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Shifra Williams
Guest
Let's start with you. Who are you, what do you do, and what does your company build?
I'm Shifra, Data Scientist, Technical Writer, and Educator turned DevRel. I'm the founding Developer Relations Engineer at Render, the intuitive cloud platform for deploying any app or agent.
What does DevRel actually mean to you? Is it marketing, engineering, product, or something else entirely?
DevRel is absolutely the intersection of marketing, engineering, and product, but that's more of a classification. The process of DevRel, to me, is about building relationships and trust with developers and showing them how your tools make their day materially better.
DevRel works in both directions: you speak for the company to developers, and for developers inside the company. How do you balance the two, and when have you pushed back on your own team for developers' sake?
To be honest, we all lean more heavily on the former. One example that comes to mind was exploring AI-generated video to showcase our product. While it was interesting, it felt like the wrong choice and I knew that it would cost trust with developers. They want to hear from real people, and I want to show them a real human developer experience. I'm grateful that my team trusted my input on that decision.
Tell us about your community. Who's in it, how big is it now, and what helped it grow?
We now have 7M+ developers building on Render. It's a diverse international community of founders, software engineers, data scientists, and more. But what they all have in common is that they want to focus on building their product or project at scale. Render is such a loved platform that a lot of the growth is product-led and word-of-mouth. That aside, I made some product videos that reached 8 million views, and I've spoken at events around the world demoing Render.
On a more personal note, I have a little podcast called Saturdata and a community on LinkedIn, mostly in the data and software engineering space, and I'm super grateful for those who have followed me since the beginning <3
What's a launch or campaign you ran that you're proud of? What happened, and what did you learn?
I'm incredibly proud of the Render Workflows launch. I built one of the demo apps to showcase a data pipeline built on workflows as well. One takeaway was that a lot of developers want to see demos at scale. Looking back, Trender is cool, but I wish I emphasized the scale at hundreds of thousands of workflow tasks and heavier CPU usage, to show the kind of throughput the product is capable of. I'll take that lesson with me.
In a product-led world, the product is the marketing. How do docs, onboarding, free tiers and sample apps fit into your DevRel work, and what's one change that measurably improved developer adoption?
Thinking about launches as omnichannel campaigns. Every launch should be a blog, a landing page, a YouTube video, a social push, and a partner collaboration, with in-product documentation and banners to show the user what's new. We have to keep it all connected; anything else is a missed opportunity.
What's your favorite piece of content your team has shipped, and why did it work?
One recent piece I'm proud of is a blog post I collaborated on with Mac, our analytics engineer: How Render Workflows powers our internal data pipeline. It brings together everything I'm passionate about: Workflows, data, dogfooding, humor, and patterns that developers can apply to their own work. Plus, our data team is delightful to work with.
How do you measure whether DevRel is working? What do you track, and what do you ignore?
We have extensive tracking for all the concrete outcomes our leaders care about, from signups to pipeline generated by our team. We're constantly monitoring those numbers to ensure they're healthy. Beyond that, it's all about making a positive impact in conversations with developers on the ground. When a developer came up to me at my PR.ide event to tell me they almost cried tears of joy because of how much it meant to them, that was a massive win.
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." Linus Torvalds wrote this on the Linux kernel mailing list in 2000. How does that idea shape the way you reach developers?
As I've mentioned in previous questions, everything I do starts from first principles grounded in one question: How does this make my developer's day better?
That starts with code usability and ergonomics and extends into a lot of different areas. When developers point out quick fixes in our website, I PR them myself, and my engineers appreciate it. When I find UX issues, I put myself in the user's shoes and pass them onto the team immediately with my recommended fixes. The code-first perspective is an ethos and a mindset I try to inhabit every day.
There's a well-known saying that "developers are allergic to marketing." Do you agree? How do you reach developers without it feeling like marketing?
100% accurate. I don't market to developers who won't benefit from what I have to offer. I show value to the developers who will.
Kathy Sierra argues in Badass: Making Users Awesome that the goal is to make users awesome, not to make the product look awesome. How does that idea show up in your work?
It aligns with how Render operates as an infrastructure company. We're here to get infrastructure out of the way, and make it as flexible as possible so our users can build anything they can imagine. The best products focus on enabling the user, not forcing them into a constrained framework for arbitrary reasons.
One way this shows up for me is meeting users where they're at in terms of architecture. Render is a full-stack platform, but migrations can be intimidating. That's when I encourage developers to try one new Render service, like Workflows, instead of always pushing them to migrate an entire stack. The ability to adapt and be flexible is a core part of DevRel work.
How did you first come across HackerNoon, and is there a story you've read or written here that stuck with you?
I found out about it recently! As a fan of Pydantic and observability tooling, I enjoyed this one: Observability-First AI Agents: What You Gain and What You Give Up. Especially this quote: "At this point I discovered a bug that actually made me happy."
Whose DevRel work do you admire most, whether people, companies or programs, and what do they do that others should copy?
My friend and mentor, Laís Carvalho at Pydantic. Her talk, The open source of self, is one of the best I've ever seen. She's incredibly technical, creative, smart, humble, and kind. She came up in the Python community and she pays forward everything she's learned while lifting up marginalized voices along the way. I'm truly privileged to call her my collaborator and my friend.