DevRelCon, Adult Summer Camp, and My First Time Speaking

There’s something about DevRelCon that feels a little like adult summer camp. It’s immersive,...

There’s something about DevRelCon that feels a little like adult summer camp.

It’s immersive, social, and finite. For a short time, everyone gathers in the same place to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and build relationships. Then, poof almost as quickly as it began, it’s over.

If you’ve attended before, you get to reconnect with familiar faces. At the same time, every DevRelCon brings opportunities to meet new people and discover new perspectives. That combination: reunion and introduction is part of what makes the experience so special.

This year was especially meaningful for me because it was my first time speaking at DevRelCon.

Ideas I’m Still Thinking About

The conference covered many of the questions currently shaping developer relations and developer experience.

The session, "Agent Led Growth: How to get Claude Code to pick your Dev Tool” explored a challenge that feels increasingly urgent. As developers begin using AI tools to discover products, evaluate options, and solve problems, our existing approaches to content and discoverability may need to change.

I also enjoyed “Developer Marketing Is Not a Four-Letter Word” The title alone captures a tension many people in developer relations will recognize. DevRel often works alongside marketing while trying to maintain credibility, usefulness, and genuine relationships with developers. That makes conversations about the relationship between the two disciplines particularly valuable.

Another highlight was the closing keynote called "Developer First = Agent First". We’ve spent years improving the experience of humans using documentation, APIs, and developer tools. Now, we also need to consider how AI agents encounter and interact with those same systems. It’s a developing area, and I expect it will become an increasingly important part of how we think about DX.

The conference also created space for connections outside the formal sessions with unconference sessions. I particularly appreciated the job and mentor board. It was a simple but thoughtful way to make opportunities visible and help attendees turn 2 days of conversation into longer-term support.

From Knowledge Bases to Decision Systems

My talk was titled “Stop Building Knowledge Bases. Build Decision Systems Instead.”

The premise comes from an issue I’ve spent a lot of time researching and thinking about: giving someone more information doesn’t necessarily help them make a better decision.

Organizations invest significant effort in building knowledge bases. They collect documentation, FAQs, policies, guides, and internal expertise. The result may contain everything a person needs—but still leave them asking:

• What applies to my situation?
• Which option should I choose?
• What should I do next?
• What tradeoffs am I making?
• How do I know whether this answer is trustworthy?

A knowledge base can tell someone what is known. A decision system should help them use that knowledge.

That distinction matters because people rarely seek information simply for the sake of possessing it. They’re usually trying to accomplish something. They need to select an approach, troubleshoot a problem, understand a constraint, or decide on a next step.

When we optimize only for storing and retrieving information, we leave the hardest part of the work to the user: interpreting that information in context.

Decision systems go further. They connect knowledge to goals, constraints, tradeoffs, and actions. Instead of treating success as “the user found a document,” they ask whether the user was able to move forward confidently.

Finding Community Around the Problem

Sharing these ideas at DevRelCon felt great. Speaking gave me an opportunity to bring together work I’ve been developing over time and present it to a community that understands the complexity of the problem.

The most rewarding part, though, was what happened around the talk.

People came to me with questions, examples, and experiences from their own work. I met others who are wrestling with the same issues and thinking about how we can design systems that do more than return information.

Those conversations reminded me why speaking at conferences matters. A talk isn’t only a finished idea being delivered to an audience. It can also be an invitation:

Here’s a problem I care about. Who else is thinking about it?

At DevRelCon, I found many of those people.

Until Next Time

Conferences can sometimes feel like a blur of talks, introductions, and hurried notes. What I’ll remember most about DevRelCon is the sense of shared curiosity.

For two days, we created a temporary community around developer relations, developer experience, AI, documentation, marketing, mentorship, and all the questions connecting them.

Then adult summer camp ended. Everyone packed up their ideas, exchanged promises to stay in touch, and returned to their everyday work.

I left grateful for the opportunity to speak, energized by the conversations that followed, and even more interested in helping people move from simply finding knowledge to making better decisions.

Until next time.