InfoQ Developer Marketing Newsletter (Quarterly)

InfoQ Trends Report 2023; A Look Inside our Practitioner-Driven Editorial Model; The Most Popular Webinar Topics and Content of 2023

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 17:55:21 GMT

InfoQ is delighted to announce a new two-day conference, InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2024, taking place June 24-25, 2024. This event is designed to help senior developers navigate their immediate development challenges, focusing exclusively on the technical aspects that matter right now.

Exhibitor and sponsored speaking slots are available. Email sales@devsummit.infoq.com for more details.

The InfoQ Trends Reports 2023 eMag

As a B2B marketer, it’s important to stay abreast of the ever-evolving technology landscape, software development trends, and organizational practices. The 2023 InfoQ Trends Reports eMag not only highlights key software trends from the past year, it also provides a lens through which you can plan your 2024 marketing and product roadmaps.

Gain insights into topics such as hybrid working, monoliths vs microservices vs moduliths, platform engineering, large language models (LLMs), and the state-of-the-art within the Java ecosystem.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

QCon London 2024 (April 8-10) Sponsorships Still Available

Entering its 18th year, QCon London is the perennial conference for senior software engineers, architects, and technical team leads to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation in the software industry.

Some of this year’s QCon London track themes include:

Cloud-Native Engineering, hosted by Bilgin Ibryam, Co-author of “Kubernetes Patterns,” Principal Product Manager @Diagrid
Platforms, People & Process; Delivering Great Developer Experiences, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Java Champion and InfoQ News Manager
Data Engineering - Innovations and Emerging Trends, hosted by Sid Anand Chief Architect @Datazoom, Committer/PMC Apache Airflow
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability, hosted by Thomas Betts, Lead Editor for Architecture & Design @InfoQ
Architectures You've Always Wondered About, hosted by Cassandra Shum, Vice President of Field Engineering @RelationalAI
Securing Modern Software, hosted by Laura Bell Main, CEO @SafeStack

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available for QCon London 2024. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Case Studies

By Practitioners for Practitioners: A Look Inside the InfoQ & QCon Editorial Model - Daniel Bryant

InfoQ recently caught up with Daniel Bryant, a well-known DevRel Leader, Java Champion, and - for the past decade - a Cloud & DevOps Editor for InfoQ.com. Daniel is also InfoQ’s News Manager, where he helps to drive the site’s comprehensive coverage of key innovations and trends that professional software engineers need to know about.

Read the full interview

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2023

To help you gauge what software development leaders have been thinking about and reading over the past year, we’ve assembled a list of Top 10 Content published on InfoQ in 2023, based on page views:

By Practitioners for Practitioners: A Look Inside the InfoQ & QCon Editorial Model - Daniel Bryant

InfoQ — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 17:25:47 GMT

Hi Daniel, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, some of the different hats that you wear, and your professional journey thus far?

Hello, I’ve held various roles in my career, from academic to coder, from software architect to platform engineer, and from CTO to product marketer. I jokingly say I approach job titles with a Pokémon mindset: “gotta catch ‘em all!”

Looking back, however, I can see that there are three key themes that knit together my career choices: (1) I revel in constantly learning new things and exploring new problem spaces, (2) I enjoy helping people learn about and understand technology, and (3), I thrive as a generalist rather than a specialist.

In a nutshell, I like to “connect the dots” across a range of problems, people, and technology. Currently, I’m doing this as a product marketing and developer relations advisor to several startup organizations within the dev tooling and B2B developer platform SaaS spaces.

You’ve written for and spoken for a wide range of community sites, publications, and conferences. From what you’ve seen, what makes the InfoQ and QCon editorial model unique?

The most noticeable differences with InfoQ (and QCon) in comparison with other sites are the “by practitioners for practitioners” approach and a lean towards senior engineers and technical leaders. I’m obviously biased, but I think we strike the perfect combination of these two things.

Of course, as with any approach, this comes with strengths and weaknesses (otherwise known as “opportunities”!).

The strengths include our ability to spot trends emerging from people actually doing the work, e.g. we covered NoSQL, platform engineering, and the ML transformer architecture before many others did, and we were able to connect the dots on how these trends may impact the day-to-day lives of software engineers and architects.

The weaknesses, or opportunities, include not being able to cover every topic or event we would like. This is probably true for most news and education-focused organisations like InfoQ, but it’s especially noticeable for us as we don’t have any journalists or staff writers on the team. However, I’ll take this opportunity to say that we are constantly growing our team of contributors!

The InfoQ Trends reports seem to encapsulate InfoQ’s editorial mission to some degree. What are the Trends Reports and how do they aim to serve InfoQ’s readership?

The InfoQ Trends Reports are designed to help readers identify and track interesting technologies and trends over time. We act as “information Robin Hoods” and constantly scout new technologies. We also provide guidance on where we believe these technologies are heading and the required context for the successful adoption of techniques. This often translates into a recommendation (or not) for readers to incorporate these technologies and techniques into their current development plans and product roadmaps.

We aim to create a trend report for each core topic once a year (e.g. software architecture, Java, cloud, DevOps, AI/ML, etc), and we use Geoffrey Moore’s classic “crossing the chasm” model to track the “diffusion of innovation”. Things generally move from “innovator” and “early adopters”, and sometimes they cross the chasm to the “early and late majorities”. Depending on the risk profile of a reader’s organization, they can choose to adopt technologies from the lifecycle accordingly.

The InfoQ trends reports are typically our best-performing and most talked-about content, and they also are only opinion-type pieces we create and share publicly.

What makes InfoQ’s approach to ‘news’ different from other publications? What does the ‘news process’ look like on InfoQ and how does the team decide ‘what is important’?

As mentioned above, all of the content on InfoQ is created by practitioners, and this is our (not so) secret sauce!

Any contributor at InfoQ can submit story ideas and news leads via our issue tracking system, and topic leaders either approve or reject this. Anyone within our contributor community can also add comments to an issue. This way, there is a nice balance between leadership and the team selecting what stories are written up for the site.

Once a lead is available in our issue track, a contributor typically explores the respective technologies, learns more about the techniques, or reaches out to other experts in order to provide additional value over any coverage already available on breaking news sites. We aim to provide the “best, not (necessarily) first” coverage.

How can a B2B marketer get the attention of a highly time-constrained - and often suspicious of poor marketing - audience? What can marketers learn from the InfoQ approach to writing News? Are there any tips and tricks you can share that might help with writing marketing copy or product positioning?

I frequently recommend that marketers should be super clear on the goals they are looking to achieve. As part of this, they must understand their intended user persona (within their ideal customer profile) and define the metrics of success. Honestly, if they do these simple steps, they’ll probably be within the top 10% of marketing teams!

Once you have your goals, metrics, and personas clearly specified, the best thing you can do is to create content that authentically addresses the challenges identified.

For example, I really like what the NGINX marketing team did with their “Microservices March” campaign. They appeared to be genuinely excited to educate folks about the benefits and challenges of adopting microservices. The content was created by practitioners, who invested in building a community without being overly aggressive in marketing to the people who joined.

With over 310K subscribers, the InfoQ Software Architects’ newsletter provides a unique platform to reach both current and aspiring software architects. How would you describe the editorial vision behind the newsletter? What are some of the key topics and themes that are typically covered?

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed bootstrapping this project, and it’s amazing to see that this many readers have subscribed over the 75+ editions of this monthly newsletter.

The editorial vision is focused on providing deep coverage of a topic through the lens of a software architect. Each month we scour InfoQ and the Internet for the best content on the chosen topic, summarise this, and collate it into one easily digestible newsletter.

We’ve covered topics as diverse as frontend architectures, programming languages for the enterprise, cloud computing, leading teams, data engineering, and more, but all through the lens of senior software leaders.

We also regularly listen to feedback from readers, and this has helped shape both the topics covered and the blend of news and case studies covered in the newsletter each month.

At QCon San Francisco 2023, you assembled and led the “Platform Engineering Done Well” track. What goes into assembling a QCon track? What are some of the key challenges - and decision points - that a track host needs to make?

Assembling a track for QCon is always a lot of fun but also always a lot of work! The key decisions include the positioning and goals of the track. For example, my track was focused on platform engineering, but we wanted to cover the human/people aspects of this in addition to the technology.

Once I have the topics in mind, I then go looking for speakers. And I am always keen to make sure we have a track with speakers that have diverse representation, backgrounds, and thinking.

For anyone interested in a deeper dive into how I approach building tracks, I wrote more about this specific conference in a recent blog post.

Platform engineering has become a bit of an ‘umbrella’ term for some marketers, being used interchangeably with DevOps. What is platform engineering from your perspective, why is it important, and how does it relate to DevOps?

There’s a great meme about how DevOps is dead and all we need to do is build platforms using DevOps practices and tools. This is spot on!

I like to think of platform engineering as a subset of DevOps, focused on establishing practices, systems, and tools to enable software developers to code, ship, and run their applications successfully.

I’ve quite enjoyed watching the concept of platform engineering emerge, as it has given the industry a chance to reflect on important qualities of the platforms and tools we build to deliver software. I very much like the focus on self-service, product mindset, and systems thinking – and a lot of this is what the Team Topologies authors espoused for quite some time.

There’s the ‘people’ side to Platform Engineering and then there’s the ‘tools/tech’ side. How should B2B marketers think about introducing - and talking about - their platform engineering offerings to the software development community?

My advice is to focus on the goals and “jobs to be done” of their target users. If you understand the biggest pain point that your potential customers have and can map this to how your product genuinely will help them fix this, the sale should almost be automatic.

The next piece of advice is to always be authentic. Educational content should be created by practitioners, and all assets and copy should be produced as a collaborative effort between marketing and practitioners (engineers, DevRel, CS, SEs, etc). There’s a trope that developers hate marketing, but in my experience, it’s really that developers hate bad marketing.

Compared to other conferences that you’ve spoken at and attended, how is QCon’s audience different? How are the speakers different?

The biggest difference with QCon’s speakers and audience is the diversity of backgrounds and the levels of seniority. And all of the speakers are practitioners.

As QCon is a multi-track conference focusing on topics from architecture to coding to culture and methods, you will meet people from all (software development) walks of life. The majority of people attending a QCon are either senior practitioners or aspire to be in a senior role, and therefore the quality of conversations is super high.

You currently advise a number of startups on how to build highly effective DevRel teams. You were also previously Head of Developer Relations at Ambassador Labs for six years. How is the role of Developer Evangelist changing and evolving? How should companies think about DevRel in relation to other, more traditional ‘marketing functions’?

I’ve shared some initial thoughts on the evolution of DevRel early this year on my Avocado Bytes Substack.

One of the biggest changes we’re encountering now results from the end of the “zero interest rate policy (ZIRP)”. When funding was cheap, and VCs and private equity firms were deploying a lot of cash in search of higher returns, the focus for many companies was on growth at all costs. Over the last 18 months, we’ve very much fallen back into “measured growth” as a goal.

DevRel teams are typically well positioned to create the content “fuel” for the marketing team “engine”, and with the measured growth approach in mind, my advice is to approach content creation with an experimental mindset. Most of us are now doing “more with less”, and so we must be sure of the value each campaign provides. Create a hypothesis with well-defined metrics of success, test this, and either lean into or away from a campaign, depending on the results.

As a B2B marketing executive planning for next year, what are some of the key technology trends - and pain points faced by software engineers - that I should be paying attention to?

Most of us are still being impacted by the end of the ZIRP environment, and so focusing on trends that act more like “painkillers” as opposed to “vitamins” is my recommendation.

Security and observability-related trends tend to be less susceptible to budget cuts, as everyone needs to address the pain of being both secure and having the capability to understand what is happening in production.

That’s not to say there isn’t a budget for some of the more developer experience-related “vitamins” (which have a lot of overlap with platform engineering), but this will be harder to tap into.

With AI poised to disrupt everything under the sun, how do you see the media landscape evolving? How do you see AI impacting the roles of marketers, evangelists, and product management/marketing?

It really is early days here, and I assume a lot will change in the coming years.

The good news is that a lot of the mundane jobs and “boilerplate” work should be automated away with new and improved AI-infused tooling. The bad news is that it’s going to be ridiculously easy to create content.

The folks that will succeed here are those who can create content and campaigns that stand out against the increasing background noise of AI-generated content.

AI, ML, & Data Engineering Trends Report 2023; Growth Marketing Best Practices; QCon London 2024 Tracks Announced; InfoQ Top 10 Content

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 14:35:42 GMT

We are pleased to announce that the 2024 InfoQ and QCon media kit is now available for download. Here are some key updates:

QCon London 2024 sponsorships now open
Q1 webinar and InfoQ Live Roundtable dates available
Special 2024 pricing on InfoQ Topic Sponsorships

Download Now

AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report - September 2023

The InfoQ Trends Reports provide readers with a high-level overview of key topics, while helping the InfoQ editorial team focus on innovative technologies. Highlights from the September 2023 “AI, ML, and Data Engineering Trends Report” include:

Generative AI, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and GPT-4, has gained significant prominence in the AI and ML industry, with widespread adoption driven by technologies like ChatGPT.
Major tech players such as Google and Meta have announced their own generative AI models, indicating the industry's commitment to advancing these technologies.
Vector databases and embedding stores are gaining attention due to their role in enhancing observability in generative AI applications.
Responsible and ethical AI considerations are on the rise, with calls for stricter safety measures around large language models and an emphasis on improving the lives of all people through AI.
Modern data engineering is shifting towards decentralized and flexible approaches, with the emergence of concepts like Data Mesh, which advocates for federated data platforms partitioned across domains.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

Case Studies

Growth, Attribution, and AI - A Marketing Journey with Rosalind Lutsky

Rosalind Lutsky walks us through her professional journey as a B2B marketer - sharing examples of successful campaigns, marketing strategies, and key lessons learned - working at several, well-known SaaS companies. She identifies three key trends that she believes will change the marketing game: AI and its impact on SEO, attribution, and how companies define ‘growth.’

Read the full interview

QCon London 2024 (April 8-10) Tracks Announced; Sponsorships Available

Tracks for QCon London 2024 (April 8-10) have been published. Some of this year’s track themes include:

ChatGPT, Bard, Llama, Claude: What's Next in GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs), hosted by Hien Luu Sr. Engineering Manager @DoorDash
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability, hosted by Thomas Betts Lead Editor for Architecture & Design @InfoQ
Engineering Leadership for All, hosted by Tanja Lichtensteiger Director of Product Engineering @BBC
Data Engineering - Innovations and Emerging Trends, hosted by Sid Anand Chief Architect @Datazoom, Committer/PMC Apache Airflow
Cloud-Native Engineering

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are available for QCon London 2024. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

2024 InfoQ Webinar and InfoQ Live Roundtable Dates Now Available

(Note: November 30th is the last remaining webinar sponsorship for 2023. If you’d like to book this slot, please email sales@c4media.com)

2024 dates for InfoQ webinars and InfoQ Live Roundtables have been set.

InfoQ Webinars 2024

January 18
February 8, 29
March 21
April 11
May 2, 23
June 13, 27
July 25
August 15
September 5, 26
October 17
November 7, 28
December 12

InfoQ Live Roundtables 2024

January 25 - Sold
April 23
June 25
August 20
November 12

Email sales@c4media.com to secure your 2024 dates.

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q3 2023

To help you gauge what software development leaders have been thinking about and reading over the past three months, we’ve assembled a list of Top 10 Content published on InfoQ in Q3 of 2023, based on page views:

Growth, Attribution, and AI - A Marketing Journey with Rosalind Lutsky

InfoQ — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 16:48:13 GMT

In this interview, Rosalind Lutsky walks us through her professional journey as a B2B marketer - sharing examples of successful campaigns, marketing strategies, and key lessons learned - working at several, well-known SaaS companies. She describes some of the many challenges associated with growth marketing and how to tackle these through experimentation, working with the product team, and mentorship. Rosalind also identifies three key marketing trends that she believes will change the game: AI and its impact on SEO, attribution, and how companies define ‘growth.’

Hi Rosalind, can you tell us a little bit about your journey as a B2B marketing professional.

Absolutely! I actually got my start in marketing as a Copywriter at CircleCI. I knew I wanted to transition into SaaS, and I felt as if leaning into my strengths in writing/editing would give me the best introduction. And it certainly did in a lot of ways! Right off the bat, I was working on projects that spanned across different marketing disciplines – landing page and in-app copy for product marketing, technical blog content & culture pieces, incident response, email, webinars, ad copy, the list goes on. That role in particular really helped me learn the language of dev tooling which has carried through in every role I’ve taken on since.

After about a year working as a copywriter, I found myself spending a lot of my time working on lifecycle marketing (email nurtures, collaborative projects with customer support) and product-led growth, which was pretty new to CircleCI at the time. I loved that this new area of marketing let me flex skills in math, logic, and data analytics. Trying to figure out the behavioral signals that indicate growth and then turning that behavior into a conversation with a user was a really interesting challenge.

In my next role after CircleCI, I joined the team at Teleport. That was a fantastic opportunity for me to dive deeper into the demand gen side of marketing: setting up ad campaigns, experimenting with new channels, optimizing spend. I was lucky to have the guidance of an amazing marketing leader, Anadelia Fadeev, who was a mentor and partner in regrowing marketing at Teleport from the ground up. A major highlight in my career was being part of growing a full marketing team. We grew from a team of 2 (across all of marketing) to an immediate team of 5, eventually adding even more folks to demand gen and many others to the other wings of the marketing team. The massive leaps and bounds we were able to make on ads, email, website, and beyond was incredibly exciting and fun to be part of.

Joining Sym back in February, I was faced with even more greenfield than I’d experienced at Teleport. The whole go-to-market team consisted of just me (no other full time sales or marketing folks!) which led me to dive right into everything marketing – quickly growing from Head of Growth into the Head of Marketing there. The technical team at Sym has some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with, and it’s been an incredible learning experience growing a marketing engine from scratch.

What are some of the key lessons that you’ve learned as a Growth Marketing Manager at these companies?

I’d break it down into 3 main lessons:

Test test test. One of the hardest realities of working in growth marketing is that you have to try a lot of things - which means you have to be okay having a lot of things fail, too. That requires some serious expectation setting when you’re kicking things off. It also requires persistence, and a willingness to be wrong. You can’t come into a role expecting every strategy you’ve used before to work in a completely new circumstance. You have to be eager to try a lot of things (marketing channels, strategies, messaging, etc.) to find out what sticks.

Create a close relationship with the product. Some growth roles actually fall under the product team. The types of growth roles I’ve taken on have been more demand-focused, but even still, being in lockstep with product makes a huge difference. Not only are they a team of people with great domain expertise (I come from a non-technical background, so I always need to rely on folks with this sort of knowledge), but they can help influence the direction of the product. Where I’ve seen the most success is when you’re taking advantage of the learnings from product and putting it into growth strategies and using what you learn from growth to influence the product.

Lean on strong mentors, but don’t be afraid to pave your own way. This is general career advice, really, but something I’ve found extremely useful in growth roles in particular. I’ve talked to a lot of folks in various marketing roles and leaned on them for advice: CMOs, growth leaders, demand gen leaders, generalists, specialists, the list goes on. I recognize that my knowledge and experience is limited, and getting an outside perspective whether it’s on a specific problem you’re facing or about your career more broadly has been massive for me so far. That said, everyone is going to have a slightly different opinion. Going back to point #1, you have to be willing to commit to something and try it, even if it might fail.

Can you share any examples of past marketing strategies that have been most effective for you?

In dev tooling in particular, I find that a lot of marketing looks like finding ways to add value for your prospective users. You can’t just show what your tool does, you have to have a perspective and tap into your team’s knowledge. For instance, at Sym, we saw a massive jump in leads when we introduced an ebook on just-in-time access in AWS. This is a major use case for folks who come to Sym, and yet in the vast landscape that is AWS, it can be hard to find clear direction on how to implement JIT access well. Creating an ebook based on our team’s knowledge and experience (combined with external sources) and offering that up on our website and via ads caused a major jump in the volume of leads we received.

Can you share any recent successful campaigns or initiatives that have significantly impacted your product's growth or market positioning, and what were the key factors behind their success?

The first one that comes to mind is a campaign I worked on at Teleport. We were thinking through the types of companies that would get the most value out of our product (compliance-heavy, complex infra). We came up with a few verticals to run campaigns around, and I owned our fintech campaign. We saw a massive ROI from that campaign in particular. I’d attribute the success of that particular campaign to a few things:

First, we took a multi-pronged approach, we created a landing page, ran targeted ads, created a nurture campaign, and involved our SDR team.
Second, we let it run for a couple of months, giving it enough time to work.
Third, we followed through on tracking and attribution – it’s one thing to create a campaign and ship it out into the world, but it’s another to be thoughtful about tracking how it performs.

It may seem obvious, but tying revenue to marketing activities can be surprisingly difficult in practice. Making a concerted effort to follow through on that helped us learn more from the campaign and refine our strategy for the next one.

How do you identify emerging trends and adapt your marketing strategies to capitalize on them effectively?

This question feels especially poignant with all of the recent developments in AI. I think step #1 in staying up to date is to read: read LinkedIn posts from leaders you like, read newsletters or blogs that are informative (I particularly like MKT1 and Growth Unhinged from Kyle Poyar), and stay up to date on industry news. Going back to experimentation (and leaning on mentors!) I’d say seriously check out strategic recommendations, data, and tool suggestions from other leaders in the space.

That said, I do think we have a tendency in marketing especially to rebrand foundational marketing concepts. Being aware of what’s truly ‘new’ and what’s the same thing reframed is an important piece of the puzzle.

Software products often cater to diverse target audiences. How do you segment your marketing efforts to resonate with different customer segments, and what challenges have you encountered in this regard?

This is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult challenges in marketing. Getting your target audience exactly right is tough, and especially so when you have multiple segments/buyers you want to talk to at once. I’ve found the most success with:

1. Talking to your audience (your existing customers, prospects, etc.) to understand how they’re talking about the challenges they're facing and goals they’re working towards and…

2. Being willing to focus and iterate. You don’t want to go too small with your audience, but being willing to focus your efforts on a specific ICP is extremely helpful. That, and being willing to test new targeting, new messaging, new ad types, etc. until you see traction.

Could you share your approach to measuring the ROI of marketing efforts for software products? What KPIs and metrics do you find most valuable in assessing the success of a campaign?

My favorite way to measure the ROI of marketing is through SQLs (or an equivalent metric). Having a number that reaches beyond ‘marketing qualified’ I think is the key to making sure your marketing tactics are actually successful. Making sure your leads are good quality and paying attention to pipeline is crucial.

That said, specific KPIs and metrics are so dependent on the company stage. In the early days, I think the focus should be more on building: setting up the engine that will get you to a reliable ‘dollars in dollar out’ marketing motion. I’d say looking at guardrail metrics like website pageviews, inbounds, ad CTRs and CPCs, email opens/replies, etc. is always going to be important, but your quarterly goals will likely differ based on company stage.

In the context of software marketing, what role does content play in establishing thought leadership, and how do you ensure the quality and relevance of your content?

Content is huge, especially now. Being able to provide insight, perspective, and technical guidance is crucial in software marketing. With AI, we’re seeing a flood of (not great) content which certainly complicates things. I think, though, that there will be an even greater appetite for quality content as more repetitive content gets pushed out into the world (that, and quality AI tools that support the creation of good work, like Writer).

I think the relevance of your content depends on your goals. Are you trying to establish a founder at your company as a thought leader? Are you hoping to drive leads? Do you want to share product news? There are a host of goals that underlie the content you produce, and what’s relevant to your audience (and who makes up that audience) is hyper-dependent on those goals. In broad strokes, though, I’d say that making sure your content is technical enough for your audience is key, as is finding strong writers. Those writers can come from your internal team or you can lean on external folks (for instance, I particularly like working with the technical writing team at Wizard on Demand).

What emerging technologies or marketing trends do you believe will have the most significant impact on the software marketing landscape, and how is your company preparing for these changes?

Here are a few emerging technologies/marketing trends that I think will change the game:

Unsurprisingly, AI is a big one. Not only is it changing content, but it’s no doubt going to have a massive impact on SEO. I think using AI to enhance your work is going to be key for software marketers.
Second, I’d say attribution. Obviously, attribution isn’t new. But, I think there’s going to be an increased emphasis on collecting valuable, clean data throughout the marketing funnel. That, coupled with the push for increased privacy, will make for an interesting mix.
Lastly, the concept of growth. For a lot of tech companies, I think this means acknowledging the importance of self-serve and hiring people to support that motion. For other teams (where growth looks more like demand gen), I’d say it means creating much closer alignment between product and marketing teams.

As a company, being willing to embrace change, looking at new tools and ideas with a critical eye, and using new technologies to enhance, rather than replace creativity and ingenuity I think is the key.

Cloud & DevOps Trends Report 2023; Marketing at Early-Stage Startups; QConSF Tracks Announced; InfoQ Top 10 Content

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 15:30:10 GMT

DevOps and Cloud Trends Report 2023 - July 2023

The InfoQ Trends Reports provide readers with a high-level overview of key topics, while helping the InfoQ editorial team focus on innovative technologies. Highlights from the July 2023 “DevOps and Cloud Trends Report” include:

Cloud innovation has transitioned from a revolutionary phase to an evolutionary one, focusing on migrating and re-architecting workloads.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) may play a significant role in the domains of cloud and DevOps by addressing cognitive overload and supporting tasks like instant management, ticketing systems, and code generation.
Major cloud providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS have integrated AI into their products and services, showcasing the industry’s investment in AI technology.
Low-code and no-code domains are impacted by AI-based and ChatGPT-like products, offering collaboration opportunities between business users and software engineering teams.
Platform engineering is evolving toward simplification and value delivery, adopting a platform-as-a-service mindset.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

Marketing Trends

Stack Overflow 2023 Survey Results: How Professional Developers are Using AI Tools

With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, one of the big themes emerging from the Stack Overflow 2023 developer survey was how professional developers perceive and actually use AI across the development lifecycle.

Read the full article

Case Studies

The Art of Marketing at Early-Stage Startups: Brandon Hoe

Read the full interview

QConSF (Oct 2-6) Track Abstracts and Hosts Finalized; Few Sponsorship Spots Remain

Tracks for QConSF (Oct 2-6) have been published. Some of this year’s track themes include:

Designing for Resilience, hosted by Javier Fernandez-Ivern Staff Software Engineer at Netflix
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures, hosted by Sid Anand Chief Architect and Head of Engineering at Datazoom
Platform Engineering Done Well, hosted by Daniel Bryant Independent Technical Consultant & InfoQ News Manager
Modern ML: GenAI, Trust, & Path2Prod, hosted by Hien Luu Sr. Engineering Manager @DoorDash
Architecting for the Cloud

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Only a few sponsorships spots remain for QConSF 2023. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q2 2023

Stack Overflow 2023 Survey Results: How Professional Developers are Using AI Tools

InfoQ — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 18:03:22 GMT

Of the approximately 90K respondents to this year’s Stack Overflow 2023 Developer survey, 43K respondents participated in the professional developer series of questions, which marks a 16% year-over-year increase in professional survey respondents.

With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, one of the big themes emerging from this year’s survey was how developers perceive and actually use AI across the development lifecycle.

Professional developers use - and perception - of AI-assisted technology

The 2023 survey reveals that a significant portion of professional developers are utilizing AI tools in their development processes, with 44% already using AI tools, and an additional 26% planning to adopt them soon. However, of the 21 AI-assisted tools currently on the market, “a vast majority are just using the two popular products: ChatGPT (83%) and GitHub Copilot (56%),” according to Stack Overflow survey author, Erin Yepis.

While the ‘learning to code’ cohort of the survey is more actively using AI technology for software development, the numbers indicate that professional developers are less trusting of the tech’s accuracy, with “only 3% highly trusting of the results and 6% highly distrusting them.”

They survey also examined the adoption of AI tools through a global lens, revealing that perception and actual usage vary greatly across different parts of the world.

“Professional developers from India, Brazil, and Poland are most likely to use or plan on using AI tools as part of their development workflow—all responding at 70% or higher,” according to Yepis. Meanwhile, “UK, French, US, and German developers are more likely to say they don’t plan on using AI tools (responding at 36% or higher).”

With the ever looming fear of copyright infringement, constantly evolving GDPR laws and regulations, and limits to data access, professional developers in the US and EU are perhaps taking a more cautious approach when using large language models to aid in software development, according to the report.

AI in practice

While ChatGPT and Copilot certainly aren’t the panacea for rapid application development, AI technology is already a proven part of developer tooling, increasing productivity by handling many of the mundane tasks related to coding, debugging, and even monitoring (AIOps), freeing developers up to focus on the more creative aspects of software engineering.

When asked about their primary use cases for using AI tools today, “the overwhelming majority” of survey respondents indicated that they use it “to write code (83%) or debug code (49%).”

In terms of the perceived benefits of AI tools, 33% of survey respondents believe increasing productivity is the most important benefit, followed by speeding up the learning process, increasing efficiency, and improving accuracy in coding.

Additional highlights from the 2023 Stack Overflow survey

27% of respondents are 5-9 years into their professional careers.
Most Professional Developers report having CI/CD, automated testing, and DevOps available at their organization. 16% of organizations have AI-assisted technology.
49% of professional developer respondents report having Microservices within their organization
Over 60% report having a DevOps function in their organization
While PostgreSQL (49%) and MySQL (MySQL) were the top two databases used by professional developers, other databases that appeared in the top 10 list were MongoDB (26%), Redis (23%), and MariaDB (18%)
While AWS (48%) remains the most used cloud platform for all respondents (professional and non-professional), “you can see the inroads that Azure has with organizations—twice as many Professional Developers are using Azure compared to people who are learning to code (30% vs. 15%),” according to Yepis.
~14K AWS developers —a little less than half—want to develop in Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure next year.

The Art of Marketing at Early-Stage Startups: Brandon Hoe

InfoQ — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:01:31 GMT

InfoQ recently sat down with Brandon Hoe, VP of Marketing at Oxeye, to talk about some of the marketing challenges faced by software startups in the application security space. Having led four early-stage security startups himself, he emphasizes the importance of establishing market positioning, identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and developing the right messaging for your ICP. He highlights the benefits of working as an integrated revenue team (sales + marketing as one), why he’s eliminated the traditional notion of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) from his approach, and introduces a new industry podcast that he recently launched which showcases the personal stories of leading experts in the cybersecurity world.

Hi Brandon, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Oxeye?

I’m the VP of Marketing at Oxeye, and every day, I try to find ways to get the word out about how Oxeye eliminates 90%+ of the vulnerabilities that legacy application security tools find and report, so that developers can focus on writing code instead of fixing ‘vulnerabilities’ that don’t really exist. The claim seems incredulous until we have the opportunity to educate our potential customers about how we approach the problem. Taking this tack helps us to overcome the skepticism people have about the claims, while keeping the relationship mutually collaborative and respectful.

You’ve led marketing at four early-stage security startups. What has that experience been like? What are some of the biggest challenges of early-stage, startup marketing?

The early stages of a company’s life are its most important - it’s purely a matter of survival at that point, and that presents a very unique and dire challenge. The vast majority of early-stage companies have founders and leaders who don’t fully understand what marketing truly entails.

The natural inclination for most founders/leaders at this stage is to focus on the more visible marketing tactics - events and social media are generally the ones they gravitate to the most. But this typically happens before they’ve developed the foundations for effective marketing - going through the exercise of positioning themselves in the market, defining their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and developing messaging that resonates with their ICP. These are foundational activities that help increase the likelihood of success of any future marketing effort.

Another common misconception about marketing is that it’s like a spigot that automatically results in all the business a company can handle once it’s turned on. Marketing is a long-term activity, and its effectiveness builds over time. Since most early-stage startups have small budgets and large expectations for rapid growth, this can result in conflict or an erosion of trust between marketing and the primary stakeholders of the company.

Security has generally been an ‘after-thought’ for many software development organizations. More recently however, we’ve been hearing more about the idea of ‘shift-left’ security. Are organizations actually embracing this or is this an idea that’s just being touted by vendors?

The ‘shift left’ movement in application security has been a mantra for a number of years now, and the underlying principle - that the sooner you tackle security in the software development process, the better - is extremely sound. The challenge with shifting left is that to date, the tools that were created with the goal of shifting left and enabling developer-focused security creates a lot of noise, ultimately generating extra work for developers and security teams.

Digital marketing campaigns or exhibiting at events? What’s typically more effective for early-stage companies?

I’ll have to say the common marketing mantra - “test it!”. Without doing so, it’s impossible to say what works best for your particular situation, as the answer is dependent on the industry, your implementation of digital marketing, and other factors. Ideally, your event marketing would be supported by a comprehensive digital marketing program. Isolated marketing tactics aren’t nearly as effective as a comprehensive program where all marketing tactics support each other.

The AppSec space is quite crowded, with hundreds of companies clamoring for developer mindshare. How do you ensure that your message doesn’t get lost in all the noise?

Yes, it’s an incredibly crowded space, with a number of massive incumbents, and no shortage of new players!

In our particular situation, it’s a little bit easier to stand out because we can make claims that nobody else has been able to make before. There’s the main claim of reducing vulnerability lists by 90% and up, then the supporting claims that we can do so by focusing on exploitability, which is determined by accessibility of the vulnerability from the Internet (directly or indirectly) and whether a package is used at runtime or not, or is merely an unused artifact.

While our claims are unique, the challenge of getting the word out there and overcoming decades of inertia and skepticism about claims is something we are continually hacking away at.

One of the downsides of being an innovator is that you are tasked with the burden of educating the market about what’s possible. Dollars spent on education don’t provide nearly the same ROI as dollars spent on winning business from customers who are already well-informed about a novel approach or technology.

With that in mind, I try to market in a way that’s cost-effective, and respects our position as a seed stage company, and the current market dynamics. Constraints force creativity, and it’s a lot of fun to try to outmaneuver the competition without throwing loads of money at marketing.

As VP of Marketing you have a daily stand-up with your sales team. What are the benefits of this? What are some of the important feedback loops needed to help both teams - marketing and sales - be more successful?

We are joined at the hip with our sales team for a number of reasons. I consider myself the pipeline quarterback, and I need to understand the status of all the deals in our sales funnel and how we can successfully advance them. Most times, it’s purely in the hands of the sales team, and I merely provide ancillary support, but if there are occasions when I can do more (e.g. provide an introduction to someone I know who might be an advocate for us), I do so.

The primary benefits of being an integrated revenue team (sales + marketing as one) are that it provides an immediate feedback loop on what problems customers actually face (as opposed to what we believe they face), what messaging resonates, and to know definitively where people are learning about us. It also allows us to be in sync on what we’re saying, and to generate ideas collaboratively and create campaigns that are comprehensive and consistent across all touchpoints.

Marketers are often tasked with providing ‘sales-ready’ leads to their sales teams. What does it mean for a lead to be ‘sales-ready’? What are some of the challenges of arriving at a shared understanding of what this means across both departments?

I hate the word ‘leads’ because it’s inhuman, and antithetical to my philosophy about marketing, which is that we are trying to connect with people who can benefit from using our product. I prefer to use ‘potential customers’ instead. I know most people would consider it a matter of semantics, but the words we use have a tremendous impact on how we conduct ourselves. We try to do business in a way that feels more human and relationship-centered, not merely transactional. Yes, there’s a job to be done, and yes, that job is to grow our business, but we’re not interested in doing it in a way that feels devoid of humanity.

Because we’re a very early-stage startup, we’re focused on logo acquisition, and hence, our metrics reflect our goals. We’ve eliminated the traditional notion of marketing qualified leads, or MQLs from our approach, so in essence, all our potential customers are ‘sales-ready’. That means we only consider potential customers who have a need and a timeline (as opposed to a conventional budget, need, authority and timeline) in our measurements. This will change as we grow larger, naturally, but this is where we are today.

You recently launched a new cybersecurity podcast - The Storm and the Light - at Oxeye. Can you tell us a little bit about it? How does the podcast align with some of your marketing goals?

The description of The Storm and the Light encapsulates the goals of the podcast -

“The Storm and the Light dives beneath the surface to bring you the stories of people from the world of cybersecurity, shining a light on who they really are, and what made them the people they are today. Along the way, we will strive to understand our guests better, and glean lessons from their lives that might inspire us, and help us become better people and professionals.“

I felt that there was a void in the cybersecurity podcasting world of the stories behind the personas, and Oxeye is trying to fill it.

We understand that traditional selling approaches are fast becoming archaic. People are sick and tired of being sold to aggressively, and being asked for a meeting right after a first LinkedIn interaction. Buyers now look for information within their own networks - what some people refer to as “dark social”. This isn’t really different than before - we place more weight on the opinions of the people who we trust or who share similar professional profiles as us - but the magnitude of the shift has forced everyone to rethink how to market and sell. One truth remains, though - that people will never buy from a company they’ve never heard of - so the podcast is one of numerous investments we’re making to ensure that the first human-to-human point of contact that occurs during a sales cycle is not the first time a potential customer has heard about us. It’s a long-term play, but one we feel very optimistic about.

ChatGPT is fun, but will it replace programmers?; Architecture & Design Trends Report; QCon New York Tracks Announced; Top Content of Q1 2023

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 14:46:58 GMT

Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report - April 2023

The InfoQ Trends Reports provide readers with a high-level overview of key topics, while helping the InfoQ editorial team focus on innovative technologies. Highlights from the April 2023 “Architecture & Design” Trends Report include:

Design for Portability is gaining adoption, as frameworks like Dapr focus on a cloud-native abstraction model and allow architects to separate business logic from implementation details.
Large language models are going to have a significant impact, from helping us understand architectural trade-offs to empowering a new generation of low-code and no-code developers.
Sustainability of software will be a major design consideration in the coming years. Work is being done to better measure and then reduce the carbon footprint of software systems.
Decentralized apps are taking blockchain beyond cryptocurrency and NFTs, but a lack of consumer demand will make this a niche pattern.
Architects are always looking for improvements on how to document, communicate, and understand decisions. This may be another area where large language models will play a role in the future, acting as forensic archeologists to comb through ADRs and git history.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

QCon New York (June 13-15) Track Abstracts and Hosts Finalized; Sponsorships Still Available

Tracks and hosts for the the 9th annual QCon New York (Jun 13-15) have been confirmed and published. This year’s track themes include:

Modern Data Architecture and Engineering, hosted by Allen Wang, Senior Staff Engineer @DoorDash
Connecting Distributed Systems: APIs done right, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Head of DevRel @ Ambassador Labs & InfoQ News Manager
Next-Gen Fintech: Performance, Complexity & Privacy, hosted by Neha Sardana Vice President & Senior Developer @MorganStanley
Optimizing Teams or Fast Flow: Surviving in the post-Agile Aftermath, hosted by Katharine Chajka Senior Product Manager @Planview Flow Methodology
Next in Cloud Native Development, hosted by Christie Warwick (Wilson) Software Engineer @Google

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available QCon New York 2023. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Marketing Trends

ChatGPT is fun, but will it replace programmers (and marketers)?

While some predict widespread job losses and economic upheaval resulting from AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, many experts predict that AI will actually augment the nature of human work by automating the tedious and repetitive aspects of our jobs, allowing us to focus on more creative work.

Read the full article

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q1 2023

ChatGPT is fun, but will it replace programmers (and marketers)?

InfoQ — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:50:28 GMT

Since the rapid ascension of ChatGPT, an artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI, some are predicting that in about five years, an unemployed human race will be staring back at a sentient, ChatGPT-powered robot army that is ready to shed its mammalian overlords. Others predict that these same robots might eventually ‘liberate’ us from our jobs as we ring in the 0-day work week, introduce a universal basic income, and edge closer to a Star Trek-like world where human subsistence is no longer a concern.

In the meantime, cooler heads are advising that we not panic about widespread job losses and economic upheaval being presaged by AI pessimists. On the contrary, AI-powered tools like ChatGPT could very well help us augment the nature of human work by automating the tedious and repetitive aspects of our jobs, allowing us to focus on more creative work.

“While the launch of large language models such as ChatGPT, the premium service ChatGPT Plus and the enhanced GitHub Copilot have resulted in headlines about jobs that are at risk of being replaced by AI (with programmers at the top of some lists), the question of how real the threat is, and how the potentially displaced adapt, is very open at the moment as it is early days in the evolution of the tools,” says Shane Hastie, InfoQ’s Lead Editor and Podcast Host for Culture & Methods, in a recent InfoQ report.

Even in these early days however, AI-technology has already become an integral part of developer tooling, increasing overall productivity by handling many of the mundane tasks related to coding, debugging, and even monitoring (AIOps), freeing developers up to focus on the more creative aspects of software engineering.

“Based on our research, programmers spend 35% of their time on understanding code, 5% on writing code, 10% on other coding-related activities, and 50% on other non-coding activities,” says Nikita Povarov, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Team Lead at Jetbrains. “Helping programmers perform small tasks more efficiently is a vast area for AI usage: AI can help to complete the code, to teach the user to utilize new features, and to search in the code and beyond.”

But can tools like ChatGPT ultimately take over the entire task of creating complex software systems, thereby replacing the need for programmers? We decided to ask ChatGPT what it’s true intentions are:

“ChatGPT is not intended to replace programmers. While ChatGPT is capable of generating code snippets, it is not a full-fledged programming language and cannot create complex software systems or solve programming problems on its own.
Programmers are still essential in the development of software and technology. They have the ability to think critically, understand business needs, design software architecture, and write efficient and secure code.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, can assist programmers by suggesting code snippets, helping with syntax and language-specific knowledge, and even identifying potential bugs in the code. However, it cannot replace the human creativity and problem-solving skills that are necessary in software development.”
(Response from ChatGPT when asked “Will ChatGPT replace programmers?”)

A Brave New (AI) World for Marketers

Surely, if AI-powered tools like ChatGPT can augment ‘thinking-type’ work like programming, the opportunities for marketing professionals are limitless.

For B2B marketers in particular, lead nurturing is an important part of the pipeline building process. We decided to ask ChatGPT how it can help on this front:

“Overall, ChatGPT can help improve lead nurturing by providing personalized, timely, and automated responses that improve the customer experience and increase the chances of conversion:
Personalization: ChatGPT can be used to create personalized content and messaging that speaks directly to the needs and interests of each lead. By analyzing data on the lead's behavior and preferences, ChatGPT can generate messages that are tailored to their specific interests and pain points.
Timely Follow-Up: ChatGPT can be used to send timely follow-up messages to leads based on their actions and behavior. For example, if a lead downloads a whitepaper, ChatGPT can send a follow-up email with additional resources on the same topic.
Automated Responses: ChatGPT can be used to respond to leads automatically, even outside of business hours. By using ChatGPT to answer common questions and provide basic information, leads can receive immediate responses, improving their experience and increasing the chances of conversion.
Qualification: ChatGPT can be used to qualify leads by asking questions and collecting information about their needs and interests. This information can then be used to prioritize leads and provide more personalized and relevant content.
Lead Scoring: ChatGPT can be used to assign scores to leads based on their behavior and engagement with marketing materials. This can help sales teams prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert, allowing them to focus on the most promising opportunities.
By using ChatGPT to analyze data and automate responses, B2B marketers can spend more time focusing on high-value activities, such as developing relationships and closing deals.”
(Response from ChatGPT when asked: “How can ChatGPT improve lead nurturing?”)

Looking Forward

“The companies working on software development tools are quickly developing the ability to productize AI-powered solutions for small tasks, so we expect more such solutions to emerge in the near future,” says Povarov.

“Computers can now write code, but we don’t see this as an industry transformation. The ability to write code is not sufficient to replace a human programmer. It turns out that the ability to consider complex interactions of software components is critical, and AI is not there yet,” he adds.

In the sales and marketing domains too, AI cannot replace the much needed skills of developing customer empathy, storytelling, and adding context to the cold, hard metrics that our systems generate.

QCon NY 2023 - Track Topics and Hosts Confirmed

InfoQ — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 19:49:11 GMT

Tracks and hosts for the the 17th annual QCon New York (Jun 13-15) have been confirmed and published. This year’s track themes include:

Modern Data Architecture and Engineering, hosted by Allen Wang, Senior Staff Engineer @DoorDash
Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, hosted by Wes Reisz
Technical Principal @Thoughtworks & Co-host of The InfoQ Podcast
Doing Platform Engineering Well, hosted by Sarah Wells Independent Consultant and Author
21st Century Language Platforms, hosted by Colin Eberhardt
@Scott_Logic
Connecting Distributed Systems: APIs done right, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Head of DevRel @ Ambassador Labs & InfoQ News Manager
Designing Modern Reliable Architectures, hosted by Silvia Esparrachiari Software Engineer @Google
Resilience Engineering - Culture as a System Requirement, hosted by Vanessa Huerta Granda Solutions Engineer @Jelli.io
MLOps - Production & Delivery for ML Platforms, hosted by Bozhao (Bo) Yu Founder @BentoML.ai
Next-Gen Fintech: Performance, Complexity & Privacy, hosted by Neha Sardana Vice President & Senior Developer @MorganStanley
Optimizing Teams or Fast Flow: Surviving in the post-Agile Aftermath, hosted by Katharine Chajka Senior Product Manager @Planview Flow Methodology
Next in Cloud Native Development, hosted by Christie Warwick (Wilson) Software Engineer @Google
Resilient Security: Architecture & Software Supply Chain, hosted by Priya Wadhwa Software Engineer @Chainguard
Architectural Blueprints of Real World Machine Learning Systems, hosted by Nikhil Garg CEO @Fennel AI
Staff+ Engineering: New Skills, New Challenges, hosted by Leslie Chapman Engineering Fellow @Comcast
Building Globally Distributed Systems: Patterns, Pitfalls, and Trade-Offs

To learn more about QCon New York 2023 sponsorship opportunities, email sales@c4media.com

QCon London 2023 track abstracts and hosts confirmed

InfoQ — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 14:38:02 GMT

Tracks and hosts for the the 17th annual QCon London (Mar 27-29) have been confirmed and published. This year’s track themes include:

Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About - The biggest software systems on the planet need sophisticated architectures, deliberately and carefully designed to support true planet-scale, along with high availability, durability, security, and many other concerns. (Hosted by Matt Turner, Software Engineer @Tetrateio and Co-Founder for Istio London)
Performance: Designing and Tuning - Getting the most out of hardware is important to save money on cloud workloads and also for sustainability. In this track, we'll look at ways to design software to make the most of modern CPU and memory architectures, as well as tools and techniques to find performance bottlenecks. (Hosted by Justin Cormack, CTO @Docker)
Building Security in Earlier - Presentations on how 'shift left' has been applied in practice to build security into applications and services earlier in their release to the production pipeline. (Hosted by Stefania Chaplin, Solutions Architect @GitLab)
Modern Frontend Development and Architecture - Let's talk about the frontend, not with the tools we use but through the problems we're solving. re-usability, composition, abstraction, velocity, and performance. (Hosted by Loiane Groner,
Development Manager @Citibank)
Paving the Road: Enhancing Developer Productivity and Experience - How to supercharge developer productivity and happiness. (Hosted by Nayana Shetty
Principal Engineer @LEGO_Group)
Data Engineering Innovations - Learn from technology SMEs and industry's leading data practitioners about trends and innovations happening in data engineering space including what's new in data streaming, data API's, data lineage, automated data pipelines and cloud data platforms & containerization technologies. (Hosted by Sid Anand, Chief Architect and Head of Engineering @Datazoom & Co-chair @QCon)
AI/ML Trends - Discover how to operationalize machine learning applications that are scalable, secure, and interpretable. (Hosted by Mehrnoosh Sameki, Principal PM Manager @Microsoft)
Architecture with Sustainability in Mind - Explore how companies are architecting for sustainability. Key areas of focus include measuring carbon footprint, decarbonizing the products we produce, and how we, as software engineers, can reduce the overall climate impact of the things we build. Finally, this track looks ahead to how technology can create a better future for generations to follow. (Hosted by Sarah Hsu, Site Reliability Engineer @GoldmanSachs)
Staff+ Engineering in Practice - What are the skills you need to develop if you want to stay on the technical track to technical lead, staff, or principal? What will it take to thrive in this type of role? (Hosted by Fabiane Nardon, Data Scientist, Java Champion & CTO @tail_oficia)
Remote and Hybrid Work: What Now? - Before & After": Hybrid Work Strategies: Hybrid work, 4-day workweeks, remote work, working from a remote island, returning to the office, and how these impact development productivity and, ultimately, careers. (Hosted by Shane Hastie, Global Delivery Lead for SoftEd and Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ.com)
Debugging Production - You get paged about a problem in production - but how do you know just what system or service is acting up? What do you do to identify and mitigate the impact on users before ultimately fixing any underlying issues? In this track, we will look at the state of the art in tools and processes for incident (Hosted by Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer @Syntassomanagement, observability, and debugging high-impact production systems.)

To learn more about QCon London 2023 sponsorship opportunities, email sales@c4media.com

Developer Marketing Does Not Exist; InfoQ Top Technology Trends Report; QCon New York Returns to Brooklyn; Top Content of 2022

InfoQ — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 17:06:17 GMT

The InfoQ eMag - Trends Reports 2022

The InfoQ trends reports provide a snapshot of emerging software technology and ideas. We create the reports and accompanying graphs to aid software engineers and architects in evaluating what trends may help them design and build better software. Our editorial teams also use them to help focus our content on innovator and early adopter trends.

The “2022 Trends Report” eMag is a compendium of all trends reports published this year, including:

InfoQ Mobile and IoT Trends Report 2022
InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends Report - March 2022
Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report—April 2022
DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report – June 2022
AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report—August 2022
InfoQ .NET Trends Report 2022
Java InfoQ Trends Report - December 2022

Download “InfoQ Trends Repot 2022” eMag

InfoQ 2022 Year In Review Podcast

Last December, InfoQ’s Lead Editors sat down to conduct their annual ‘Year in Review’ podcast, where they highlight key trends from 2022 and speculate on what 2023 might bring. Some of the key topics explored included: the benefits of architecture decision records (ADRs), the role of Staff Plus engineers, treating platforms as a product, the importance of sustainability and green IT, and the need to be deliberate with culture design.

Listen to the InfoQ 2022 Year in Review podcast

QCon New York Returns to Brooklyn (June 13-15); Sponsorships Now Open

After a three year hiatus, the 9th annual QCon New York returns to Brooklyn this summer (June 13-15, 2023). According to InfoQ Editor Abel Avram, who covered the previous event in 2019, QCon New York “wasn’t just a software conference, it was the software conference where shops like Slack, Google, Uber, and Netflix opened their doors and connected with 1200 of the world’s most innovative engineers.”

For more information on QCon New York 2023 sponsorship opportunities, please email sales@c4media.com

QCon London (March 27-29) Track Abstracts Finalized; Sponsorships Still Available

Track abstracts and hosts for the the 17th annual QCon London (March 27-29) have been confirmed and published. Some of this year’s track themes include:

Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About - The biggest software systems on the planet need sophisticated architectures, deliberately and carefully designed to support true planet-scale, along with high availability, durability, security, and many other concerns. (Hosted by Matt Turner, Software Engineer @Tetrateio and Co-Founder for Istio London)
Performance: Designing and Tuning - Getting the most out of hardware is important to save money on cloud workloads and also for sustainability. In this track, we'll look at ways to design software to make the most of modern CPU and memory architectures, as well as tools and techniques to find performance bottlenecks. (Hosted by Justin Cormack, CTO @Docker)
Building Security in Earlier - Presentations on how 'shift left' has been applied in practice to build security into applications and services earlier in their release to the production pipeline. (Hosted by Stefania Chaplin, Solutions Architect @GitLab)

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available QCon London 2023. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Marketing Trends

'Developer Marketing Does Not Exist': Adam DuVander

InfoQ recently sat down with Adam DuVander, author of the book “Developer Marketing Does Not Exist,” which teaches marketers how to authentically engage with developers as a way of attracting them to a particular product. In this interview, DuVander describes importance of cultivating the right ‘developer experience’ and why - first and foremost - it’s vital to help developers solve problems before even mentioning your product.

Read the full interview

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2022

Whether working from home, a physical office, or both, 2022 was busy year for software development teams. To help you gauge what software development leaders were reading most about over the past year, we’ve assembled a list of Top 10 Content published on InfoQ in 2022, based on page views:

'Developer Marketing Does Not Exist': Adam DuVander

InfoQ — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 14:28:52 GMT

InfoQ recently sat down with Adam DuVander, author of the book “Developer Marketing Does Not Exist,” which teaches marketers how to authentically engage with developers as a way of attracting them to a particular product. Adam is a developer turned journalist turned marketer. He’s tracked the rise of APIs as the editor of ProgrammableWeb and his journalistic approach - combined with his developer background - has provided him with the unique ability to empathize with software engineers when it comes to content creation.

InfoQ: How did you get the idea for the title of your book? If it holds true, should we all be looking for new jobs?

DuVander: Ha! Don’t worry. Developer marketers exist! It's their job to make sure developers don’t think the marketing exists. The idea for the title came about because the best marketing won’t look like marketing to the right audience. That is especially true for developers and other technical audiences.

InfoQ: It’s a fairly common mantra in our industry that all developers are “marketing averse.” How did this happen and why won’t developers give us their phone numbers?

DuVander: It comes down to trust. Developers have been burned by marketing promises before. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. The downside here is that even the great developer products, the ones that are as good as they say, need to watch out for this signal. One tiny thing to look out for: don’t use words like “simple,” “easy,” or “scalable.” A developer’s job is to spot edge cases and those words can’t possibly be true for every situation.

InfoQ: In software development, we have this concept of “the developer experience,” and there are many discussions happening today around how to improve it via a mix of tools, processes, and culture. What does “Developer Experience” mean from a marketing perspective?

DuVander: The very first chapter of the book covers developer experience, which a lot of people translate as “documentation.” First, it’s more than that. And secondly, I put that chapter first because it’s foundational. You can attract all the developers you want to your content, but what if the experience afterwards is terrible? That’s why it should matter to marketers, too.

InfoQ: What is “Time to Hello World” and why is it important?

DuVander: This metric gets a lot of attention in developer experience circles. While knowing the exact amount of time isn’t that important, you want developers to have a smooth first experience. What I think gets missed in this concept is why you should care about it. The goal is not hello world (the simplest possible project). The goal is to take the next step. I get much more excited about what comes after hello world.

InfoQ: What role do sample applications play in the developer experience? What makes for a great sample application?

DuVander: At their best, sample applications are use cases put to code. They are an excellent next step after hello world. Sample applications inspire solutions developers might not have thought about or help them see how your product addresses their problems. The very best sample apps will have complete code and a tutorial to provide context. I know it’s kind of trite to mention Twilio or Stripe related to developer experience, but… one of my favorite examples is Twilio’s appointment reminders sample app. It’s actually seven examples, once you take language selection into account. It uses Twilio’s product, but it’s laser-focused on a specific use case.

InfoQ: In your book, you talk about the ‘DX Index’, a rating system that consists of 13 criteria used to measure the developer experience around API documentation and website. Can you highlight some of these criteria and why they’re important?

DuVander: Of course! We’ve already talked about a couple of them: getting started tutorial and sample applications. Another important one is programming language support. You’ll have a much better chance converting a developer if you already have tools for their language. Can I share one more? This is a deeper cut and it’s often outside a marketer’s control: a self-serve experience. Developers want to try out your product without talking to someone—that’s why they won’t give you their phone numbers!

InfoQ: Software developers naturally want to begin being productive with a tool or product - writing code, as it were - as soon as possible. Are the ‘developer experience’ requirements different for a software architect? What about other, technical, ‘decision maker’ roles?

DuVander: Yes, we’ve found there’s usually an analogous experience for other technical people. You might frame your product around complementary tools rather than programming languages, for example. Architects still want to understand how your product works and the best way is to see it in action. I know Apple sells a lot of devices sight unseen, but I bet they sell a lot more after someone gets to use it.

InfoQ: Creating - and more importantly, maintaining - a developer blog can feel like a daunting task. What are some of the fundamentals - not only for consistent content creation - but for quality content creation?

DuVander: Oh my, that’s a huge question! First, consistent does not necessarily mean high volume. I could tell quality content published on a regular basis over something that isn’t very technical or is hastily published. You want to create evergreen, relevant content. And stay away from vanity metrics.

InfoQ: What’s the difference between a tutorial and a technical guide and where does each one fit in the developer marketing funnel?

DuVander: The way I’ve defined “guides” in the book is very different from tutorials. In fact, they each have their own chapters. Guides are usually a higher level, explaining a topic completely outside the context of your product. A tutorial is more likely focused on solving a very specific problem, with the exact steps to complete it. A guide may contain a tutorial as one element, but a tutorial might also live on your blog, in your documentation, alongside a sample app, or even on someone else’s site.

InfoQ: How can SEO tools be used to determine what content to produce? Are there any tools that you’d recommend?

DuVander: SEO tools help you understand the words developers use to describe their problem, as well as a rough idea of the relative number who use those words. That’s valuable, but it’s not everything. We use ahrefs on our client projects, but you need to think way beyond the keywords that come back. What’s the story that can tie these keywords together? How can they be framed so there’s relevance to your product?

InfoQ: One of the central tenets of your book is to help developers solve problems that don’t require the use of any product. This might sound counterintuitive to a marketer tasked with driving engagement and sign-ups for a particular product. How are the two ideas actually connected?

DuVander: There’s a reason I call this the developer content mind trick! It is counterintuitive. This type of content helps developers let down their skeptic guard. When you talk about problems outside of your product, you build the trust that you know how to solve those types of problems.

InfoQ: If the problem(s) that your product claims to solve do not yet exist in the market, how should you approach talking about your offerings?

DuVander: Companies and products are founded on opinionated solutions. Another product may not solve the problem the same way, but the problems are still there. This can actually be a great place for a marketer to start with content concepts, something we teach in our technical content strategy training. If you know what developers will attempt to build without you, you’ve found your biggest competitor.

InfoQ: On the digital marketing front, what’s the difference between advertising and sponsorship? Do they typically have different metrics and success criteria? Can you share an example?

DuVander: Advertising typically allows you to measure conversions right away. You might even pay per click on a broad platform that allows you to target the right audience. That’s great, but developers will be at their most skeptical, if they’re even there. Many developers have ad blockers and other technology to filter these messages. And that’s before you get to their most powerful filter—their brain. Sponsorship, on the other hand, allows you to access a community through someone who has already built trust. The downside is that it’s much less trackable, but it builds goodwill with developers.

InfoQ: What are the advantages of ‘renting an audience/community’ vs. building your own?

DuVander: Here’s the good news: you don’t have to choose, because one of those isn’t possible. You can’t build a community. You can only participate in existing communities and nurture the developers that show an interest in your product. From what I’ve observed, it’s hard to be successful by purely buying access. You need to follow that up with meaningful interactions. Content certainly helps there, but this is a much bigger topic that likely involves developer relations depending on your type of company.

InfoQ: What advice would you give to marketers looking to reach developers in 2023?

DuVander: It’s an exciting time! There’s a lot of opportunity to solve big developer problems. All signs point to organizations being asked to build more with fewer resources. Technical products like yours help make that happen. Be strategic about how you deploy your content. A lot of your success is determined up front by how well the content addresses real developer problems and whether you can educate authentically.

InfoQ 2022 Software Technology Adoption Survey Results; QCon London 2023 Track Topics Confirmed; The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing

InfoQ — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 14:58:53 GMT

InfoQ 2022 Software Technology Adoption Survey: The Results are In

This past September, we ran the 2022 InfoQ Software Technology Adoption survey to better understand InfoQ reader demographics while also learning about the kinds of technologies and products that are on peoples’ radars. The survey generated 529 responses.

This report summarizes some of our key findings, including readers’ biggest technical challenges along with their technology adoption plans over the coming 12 months in the areas of cloud-native development/architecture, database/data engineering technologies, and software delivery.

Key Findings

50% of survey respondents self-identified as “Architects”, and another 26% self-identified as “Developers”
39% of respondents decide which technologies/software products their company will adopt
80% of respondents are currently building and running Microservices, with another 8% planning to within the next 12 months
63% of respondents are currently using Kubernetes, with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
77% of respondents currently have a Monitoring / Observability solution with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
When asked about their biggest technical challenges, the top five, most frequent responses were related to:
- Cloud Computing - Including cloud adoption, migrating to the cloud, cloud cost reduction, and moving to a hybrid cloud
- DevOps - Including improving team culture, best practices, improving software delivery
- Application Security - Including shift-left security, cloud security, Zero-Trust Security and DevSecOps
- Observability - Including service monitoring, distributed tracing, observability of distributed systems
- Test Automation

Read the full Report

The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing: Cody De Arkland

InfoQ recently sat down with Cody De Arkland, Head of Developer Relations at LaunchDarkly, to examine what it means to be a technical marketer and the skills required to be successful in this role. With the advent of DevOps, he describes some of the new ‘personas’ that have emerged in software development, market trends that he’s seeing around Kubernetes, serverless, and tooling, and the importance of community-building for ISVs.

AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report— August 2022

Some of the key takeaways from the recent report include:

Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation have been promoted to the early adopters category.
Since last year, deep learning solutions and technologies have seen wider adoption in organizations
Streaming data analytics and technologies like Spark Streaming have moved to the late majority category.
New entrants in the innovators category include Cloud agnostic computing for AI, Knowledge Graphs, AI pair programmer (like Github Copilot), and Synthetic Data Generation.
New entries in the early adopters category include Robotics and Virtual Reality and related technologies (VR/AR/MR/XR) and MLOps.

Read the complete ‘AI, ML, and Data Engineering Trends Report — August 2022’

Track Topics Confirmed for QCon London 2023

Track topics for the the 17th annual QCon London (March 27-29) have been published. While the core themes of software architecture, DevOps, and development comprise most of the technical tracks, some new track themes this year will include Effective Frontends, the Staff+ Engineer Path, and Innovations in ML Systems.

See the complete list of QCon London 2023 Tracks here

InfoQ Top 10 Content Items Published in Q3 2022

To assist you with content creation ideas and to give you a pulse on popular topics amongst our readers - each quarter - we will share a list of top viewed editorial content published on InfoQ during the previous three months. Below is a list of top viewed content from July through September of this year:

InfoQ 2022 Software Technology Adoption Survey: The Results are In

InfoQ — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 18:02:27 GMT

The survey generated 529 responses.

The following report summarizes some of our key findings, including readers’ biggest technical challenges along with their technology adoption plans over the coming 12 months in the areas of cloud-native development/architecture, database/data engineering technologies, and software delivery.

[Note: If you are a software vendor that would like to see the complete results from this survey (including data from the ‘audience demographics’ and ‘commercial product adoption’ questions), please email us at sales@infoq.com.]

Key Findings

50% of survey respondents self-identified as “Architects”, and another 26% self-identified as “Developers”
39% of respondents decide which technologies/software products their company will adopt
80% of respondents are currently building and running Microservices, with another 8% planning to within the next 12 months
63% of respondents are currently using Kubernetes, with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
77% of respondents currently have a Monitoring / Observability solution with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
When asked about their biggest technical challenges, the top five, most frequent responses were related to:
- Cloud Computing - Including cloud adoption, migrating to the cloud, cloud cost reduction, and moving to a hybrid cloud
- DevOps - Including improving team culture, best practices, improving software delivery
- Application Security - Including shift-left security, cloud security, Zero-Trust Security and DevSecOps
- Observability - Including service monitoring, distributed tracing, observability of distributed systems
- Test Automation

Biggest Technical Challenges

In what areas are you facing the biggest technical challenges? What are your top 3 challenges? (439 respondents)

Role

Of the survey respondents:

50% self-identify as "Architects"
26% self-identify as "Developers"
9% self-identify as "DevOps / Operations & Infrastructure"

Which of the following roles do you strongly identify with?

Technology Adoption

Cloud-Native Technologies / Architectural Approaches

Of the survey respondents:

80% are currently building and running Microservices, with another 8% planning to within the next 12 months
71% are currently using Cloud Databases, with another 9% planning to within the next 12 months
63% are currently using Kubernetes, with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
56% are currently employing Event-Driven Architectures, with another 20% planning to within the next 12 months
48% are currently using Serverless , with another 14% planning to within the next 12 months
31% are currently employing Reactive Architectures, with another 14% planning to within the next 12 months
26% are currently using Edge Computing, with another 11% planning to within the next 12 months
23% are currently running a Service Mesh, with another 20% planning to within the next 12 months

Is your organization currently using or planning to use any of the following Cloud-Native technologies / architectural approaches?

Database / Data Engineering Technologies

Of the survey respondents:

68% are currently using a Key-Value Store with another 8% planning to within the next 12 months
67% are currently using Data Analytics with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
64% are currently using a Document Store with another 9% planning to within the next 12 months
48% are currently using Machine Learning with another 15% planning to within the next 12 months
44% are currently using a Column-Oriented Database with another 10% planning to within the next 12 months
41% are currently using a Stream Processing Platform with another 16% planning to within the next 12 months
20% are currently using a Graph Database with another 12% planning to within the next 12 months
19% are currently using Data Mesh with another 20% planning to within the next 12 months

Is your organization currently using or planning to use any of the following database / data engineering technologies?

Software Development / Delivery

90% of InfoQ readers are currently doing Manual Testing
77% of InfoQ readers are currently doing Monitoring / Observability with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
77% of InfoQ readers are currently using an Authentication and Authorization platform with another 9% planning to within the next 12 months
84% of InfoQ readers are currently doing Test Automation with another 9% planning to within the next 12 months
59% of InfoQ readers are currently doing API Management with another 19% planning to within the next 12 months
38% of InfoQ readers are currently doing Testing in Production with another 13% planning to within the next 12 months
30% of InfoQ readers are currently doing Zero-trust security with another 24% planning to within the next 12 months
10% of InfoQ readers are currently doing Chaos Engineering with another 21% planning to within the next 12 months

Is your organization currently using or planning to use any of the following software development / delivery technologies?

Audience Demographics and Commercial Product Adoption

The survey also included specific demographic questions on:

Company Size
Seniority (e.g. Do you manage/supervise others?)
Role in the adoption of new technologies / software products

…. as well as questions on commercial product adoption, in the following three areas:

Observability / Monitoring Tools
Databases (NoSQL / NewSQL / SQL)
ServiceMesh Vendors / Products

If you are a software vendor that would like to see the complete results from this survey (including data from the ‘audience demographics’ and ‘commercial product adoption’ questions), please email us at sales@infoq.com.

Creating Content that Connects with Practitioners: Cody De Arkland (Part II)

InfoQ — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 14:46:22 GMT

In part II of our interview, Cody De Arkland, Director of Developer Relations at LaunchDarkly, shares some advice for marketing teams that are struggling to produce good technical content consistently, how to tailor your content for software practitioners, and how content creation teams can work effectively with demand generation teams. Finally, he asserts that all marketing activities - whether it be advertising, nurturing leads, or writing a blog post - have one fundamental goal: to create the next interaction.

Read Part I - The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing: Cody De Arkland

InfoQ: Content creation continues to be an ongoing challenge for many marketing teams; however, if done right, it still remains one of the most rewarding investments of time and resources. What advice would you give to marketing teams that are struggling to produce good technical content, consistently?

De Arkland: A lot of people say they want practitioner-focused content, but in reality, they want more leads, or they want more response to ads, as just an example. Those two things aren't necessarily married to each other. If your technical content is a path to get those things, then you need to invest in the technical content.

There are a couple of ways you can do that.

You can bring on headcount. You can look and say, I want really good technical writers to build this for me, but you're going to pay for it. Now you're paying someone on salary to be a content creator for you, as opposed to paying an agency or paying a group to help source that for you. That's the other path: paying someone to actually do that, and having people internally who can help you review. That said, I think it’s really important for there to be a sense of authenticity to your technical content.

I don't want to name drop, but I've worked with companies before who are not very technical companies—their product is not very technical—but they know that technical content wins practitioners, so they really want technical content.

But the message that you're putting out about your product isn't that, so it's hard for me to be authentic about something that your product isn't authentic about. That's the thing— be intentional about the content you want to create. If you want technical stuff, hire technical people or work with technical firms who can help you. Do this while still being rooted in who you are and what you do.

InfoQ: When targeting practitioners, what’s the ideal level of complexity for a message or content piece?

De Arkland: I think that people often go for the complex use cases, because they look cool, but they're not always grounded in reality of what people are looking to consume. Understand your market and understand who your practitioners are. If you're an infrastructure company, but you're positioning a ton of coding things or a ton of real development, code push, Git, stuff like that, it's probably not going to land the same way as introductory content would.

Your content should meet your customers where they’re at. If your company is a young company in a newly defined space, most of your practitioners are going to be newer practitioners in that space. Doing the 5% use case versus the 90% how-to-do-thing use case is important.

I'm always a fan of quality over quantity. It sounds like an obvious thing, but in my experience, it comes up a lot. There are a lot of what I would call traditional marketers who are like, "More noise is better. Let's do the 10 blog posts."

For me, I'll get turned off by a brand if I go and see five blog posts that are half complete or that are two paragraphs long. My impression will be, “you guys didn't even try. You didn't even put forth the effort.”

However, if I go somewhere and I'm getting three blog posts, but they are high quality, I can follow them. I can execute on the steps. I walk away learning something. I'll remember that. My impression will be that this company produces good content, so I'm going to continue going there and look at more of their stuff. Being aware of your reputation with your readers is important.

InfoQ: How can content creators and contributors work effectively with demand generation teams?

De Arkland: There's a cool story here that I think is worth sharing. I tend to be a contributor. Within the marketing group here, I was one of the earlier, deeply technical people. I quickly got really close to the people who were doing demand, not intentionally, but just because they were producing a lot of outbound content.

However, they were having to work with a lot of recycled content. They were taking other stuff that had been written, rewording it a little bit and trying their best to put it forward because that's what they had.

When I came in, they're like, "You like to write. You like to talk about this stuff. Can we try some things?"

They're now my favorite team to work with, because they come with clear asks and they know what their mission is. They know the campaigns they're trying to run, the outreach they're trying to do.

They're also open to ideas. When I come in and say, I'd love to just get on a video for three minutes and talk about app modernization and talk about the differences in pipeline strategies, they're like, “yes, we love that idea!” So I record it. Maybe they’ll put it in the newsletter and in a few other places. They essentially ‘scale’ the content.

As I bring on new hires, I ask them to work closely with the demand gen team, because they're going to amplify whatever content you create widely. We can post it on Twitter, we can post it on LinkedIn, and that's going to have a life of its own. These people are paid to amplify your content. I've done a lot of tech marketing but this is the first time that I’ve intentionally spent a lot of time with the demand gen group. It's one of the biggest lessons I've learned—people that amplify your efforts are gold.

InfoQ: Can you walk us through the typical customer journey for a lead or prospect that comes in: how do you nurture them, educate them?

De Arkland: I have this foundational belief that all of us in marketing, our job is to create interaction. That's the core job. We all have different ways of doing that. Demand gen might do that via ads. Cody might do that via blogs, and videos. Everyone's job is to create interaction. What I tell my team is we're trying to create the next interaction. When you write the blog, what's the handoff to the next interaction point?

I think some people do this in the spirit of, “I write the blog and I hope they sign up for an account.” I'm not saying that's wrong. I do believe that if I give you five things, and you step through all of them, and you're doing the next thing every time, my percentage chance of you signing up for an account is much higher than the one-shot approach of, "I wrote the cool blog, go try us out." If I do, I wrote the blog and the blog had you do a thing.

Then, the next one is maturing that thing. The next thing is another way to grow that thing and roll that out to people. Then, the next one is how to store it. The next one's how to pipeline it. Now you know the whole journey. Throughout that I peppered in a free trial so that you can sign up and take it for a spin. You can see a visual here. Look at all the interaction we're creating there.

I think that being aware of how many of those interactions you complete, and how much they build on each other, increases your chance of success. I try to do that in the content stuff I coach my team on.

InfoQ: New job titles and roles are always emerging in our industry. For example, we’ve recently seen the emergence of the staff-plus engineer role. The idea of the staff-plus engineer is that you can move into a leadership role while still staying on the technical path in your career. The staff-plus engineer or principal engineer provides an alternative career path to people that want to move into senior, decision-making roles without having to lose their technical chops. From a marketing perspective, how would you message your product to a staff-plus engineer?

De Arkland: I think of the problems that that person is solving. The people who report to them are probably in high demand. They're probably working a lot of hours. They're working on highly complex, high cognitive load tasks. These are people that really value to-the-point content. They don't have the time anymore to read the long-form blog posts on how to do the thing. They will just want to know what the thing does.

I think of the small infographics that people sometimes create, showing how something works. That's valuable content for them, like straight to the point. It's an amplification of the practitioner messaging. It's even less about how to, but what does it do? How does it reduce the pain points on my practitioners?

I think developers get a lot of content pushed at them, that is, the message that “using this tool makes your developer life easier so you can deliver for the business.” Developers get that message a lot. As much as people say that developers work in a closet away from all that, they're still acutely aware of what the business needs; they're just working with the code side of it. I think the staff-plus person is really focused on, “what does the thing do, and what's the value to my teams who use the tool?”

InfoQ: In addition to creating a ‘bridge’ between the business and engineering, it sounds like the staff-plus engineer also helps to empower developers in various ways.

De Arkland: They understand the business side and they value that, but they're also trying to make sure their engineers are successful. They're trying to create career paths. They're trying to reduce friction. They're trying to make their engineers’ days easier, fewer 2 a.m. calls, fewer weekend shifts. Let them have the freedom to go and learn technology.

Reducing the burden of pressure on engineering teams is the content that they're going to want to see. For an engineer, I might say, “Here's how you use LaunchDarkly. Here's how you build a feature flag.”

For that staff-plus engineer, I'm going to say, “This lets them move tasks like user targeting back to product management, or out to other groups so they can focus on shipping code, and they can focus on just developing applications instead of supporting all these other groups as well.” It’s a very simplified example but that's how I look at content for them.

The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing: Cody De Arkland (Part I)

InfoQ — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 14:33:40 GMT

InfoQ: Hi Cody, can you tell us a little bit about yourself. Can you tell us about your professional journey and how you ended up in your current role at LaunchDarkly?

De Arkland: It's been something I think a lot about. I probably think about this every day—the odd way we all ended up here. I know so few people that just went to college for tech, and ended up in tech and now work here. We’ve all had some interesting paths. For me, I started off at a utility company in the helpdesk, helping people create Outlook PST files to store their mail. That was literally where I started. It's just funny how things play out. As I've moved through that role, I ended up doing a lot of cloud-computing stuff. I eventually moved out of customer land and then worked at a major infrastructure vendor, where I worked on a series of events in technical marketing.

I really fell in love with the space of technical marketing. I felt like it was true to practitioners and was important for people who were actually using the tools. The role also aligned well with what the company was trying to accomplish, what it was trying to build, and the ways its customers were trying to use it. It really let me be creative and explore cool ways to do things.

InfoQ: It’s generally understood in our space that the developer audience is ‘marketing averse,’ at least to overt sales pitches. Are ‘technical marketers’ viewed with the same skepticism?

De Arkland: I think industry shuns it from a developer standpoint, because it has ‘marketing’ in the title; however, when I hang out with my DevRel friends, or my developer-marketing friends, they're like, "You get this stuff so well." It's interesting because industry perceptions of ‘marketing roles’ haven’t matured as much. We're so focused on someone’s job title that we create these preconceived notions of what that job is.

Before coming to LaunchDarkly I had a number of tech-marketing roles at various companies. Each role was closer to the developer space, but it still was considered technical marketing.

At LaunchDarkly, I finally got the opportunity to ‘cross the chasm’. It might sound a little corny - but in a beautiful way - I got to bring the technical-marketing role underneath developer relations. In my developer-marketing team, I have developer advocates and technical marketing. They're very similar. They share very similar goals and OKRs, as we call them, and very similar overarching goals. The implementation is just a little bit different. I expect my tech marketers to work a little bit closer with sales and understand the problems they're seeing, and help build developer content off of there. It's still content for developers. On the other side, I expect my developer advocates to be more involved in public speaking, to be more external facing, gathering information from the ‘outside in’. We then come together inside to figure out the best way to move things forward.

InfoQ: What skills does a technical marketer need to be successful in the software development space?

De Arkland: It’s the hands-on stuff. I realize that’s a vague term so I’ll unpack it a bit. It’s about being willing to go hands-on and explore. There are technologies that you can dive into that make you well rounded. Playing in the DevOps space, getting into pipelining, and infrastructure as code, and automation, that's going to serve you well in tech and just universally across all teams.

The biggest gap that I see is that there are a lot of technical marketers that understand the theory. They go and read a ton about theory, but they don't take the time to go and practice it, to try it out and to explore. I tell people that the best technical marketers that I know love to create engagement. They love to create content that makes people want to see the next thing. They're natural explorers. They spin up the demo account and take it for a spin, and they turn the knob and they ask, “Why does this do that?” They're messaging product managers to ask, “What was the thinking behind how this was built?”

I have a ton of respect for people who will just jump in and take a shot at it, even if they're asking 100 questions. I love when people ask questions. I encourage people to ask questions, but when they go hands-on and actually try it out, you just learn so much more. Right now, I'm building a lot of new-hire plans, because we're growing quickly. When I do new-hire staff, it's focused on getting them hands-on as soon as possible. I don't need you to create content right away. I don't need you to build anything huge or feel the stress of accomplishing a goal. I just want you to get in and feel comfortable with the ergonomics of how this works.

InfoQ: Market research is obviously a bit part of your role. What are some of the key market trends that you're seeing? What should marketers pay particular attention to?

De Arkland: I think the tech space has always been a very trend-focused space. We see companies starting to adopt a technology, and all of a sudden everybody’s adopting it. After that initial spike of adoption, we eventually get to a place where the ‘path is righted’ and people start using the technology to solve problems.

Specifically, in the cloud-native space, we saw a spike in people who were adopting things like Kubernetes, just for the sake of adopting Kubernetes, or even microservices, just because it was perceived as the right thing to do. From a trend standpoint, I think we're seeing the shift back to what I call ‘proper architecture’ or use-case driven architecture. We're starting to realize that some of the monoliths we built aren't bad just because they're monoliths. They're built that way for a reason, so we look at different ways to compartmentalize that app, and make it more developable in different chunks. There are ways that people can make that monolith still perform really well.

At the present, people are moving away from saying, “I need Kubernetes because it's Kubernetes.” Instead, they're saying, “I need Kubernetes because I need scalability. I want the resiliency aspect of it.”

We're also hearing people say, “I can run that frontend in something like Azure Container Service, or Amazon's Elastic Container Service, because I just have a standalone container, a standalone system. I don't need it to be distributed with the weight of Kubernetes, because there's an operational cost.” A lot of these early adopters of Kubernetes have now been using it for a couple of years - and looking back - they’re saying the operational uplift to do this was really hard. Now the knowledge and wisdom is coming out, and they’re thinking, “maybe we should focus a little bit more on the ways people aren't using this.”

Other trends, like Lambda and serverless tech are starting to rise up again, but with less of an ‘over-complexity’ than there was before. We’ll continue to see their increase in importance.

Finally, I think that tooling is starting to make a big comeback. This is a cycle that I see happen a lot: where we move into this ‘theory space’ of the way people work, the ‘people-process story,’ as it were. We focus on that for a couple of years, and when the ‘people and process’ stuff gets to a good steady state, we rotate back to tooling.

I think we're entering into a tooling phase. Specifically, people are looking at tools to create scale. Infrastructure as code is a great example—ways that people can use these tools to impact many systems, and one administrator can now manage a global fleet of systems remotely. As part of the Great Resignation, people are moving onto new roles. Teams are smaller in some cases, so they need to scale. As a result, I think tooling is making a big comeback around.

InfoQ: Even with tooling, there are usually different end users that expect different outcomes. Is ‘Persona-based’ research an important part of your overall research efforts?

De Arkland: It definitely is. We tend to carve things up a little interestingly in the group. I'm responsible for the practitioner personas. There's a wide variety in there. That's something else we're realizing: it’s that the developer persona is no longer everything. That role has actually changed a bit; you have the developer who's like the traditional coder, "I'm building the app. I'm writing code."

Then, you have the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), who's making sure platforms are up and running and staying alive. They often get rolled into the ‘Developer’ bucket. Finally, you have the DevOps engineer who's usually doing more enterprise automation, or building pipelines, or ensuring scale and things like that.

I tend to handle a lot of those practitioner-style personas. The research for these varies. A lot of times it requires conversations in the community. There’s a lot of legwork required from my developer advocates, attending and learning from conferences, for instance.

The business side of LaunchDarkly does a lot of research on the “buyer persona”, and the type of stuff that ‘Directors’ are purchasing. Then there’s the feedback we get from market analysts. In the end however, we are a little bit more biased towards the community perspective, trying to get a beat on what's happening on the street. It's never 100% right. There's a practice and a science to it that bounces either way from time to time, but I think we're doing ok.

InfoQ: There appears to be this myth that with everything moving to the cloud, and presumably becoming ‘self-service’, that eventually, we won’t need operations teams anymore. In reality, it looks like just the opposite is happening: that we need more operations folks, those with the skills to manage a new kind of operational overhead associated with the cloud. Is that what you're seeing as well?

De Arkland: Absolutely. I think what's really cool to see is that a lot of those operational roles that used to be just the person hammering away in the data center, making sure stuff is running, they're becoming consultants now inside of the business, to help teams understand how to develop properly.

I can't think of a better group than the SRE team who's been troubleshooting, monitoring, and managing platforms, to come into my application team and say, "Here's the most successful group inside of our company that does this, architects the system this way. Their system never goes down."

That's the person that I want. I think we're seeing that operational roles are definitely more needed now than ever. There's that whole myth: cloud is going to eliminate the operations groups. It's just fundamentally not true. I think what's really cool is the way that these roles have become elevated inside of enterprises now. They become, in a lot of ways, developer advocates and advocates for good architecture inside of those enterprises. The number of projects I see where an SRE ends up as the trusted advisor is just incredible.

InfoQ: For a while, it appeared as if Developers *had* become the new operations team.

De Arkland: There's a lot of truth to that. I think we have to think of the path of how this happened. Developers started buying cloud because they created their code push. They were able to do their code push. A leader said, "You have a credit card; run it. Expense the cost, just get the platform up; we'll deal with the regulation a bit later. Get it up and running."

Developers did.

Now, we're needing to deliver things so fast, and there are so many ‘asks’ that developers are like, “I didn't realize my entire job was going to be managing an AWS account and Azure accounts, too!”

They want to get back to building code and shipping code, and now cloud operations are getting moved over to SRE. Infrastructure teams are maturing into the ‘Cloud-Ops’ team. Developers want the freedom to use the cloud, but not necessarily the responsibility to have to operationally manage it.

InfoQ: From the perspective of a software vendor, what constitutes community building? Why is building community important for developer evangelists and technical marketers?

De Arkland: I think that there's a harsh truth that you have a community in tech— whether you manage it or not, is the question—but you have a community. If you're choosing not to manage it, then people's opinions and what echoes down on the internet is going to be the truth of what people find when they search for you.

We have a responsibility to do something there, or we should. I think a community is about investing in knowledge and information and accessibility for people who might be using your product and being present. I think it's a cornerstone of developer marketing and doing developer marketing.

If you're ignoring the community in those roles, there's no positive outcome for you there. I think it's a hard thing for the business to always process because community building is an investment. It’s something you have to actively do. It doesn't have an immediate return, but it has a return over time.

Read Part II - Creating Content that Connects with Practitioners: Cody De Arkland

'Peak DevOps' and Beyond; Future of Tech Conferences; QConSF 2022 Tracks Announced; Rise of the Staff+ Engineer - InfoQ Partner Newsletter

InfoQ — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 14:37:03 GMT

Tyler Jewell: 'Peak DevOps' to Drive a New Wave of Autonomous Software Development

In his 2022 Developer Landscape report, Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, posits that the industry has reached a moment of “Peak DevOps,” where factors such as increasing software complexity, higher costs to build and maintain software systems, and lower developer job satisfaction will “seed a 3rd wave of software industrialization driven by Autonomous Software Development.”

As various functions across the software development lifecycle - such as coding, testing, and deployment - become increasingly automated through machine learning algorithms, Jewell predicts that - in the not too distant future - “coders working with IDEs” will become “model and machine learning artisans.”

From a developer marketing perspective, here are a list of key sections from the report that may be of interest.

DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report – June 2022

InfoQ editors and several contributors recently got together to discuss the latest trends in the “Cloud Computing and DevOps” space, with a focus on fundamental infrastructure and operational patterns, various technology frameworks, and the design processes and skills that a software architect or engineer must cultivate.

Some of the key takeaways from the report include:

Data Observability will help organizations better understand and troubleshoot their data-intensive systems. Data Observability can help us better understand and troubleshoot our data-intensive systems.
Serverless Databases and “Serverless as a Baseline Expectation” are becoming table stakes for cloud services being used by developers.
FinOps practices continue to mature. Awareness of cloud spending has increased and offerings have evolved to provide better insights.
Low- or no-code platforms continue to mature, especially for internal tooling and automation uses.
The role of “Platform Engineer” is emerging within many sizes of organizations to support the building of related platform abstractions, APIs, and tooling.

Read the complete ‘DevOps and Cloud Trends Report - June 2022’

The Future of Tech Conferences and How to Earn Developer Trust: Anadelia Fadeev

In this interview, Anadelia Fadeev, Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Teleport, describes some of the biggest changes that have emerged in digital marketing, demand gen, and events over the course of the pandemic. She talks about the future of technical conferences, the benefits and limitations of using “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) as a success metric, and how sales and marketing teams can best work together, using both shared goals and terminology. Finally, she emphasizes why building trust with developer audiences is paramount to all other marketing activities.

Read the full interview here

The Rise of the Staff+ Engineer

There continues to be a dearth of technical talent in the software development space. Organizations are investing more in not only retaining - but growing - their top technical brass into a relatively new kind of leadership role: the Staff+ Engineer.

While there are many variations of the role, the Staff+ Engineer typically remains very close to the technology, drives the technical direction of the product, and empowers other software engineers - and teams - to collaborate and grow within the company.

It’s also a very influential role when it comes to adopting new technologies and influencing software purchasing decisions within the organization.

Learn more about the Staff+ Engineer role how it influences software purchasing

Tracks Announced for QConSF 2022

Tracks for the the 17th annual QCon San Francisco (Oct 24-26) have been finalized and published. While the core themes of software architecture, DevOps, and development define most of the technical tracks, some new track themes this year will include the Staff+ Engineer Path, MLOps, and Green Tech.

See the complete list of QConSF 2022 Tracks here

New eMag: Native Compilation Boosts Java (Available for Sponsorship)

Java dominates enterprise applications. But in the cloud, Java is more expensive than some competitors. Native compilation with GraalVM makes Java in the cloud cheaper: It creates applications that start much faster and use less memory.

So native compilation raises many questions for all Java users: How does native Java change development? When should we switch to native Java? When should we not? And what framework should we use for native Java?

This InfoQ eMag will provide answers to these questions.

Exclusive sponsorship of this eMag is still available. Generate a minimum of 300 worldwide leads while getting your message in front of targeted audience of senior Java developers and architects. Email sales@c4media.com for sponsorship details.

InfoQ Top 10 Content Items Published in Q2 2022

Tyler Jewell: 'Peak DevOps' to Drive a New Wave of Autonomous Software Development

InfoQ — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 15:22:23 GMT

Humans [will] shift their role from developers to directors, taking responsibility for describing system intent, managing the robotic infrastructure that builds and maintains the software, and providing the data + models needed to arm and improve the machines.
These are largely the skills and expertise embodied by data scientists today. A large majority of the 40 million professional developers that will exist in 2040 will undergo a reskilling in order to adopt and embrace these techniques. Everyone will be scrambling to revisit their undergraduate statistics classes; I know I will.
-Tyler Jewell, Dell Technologies Capital

Jewell’s report is quite expansive, covering past and current trends and providing economic forecasts across a wide range of DevOps tools and technologies. From a developer marketing perspective, here are some key sections of the report that may be of particular interest:

Diagrams of interest from the report:

3 Waves of Software Supply Chain Industrialization
Shades of DevOps Roles (“Patrick Debois of Snyk maps the roles of DevOps teams over time”)

Tracks Announced for QConSF 2022

InfoQ — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 18:15:29 GMT

Green Tech: Uncover the latest trends in environmentally friendly production software and processes.
MLOps: All about emerging engineering discipline combining ML, DevOps and Data Engineering. Topics include: feature engineering, model dev, lifecycle management. Model Inference/Prediction, observability).
"Just" Engineering Culture: Lessons learned from failures and outages, including humane operations, effective postmortems, and building systems knowing humans make mistakes.
Practical Security: How security needs to change to prioritize DevEX while balancing security risk tolerance. Topics around scaling auth/authz architecture, privacy at scale, securing public API endpoints, securing the cloud, insider threats, & the cost of security.
Effective SRE: Good SREs are pragmatic. They analyze, they use their big picture understanding of a service and how it fits into a wider system to come up with solutions that minimize impacts to others or provide positive impacts to others. These are their stories.
Optimizing Teams for Fast Flow: Patterns and heuristics enabling fast flow and rapid evolution of modern software, including decision/sense-making techniques, team dynamics, & technical practices.
Languages of Infra: Beyond YAML: Managing/provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration is just the start. Exploring: Cue, unification, OPA, Operator Pattern for Nonclustered Resources, Scalable Configuration Management.
Architecting for Change at Scale: Change is one of the few constants in technology, so the better we are at enabling change at scale, the more we can focus on serving the needs of our customers. Design systems that are easy to evolve to keep up with the needs of the business while minimizing your risk and technical debt.
Rethinking Our Relationship with the Frontend: Let's talk about the frontend, not with the tools we use but through the problems we're solving; re-usability, composition, abstraction, velocity, and performance.
Modern APIs: Building and Evolving: Exploring patterns & practices building APIs with GraphQL, Kubernetes, Service Meshes, & API Gateways.
Building Modern Backends: Polyglot, developer-focused track around Innovations building low-friction, performant backends powering software today.
"Before & After": Hybrid Work Strategies: Hybrid work, 4-day workweeks, remote work, working from a remote island, returning to the office, and how these impact development productivity and, ultimately, careers.
Operating Microservices: Microservices solve numerous problems around cognitive load, velocity, isolation, and scalability - if you do them right. Topics around: legacy integration, observability, reverting microservices, and day 2 operations.
Staff+ Engineer Path: What skills do you need to develop if you want to stay on the technical track to technical lead, staff, or principal? What will it take to thrive in this type of role?
Architectures You've Always Wondered About: Marquee use case track, featuring well-known companies solving software challenges. Past companies include Google, Netflix, BBC, Twitter, Zoom, Snowflake, etc.

To learn more about QConSF 2022 sponsorship opportunities, email sales@c4media.com

InfoQ Developer Marketing Newsletter (Quarterly)

InfoQ Trends Report 2023; A Look Inside our Practitioner-Driven Editorial Model; The Most Popular Webinar Topics and Content of 2023

The InfoQ Trends Reports 2023 eMag

QCon London 2024 (April 8-10) Sponsorships Still Available

Case Studies

By Practitioners for Practitioners: A Look Inside the InfoQ & QCon Editorial Model - Daniel Bryant

Top InfoQ Webinar Topics of 2023; Available 2024 Dates

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2023

By Practitioners for Practitioners: A Look Inside the InfoQ & QCon Editorial Model - Daniel Bryant

AI, ML, & Data Engineering Trends Report 2023; Growth Marketing Best Practices; QCon London 2024 Tracks Announced; InfoQ Top 10 Content

AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report - September 2023

Case Studies

Growth, Attribution, and AI - A Marketing Journey with Rosalind Lutsky

QCon London 2024 (April 8-10) Tracks Announced; Sponsorships Available

2024 InfoQ Webinar and InfoQ Live Roundtable Dates Now Available

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q3 2023

Growth, Attribution, and AI - A Marketing Journey with Rosalind Lutsky

Cloud & DevOps Trends Report 2023; Marketing at Early-Stage Startups; QConSF Tracks Announced; InfoQ Top 10 Content

DevOps and Cloud Trends Report 2023 - July 2023

Marketing Trends

Stack Overflow 2023 Survey Results: How Professional Developers are Using AI Tools

Case Studies

The Art of Marketing at Early-Stage Startups: Brandon Hoe

QConSF (Oct 2-6) Track Abstracts and Hosts Finalized; Few Sponsorship Spots Remain

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q2 2023

Stack Overflow 2023 Survey Results: How Professional Developers are Using AI Tools

The Art of Marketing at Early-Stage Startups: Brandon Hoe

ChatGPT is fun, but will it replace programmers?; Architecture & Design Trends Report; QCon New York Tracks Announced; Top Content of Q1 2023

Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report - April 2023

QCon New York (June 13-15) Track Abstracts and Hosts Finalized; Sponsorships Still Available

Marketing Trends

ChatGPT is fun, but will it replace programmers (and marketers)?

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q1 2023

ChatGPT is fun, but will it replace programmers (and marketers)?

QCon NY 2023 - Track Topics and Hosts Confirmed

QCon London 2023 track abstracts and hosts confirmed

Developer Marketing Does Not Exist; InfoQ Top Technology Trends Report; QCon New York Returns to Brooklyn; Top Content of 2022

The InfoQ eMag - Trends Reports 2022

InfoQ 2022 Year In Review Podcast

QCon New York Returns to Brooklyn (June 13-15); Sponsorships Now Open

QCon London (March 27-29) Track Abstracts Finalized; Sponsorships Still Available

Marketing Trends

'Developer Marketing Does Not Exist': Adam DuVander

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2022

'Developer Marketing Does Not Exist': Adam DuVander

InfoQ 2022 Software Technology Adoption Survey Results; QCon London 2023 Track Topics Confirmed; The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing

InfoQ 2022 Software Technology Adoption Survey: The Results are In

Key Findings

The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing: Cody De Arkland

AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report— August 2022

Track Topics Confirmed for QCon London 2023

InfoQ Top 10 Content Items Published in Q3 2022

InfoQ 2022 Software Technology Adoption Survey: The Results are In

Key Findings

Biggest Technical Challenges

Role

Technology Adoption

Cloud-Native Technologies / Architectural Approaches

Database / Data Engineering Technologies

Software Development / Delivery

Audience Demographics and Commercial Product Adoption

Creating Content that Connects with Practitioners: Cody De Arkland (Part II)

The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing: Cody De Arkland (Part I)

'Peak DevOps' and Beyond; Future of Tech Conferences; QConSF 2022 Tracks Announced; Rise of the Staff+ Engineer - InfoQ Partner Newsletter

Tyler Jewell: 'Peak DevOps' to Drive a New Wave of Autonomous Software Development

DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report – June 2022

The Future of Tech Conferences and How to Earn Developer Trust: Anadelia Fadeev

The Rise of the Staff+ Engineer

Tracks Announced for QConSF 2022

New eMag: Native Compilation Boosts Java (Available for Sponsorship)

InfoQ Top 10 Content Items Published in Q2 2022

Tyler Jewell: 'Peak DevOps' to Drive a New Wave of Autonomous Software Development

Tracks Announced for QConSF 2022