for what they're going through when they're trying to learn something. So it's really kind of giving you that, you know, actual real perspective when you're trying to help people learn.

And why do you think there's been such a boom lately? Right? Cause I mean, I feel like, you know, I feel like I didn't start hearing about dev-rail rolls up until maybe a few years ago. Now I think I saw a Twitter thread yesterday where there's actually people, it's hard to find people like this. I mean, can you talk about what's led to maybe the explosion of DevRel? Sure. I feel like it exploded a little bit along the lines of the pandemic. I don't know if there was a direct correlation to being able to- Hey, I'm glad you said that. Yeah. Like, it might have just been a coincidence, because maybe it's a little bit about how you can kind of, more often than not, you'll see DevRel's kind of be able to work wherever they want, as opposed to some software engineer roles, like, you really need to be at the office.

So maybe that correlates a little bit. But generally speaking, it is kind of an attractive position, right? Because I think one of the mindsets that people have, which might not always be true, is that you can kind of just do it everyone. And it is true that I have a lot of flexibility for what I do, but I have a lot of focus for what I'm doing. And of course, what I'm doing needs to ultimately hit those goals of helping people learn. And whether that's with Cloudinary, the product that I work for, or just generally helping people learn how to do cool things with the web.

You know, that's ultimately the goal, right? So it's not like I'm just kind of going out there doing anything that I want every single day. Right. Now that makes sense. Yeah. I think the power of content and the explosion of it was really kind of fueled by COVID because it really forced us into a virtual world, right? I think, you know, I talk to people all the time about people like well onsite, offsite, I'm like, listen, at the end of the day, like tubes out of toothpaste, like we're gonna be mainly remote from here on out. I think there's companies forcing the issues and that's fine, that's their prerogative, I understand that.

But I think companies realize that they need another mode of marketing, than just maybe like swag for conferences. Or maybe, you know, YouTube pre-roll banner ads, right? Right? Like, like, I think there's been a need for that. And I think that came out of COVID as well. So I agree with you. A few more people to again, Dominic, it's great to see you Victor, given the love for everybody. I love it. Thank you. Si, what's going on in Erica? It's always great to see you girl. So I want to move to the next thing to and about just kind of just tips for the job seekers, right?

Because I want to hit, you know, talk, talk about job seekers real fast, and then we'll wrap it up with kind of some culture leadership questions. What, what are you seen right now in the job search, man, when it comes to, you know, maybe people that are struggling, maybe some stories that in your network that you've heard, maybe just kind of give an overall lay of land of what you're seeing and maybe some advice to people right now. Sure. So generally speaking, I've seen a lot of success where people kind of make themselves their own developer advocate. And what I mean by that is they go out there and they create content.

It doesn't matter if it's something that's going to blow up all over social. It doesn't matter if it's perfect. It's really just getting your mind down on a digital piece of paper, writing down some content. Again, it's giving you more fuel and more material for being able to show those prospective employers. But a lot of these employers, it's not that they go to the social media and say, I want the top followers. Of course, some probably do that. But what they're really looking for is they want those people who are eager to learn. Consider yourself or consider you against all the other candidates. If they have two candidates that are about the same and one is actively showing that they're learning and really just trying to grind it out and they're showing all of that, how do they know that the other person isn't like that, right?

So they're going to choose the person that's actively showing what they're doing because there's more evidence that they're going to make a successful hire, right? I say it all the time. I say it all the time to people. It's like, listen, you can be, and I hate this, right? Cause some people are like, well, I don't want to play the game. Cause it is a little bit of a game, right? I mean, It absolutely is. I'm, you know, some people like, so I, so the guy moved up here to do music with, with the Nashville. So I moved to Nashville to do music and then I ended up in Tech Recruiting Go figure.

But, but, but he and I were hanging out the other night. He's still doing music. He's essentially made it for all intents and purposes, right? That's what he does full time. And he, uh, and he was like, he goes, I'd rather not get famous than get famous by using TikTok. That's hilarious. And, and, and if you knew him, I mean, this guy hates the frills. He hates, he's very low ego. Like just doesn't like playing the game, which is fine. I get it, but also too, it just depends what your angle is. And so I'm not going to sit here this morning, Colby. I'm knowing you the briefly, the brief, you know, I've known you.

I'm pretty sure you're not going to be this person as you have to do it this way. But if you do do it that way, I think you're going to separate yourself a ton. For sure. It's all about that separation of how you can differentiate yourself from the other candidates. And I think there's different levels of playing the game, right? Like I'm not here saying that everybody needs to go out and become a TikTok star. There's certainly something there. But what I'm just saying is just have a personal blog. You can use to see it except for when you link it to your employer, right?

Like it doesn't need to be popular content. It just needs to be something that's there to help them learn more about you. Absolutely. Uh, question comes in from Dominic this morning. Um, question to our speaker. How much does consistency play into getting your content noticed? Obviously have my thoughts here. Go ahead. Yeah. So I, I think it also depends on your goals, right? Like being consistent really helps for building an audience, in my opinion, um, where people are going to be able to see that you're consistently putting something out, they're knowing that you're actually trying to do that. From a job seeker perspective, I might not have the, like I don't know for a fact, but I would say it probably doesn't matter as much because really they're coming in and looking at you through that time that you are applying, right?

So they're not necessarily saying, hey, I see that this person is posted every single week. They're more so looking at what you wrote and why you wrote it, that kind of thing. So I think it depends on the goals, right? Yeah. And I totally agree with that. Dominic, I mean, my two cents, even though this question wasn't targeted at me, I'm still going to answer it though, is I think the more consistent you can be the better. Now, I'm not saying you have to have a YouTube channel as beautiful as as Colby's, right? I mean, literally I checked it out. That thing is beautiful, thumbnails on everything.

like, dude's got a pristine YouTube profile, right? I'm not saying you have to do that. What I'm saying is, I think once a day, right? Because what I told my dad, so my dad is in the restaurant industry, he quit his job with 25 years. He called me and he goes, how do I find a job? Because last time I looked for a job tailor, there was no internet. I was like, oh boy. So you know what I told him, Colby and Dominic, I said, have one conversation today. just with a straight, just with someone in your network, can be a stranger, mutual acquaintance, whatever, just one.

I would apply that principle to content. Post once a day, just once, LinkedIn once a day. Twitter is its own other animal. We can talk about Twitter and other conversation if we need to. That thing is like a babbling. So I consider LinkedIn like a lake when it comes to content, right? So like a lake, like if you put a raft on the lake, you're gonna move, but you're not gonna move a lot, but you're gonna move. That's how I view content on LinkedIn. You can throw one piece of content on LinkedIn today and it's for the most part going to stay and it's going to move a little bit, but people are going to see it for the most part.

Twitter, Twitter is like a babbling brook. Right. That thing, it just keeps going down. So you have to put out a lot of content. So if you're starting to get into the content journey, I would say LinkedIn from the first and foremost, just because it sits there a little bit more, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts too. I think that's super valid. That all makes a lot of sense. And, you know, I think in addition to just generally, like, because I was thinking more along the lines of audience building, right? Where like maybe your goal of that consistency is just showing yourself that you can do it, that you can create that habit and have yourself doing it consistently, or just being able to have more content out there might hit a different network and might see somebody else on LinkedIn that we'll see that and want to bring you on the team because they saw that.

Yeah. I will tell you this for those of y'all who are watching, I've never spoken to an individual who has started a content journey and has regretted it. It's always scary getting over that first bump, you know, getting that first piece of content. Yeah. If you look at my very first video, I was scared to do that. I would love to see it. I would love to see it. And I showed all my friends and I'm like, please tell me that I'm not going to become a meme off of this video. And you know, it wasn't so bad. Once I got it out there, you know, it's not so bad.

So just push yourself to get over that first article or first whatever you're putting out. Yes, 100%. So as we not wrap up, but get into the last part of things. So Colby, talk about maybe your experience with some leadership stuff. So for me, one thing doing this show every morning with IT individuals across the country, from ICs to senior level leadership, one thing that I've realized is culture in tech is broken. I think for an industry who talks a ton about acceptance and diversity and thought and all that jazz, there's a lot of toxicity as well that comes with it. I wanted to first, can you go over kind of set the stage a little bit about just any sort of leadership team lead building that you've done in the past?

So right now, I'm not in necessarily a leisure position, but my previous role, I was a UX lead and a tech lead project to project for a small software engineering team. And really what I was doing is driving the project forward, working closely with the product managers to make sure that we're hitting our goals for our client and able to organize the work for the rest of the team. But it's something that I care deeply about because I'm the kind of person that not only is going to try to help multiply the team because for me that's really what's about multiplying the rest of the team.

But I'm also gonna be down there in the grind and really helping drive the project forward as an engineer because that's ultimately what I love to do. Yeah, and what would you say, I mean, at least even recently too, what's some of your suggestions right now, man? just for companies, organizations right now, now is the time for you to speak freely and it go on the record of, I don't know, maybe some things you're seeing organizations that people should be doing and we can talk about remote work. I mean, I'm kind of open to kind of what you've been seeing and what we can jam on that.

Yeah, I think one of the big things that people really need to consider is good work, life balance. And that's becoming even more critical for people working from home because it can be very easy to go over those hours for the week. And if you're an employer that's going to celebrate that, that's not a good thing, because you're ultimately going to burn out your employee, they're gonna become unhappy and they're going to leave, or they're just going to become unproductive because they're unhappy. You wanna keep your employees happy, and that means making sure that they're going to have their own time to enjoy their life.

Yeah, what do you think? I mean, are there some things you've kinda put in place for maybe yourself or your team to help with work-life balance, because there are some things that I've been trying to put in place as well for me. Yeah, it's something I've had to kind of overcome over the years, because I definitely used to be that person that would accidentally overwork. And like one of the things, for instance, that I've done is using Slack, I set work hours and on my calendar. I have work hours set anywhere that I possibly can that I'm going to be receiving communication and those work hours should be respected by your employer.

And if not, there needs to be a larger conversation. But for instance, with Slack, I would get anxiety from receiving Slack messages at night, thinking that I need to answer them. And of course, I didn't have to, but seeing that, I'm like, I should probably do that. But now they'll see that and maybe I'll see it in the morning because they know it's not important. They're just trying to get their thoughts out there. Or if it is important, you know, they'll ping me. I think you can ignore which, you know, people don't do unless it's actually important. So being able to kind of have those controls in place really helps eliminate those notifications that are just going to give you anxiety and eat into your evenings.

You know, I'm kind of curious, have you dealt with that with content creation? Because I think I've dealt with a little bit of that too, with the at's, the comments, the mentions. Have you struggled with that at all? Because I know I have with like trying to feel like indebted to catch up with every I mean like literally I try to comment on everybody who comments on this show right to let them yeah want them to be hard do you struggle with that as a content creator? Absolutely and like I'm not big enough that it's become kind of like completely out of hand but for instance like I don't get for my Twitter notifications on my phone for instance like I really only get notifications for DMs otherwise I completely ignore everything.

And I think it's, you know, in the world where everything is notification based and push notifications, it's, I think it's important to make sure you try to limit what's getting pushed into your life. Otherwise it can overwhelm you and it's just going to eat all your time. But I, you know, I try to keep up with things, you know, it's, it depends on the day, depends on, you know, if something blows up or not. But it's definitely something that you need to kind of keep track on and not let it overwhelm you. I love that. And so I've done the same. So I've turned off all notifications, all push notifications for all social media.

The only push notifications I keep my phone is Slack and my email. And then, but one thing I've done recently is because the wife and I've had a conversation about it is I've now set my entire phone to do not disturb at 6 p.m. Nice. Nice. That's a good point. So basically just everything shuts down at 6pm on my phone. So I have to, so I'm not getting things on my watch or anything like that, which could distract me from conversation. So I think it's incredibly important and I'm glad you brought that up. And I think that's something for, especially for organizations moving forward, working more remote, I think respecting office hours, I, you know, even for me as a leader, I lead a team of seven.

you know, there are times where like I was messaging like a group and one of the individuals like hey so and so is on vacation We probably need to like stop messaging On this group and I was like oh shoot you're right So I think if you can also get a team to buy into that to hold you accountable I think that I think that's incredible as well for sure And like there's two like I have two kind of big thoughts around that like the first of all I kind of mentioned is If it's important enough that they need to message you at night and and they're gonna get that message to you.

They're gonna call you, they're going to force that notification through. So there really shouldn't be anything important day to day enough that they have to message you in the evening, right? So that's why snoozing those notifications should be okay, setting those work hours. And at the same time, you don't wanna, you need to really consider your employment as a business deal. Like as much as like, I've personally invested myself in every company I've been in and now for better or worse, like you need to also realize that it's a business, right? like you don't want to burn yourself out and ruin some potentially critical years of your life for a business that sees that as a business relationship, right?

So you want to make sure that you really pay attention to yourself and avoid burning out. Absolutely. So the question, I've been meaning to ask this question now for a little bit, and I keep forgetting and I pop back into my brain now, I want to go back to content creation and the job search. In my opinion, and you can, you can, you can agree disagree, it's totally fine. I won't get mad at you, I promise. In my opinion, I think you should stop applying to job postings, easy applying, and you should be focused on content creation and networking on social media. And I think you're going to find a job twice as fast.

Fully agree. You know, I'd love to say that, like, I love to think that that's not going to be the case only because I hate seeing where just because somebody has a million followers, that means that they're automatically a better candidate, right? Because that's not the case. So, like, I wish there was a better way, but that's absolutely true. Like, the networking, like, that's how I got my job at Cloudinary, because I reached out to the person who leads DevRel, and we started chatting. And, Like he had no idea who I am, but I talked to him about my experience, talked to him about how, you know, I'd fit into the role and all the other job postings that I submitted, they either got ignored or they...

Hold on a quick. So you found this job by Halogen? I DM'S the person on Twitter. That's it? That's it? Yep. That's it. Do you play a lot on LinkedIn? Do you play a lot on LinkedIn or not? Or is Twitter kind of your baby? Obviously I don't, Twitter's really more where I'm kind of focused on. I just, I, I, I, I tried to avoid overwhelming myself with the different channels and Twitter's just kind of been easier for me to manage. 100%, 100%. Samantha, it's great to see you this morning. I love your profile picking that pink background. All right. So Ken comes in. What's up?

Ken, a long time ago I read a story from an engineer that was hired by Fog Creek after working on another tech firm. The thing they noticed immediately was the work stopped at 5, 5.30, and it was not a good look to push yourself and work beyond that time. The company culture established that aspect of work life balance. You know, there are, I have heard comments recently that you can't build culture remotely. This is how you build culture remotely. It's not hard, but it's intentionality. And that's what's hard for a lot of people Colby. I'm interested in your thoughts because culture remotely Have you worked more remotely most of your career or not?

Not most my career, but probably the last Four or five years. Okay, so what what are your thoughts and we can wrap up on this topic? Just just maybe some tips and tricks that you've seen with good healthy remote culture. I mean that there's a fantastic example, right and I just want to like Like some of the companies that have that like might be a little bit privileged to be able to have that right. But if your work is kind of pushing you outside of those bounds, it should be a conversation that you should start to have. Like talk with your company about that as those things are valuable and kind of explain why those are valuable.

They'll ultimately get more productive people out of that. But generally for building remote cultures, I think it's very important to still try to connect people. Because in my opinion, all the successful roles that I've been in is being able to connect to my teammates and be able to collaborate with them more because it builds better trust between everybody. So maybe that means whenever you're on a video chat, turn on your video. I know we all don't want to get out of our jammies to have a chat with somebody, but there's so much value in being able to put that face on something and having that conversation with somebody in real time.

respecting people's work schedule. And that might mean that you might have to pay a little bit more attention to the person's snooze notifications, right? But trying to respect each other is also going to provide that trust. And I think, you know, I said trust twice. I think that's a big part of it, right? It's building trust with your teammates. And ultimately that culture is going to kind of trickle out as other people start to see how that's really what you're trying to build. Yeah, I mean, my thing with trust is that you're always, you start with trust with me, right? Like I'm not one of those, I'm not one of those guys like, you have to earn my trust.

No, that's stupid. First off, ain't no one got time for that. And two, like I just don't, I just don't work that way. And so for me, like your trust is there and then you just erode it away if you want to, right? Cause I think everyone starts at 100% with me. I think that's fair. I wouldn't say everybody starts at 100. Like I'm gonna ultimately give people the benefit of the doubt, but, you know, there's definitely relationships. Like you build more trust beyond that as you're building the relationships with people. When you start to be able to know who you can rely on and who you'll unfortunately can't, right?

Yeah. I love that. I love that. Um, Samantha, absolutely. They go using Canva. I dig it. Yes. It looks fantastic. Um, all right. So Colby, Tom flies when we're having fun, we're already hit 30 minutes. So can you any last little bit of nuggets, gems? I mean, I always like to leave like the last minute or two for the guests to kind of maybe riff on something that we didn't cover. Sure. I mean, I think ultimately, like one of the big things we were talking about is really getting yourself out there and content is a fantastic way to do that because you need to differentiate yourself and show why you're going to be able to better candidate.

These employers, they have limited amount of information about you. Sometimes it's literally just that one page resume, right? So the more fuel and ammunition you have to put into that, that hiring pool is going to just increase the chances that you're going to succeed. I love that. I love that. All right, y'all. Well, thanks again. Colby, stay home real quick as we end. So I can say a proper goodbye to you. But y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us. Say go care with Colby. Oh, Colby, last question for you. What's with the figurines and your profile pick? I used to work at a company called ThinkGeek years ago.

And it was an e-commerce company that did geeky stuff. So one of those things were those Star Wars plushes and they used their employees as the models. So I was a model for those plushes. I love the pictures, so I just kept it as my profile. It's a fantastic thing. So go connect with Colby. He's got much of Star Wars thing in the jiggers. He's hugging, which is fantastic. So Colby, thanks again. Thank you. You all listen, connect with each other, right? And I would connect with every single person on this chat. There have been a lot of people on this chat. Go connect with them, send them a DM, telling those great to see them this morning.

And you know what? That's how you network right there. Just a simple, hey, it was great to see you this morning. Also again, render, go check it out. GC2.0, I'll be there. Also, react Miami. If anybody's gonna react Miami three weeks, I'm gonna be there. It's just gonna be lit. Very, very excited about that. And then, cool. We've got people coming in and you'll want to thank you again. I can't, I love you all. Yeah, thank you. Make sure to thanks, Gwen. All right, y'all, you have a great one tomorrow. My guest failed, so it's just me tomorrow morning, 9.30 a.m. Central. I'll see y'all in the morning.

We'll talk about, I don't know if something, but it'll be great. All right, y'all, take it easy, peace. See you, everybody. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, and I am very grateful, because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes, and I myself rarely finished an entire episode, so I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it.

So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T. Dustin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.