How do you build an active and engaged developer community? What is your take on Developer Evangelists?

My take on this is assess what's already out there before building something new. Your team could benefit from becoming active in preexisting communities, building content for them, or sponsoring workshops instead of building something from the ground up. My example for this is when I was first launching Crossbeam's Slack App to the market and we wanted to educated the app developers about the product. We partnered with Slack and our engineering team to author a series of blogs targeted for the Slack App community. This resulted in a surround effect where we were able to impact the dev community who in turn go their teams excited about the App and increased utilization.

I see you have a lot of documentation and developer content on your developer portal. I think you can take the following steps to building an active and engaged developer community

• Select a channel where your developers can interact with peers and experts—it could be Slack, Discord, Reddit, StackOverflow, X, HackerNews or a custom online forum. Highlight it on this portal and invite developers to sign up.

• See your channel with some FAQs, foundational content, or product news that can spark discussions and peer-to-peer engagement.

• Identify your most active developers and invite them to an in-person or virtual meetup to formally launch your community and recognize them as champions or advocates.

• Continue these meetups and empower your community members to organize their own user meetups in their local regions globally.

• Incentivize and recognize community members with badges for different activities.

Developer Evangelists can help foster technical discussions, offer live support, and moderate your community channels as you scale and grow your community. Coming from deep technical backgrounds, developer evangelists can become the perfect bridge between your product teams and customers, help build trust and credibility, and ultimately accelerate community growth.