Adam: In terms of the, like, nuts and bolts of technical communication, I think probably the biggest challenge for a technical person is becoming comfortable with imprecision.

 I think I first saw this I early days of APIs again I was tasked at Wired with writing about REST. What is REST this new API and I. I dug into it and wrote up a pretty short, admittedly, but still, you know, like within the requirements of my assignment article on what is REST and somebody shared it on on Reddit programming and it like made it to the top. My editors were like thrilled cause it was getting all of these views.

But then I went and read the comments and. And it was a bunch of technical people saying that I had completely glossed over the details. One of them even went like line by line and tore me down for each line. And, you know, one of them was like, “you didn’t read Fielding’s thesis that created REST” and and they were right, which is the worst thing. 

And this still, maybe it’s, maybe I shouldn’t admit this in a, in something that’s going to be public. I have still not read Roy Fielding’s entire thesis, because I don’t have to, and most of us don’t have to be able to actually use this technology in the way that it’s useful, and that’s being comfortable with imprecision. 

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

I’ve got a book coming up in the next couple months. But I wanted to introduce you to another amazing tech author. This is, uh, an episode that I’ve been waiting for.

Uh, so here we go.

I’ve got a really interesting guest nerd today. Really excited to introduce you to Adam Duvander. And I just screwed that up. No, I did it right. I did it right.

Adam: No, it’s good.

Joel: I did it right. Ah, see,

Adam: It’s good.

Joel: I stress myself out so much. 

Adam is the founder, principal consultant at EveryDeveloper.com.

I will let him give his background and everything, but you have probably read a lot of his work if you’re in the in the technical fields. He’s kind of a backwards, he’s kind of like Bizarro Joel, whereas, you know, it’s my job to help technical folks, think about marketing and to reach out.

It’s Adam’s job to help marketers think more like developers. So I thought it’d be great to have you on today, man.

Adam: Great to be here. Thanks.

Joel: So I want to start off just with your nerd origin story. How did you get here? You know, you say you’re a “developer slash accidental marketer.” Those are my favorite kinds. So let’s get that that nerd origin story.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah, well, I mean, started like a lot of them do. CS degree in the dot com era. There’s like one path that someone like that would take, which is put the blinders on and write code for the next several decades, right? But I actually went into a communications double major. I mean, I was always a lot more interested in sort of what you can do with technology than the technology itself.

I mean, I I taught programming before I even graduated, so communicating about it was always a key piece of what I did. And my first job coding found me from things that I wrote about coding. So it was it was there from the get go. And so eventually that became the main thing.

So starting kind of on the journalistic side, I wrote for Wired was Editor of Programmable Web, which was the first directory of APIs and really resource for APIs. And from there transition to that marketing side, because I realized that companies needed a lot of help communicating these technical products to that audience.

And so then eventually that was a natural, naturally led to EveryDeveloper, which is the company that I run that works with companies that have technical products and helps them reach those audiences.

Joel: So kind of a a content shop marketing advocate, but you take it from the technical perspective first .It’s developer first. I’d love to hear about that approach.

Adam: Yeah, so any company that wants to be able to communicate with that audience, they’re a good fit for EveryDeveloper. So often that means they have some kind of dev tool or API that they want devs to use. And and so you mentioned content. Yeah, that is, that’s the frequent output.

That is definitely our specialty. But before you can create content that that will actually resonate with that audience, you have to really understand that audience and dig into what will actually hit the mark with them. And so that’s a big part of what we do. Yes, we produce the content, but there’s a lot of the effort up front to, to get it right.

Joel: Yeah. And that’s what I want to dig into. Cause I have the same experience. I have people coming to me saying, “Hey, take a look at my pitch deck and brush it up.” Or, you know, “Hey, can you rewrite the website?” And I’m like,” yes. But we need to take several steps back. We need to understand you know, a messaging platform.”

We need to really do, you know, that introspective message therapy that I talk about first. And part of my approach is to bring the technical details to undergird a lot of the higher level I’ll call it this, the softer, less dense, more emotional stuff because I’m often working with very technical companies who, you know, need to think about their higher self, if you think about kind of like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is what I talk about a lot.

You come at this from a little bit of the opposite way, maybe sometimes I mean, if you’re working with a technical organization that has a development tool, But you’re working with the marketing people and the marketing people are scratching their heads going, “I don’t know how to sell this thing to developers.”

It kind of feels like there’s a disconnect even internally. Is that something that you get into and repair that relationship?

Adam: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think one of the ways you could see us is a translator between the marketers that have to explain the product to to the market and the people who created it. I think, I mean, that’s one way, and 

that’s definitely a piece of what we do. I think yeah. That’s the more important thing that we do, and that others, people listening to this, need to do, is to be able to become that translator between the problems someone has, and then the ways that your solution solves that problem. And that’s re that really is a, that kind of different way of being able to look at it, you know, finding the other level on the hierarchy of needs. It’s I think that too often, and I think marketers and technical folks who are attempting to explain things both have this issue that starts with that product, starts with the solution they already have, and I think that’s where those things break down, is that you need to, that’s, like you said, of taking those steps back, you need to really start thinking about what are, what do they care about before they’ve discovered that product, and how can you tap into that.

Joel: yes. And I find that a lot with founders. “I built a thing.”

“Okay, great. We can talk about the thing. Have you actually looked to see if anybody. needs that thing?”

“Well, I needed that thing.”

“Okay. Is anybody else needed that thing or did they need a variation of this thing?”

So you’re very much turning that view outwards, which is, which I think is phenomenal.

I discovered you because I was working on my book and I was looking for technical And your book, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist, comes up and I thought, oh, well, you know, I guess I don’t need to write my book. We already have a handsome, bald gentleman who’s writing about this. And then we talked, I sought you out, and you know, I did realize that we’re kind of coming at this from opposite directions, both sitting in the same seat. Right? So I kind of want to jam with you a little bit about your experiences.

Maybe some case studies or successes you’ve had but what really was the eye opening thing for you?

I mean, you were a content developer and a developer, you’re a content developer of developer content for organizations. When did you realize that you had an opportunity to step out and do this on a broader scale?

Adam: Well, it was probably earlier than even being in that role. And that is at Programmable Web, I received press releases all the time. And in that era, it, I guess, felt like enough to just say “we have an API” as the press release. So I saw the same press release over and over again. I attempted, or my team attempted, to figure out which of these have actual interesting things going on. What is the, what’s the thing that we would actually explain to someone? And so that was the aha moment, was Oh my gosh, these companies need someone who can help explain why their thing exists from the inside.

Like that you know, and so that was the, that was what led me to go into what ended up being marketing. I wasn’t sure that was the the department it would be, but that, you know, that .That was at SendGrid and at many of the other places that I worked that was the department. And yeah, so the aha happened before I was in house.

And I think it the running my own thing was something that I’d considered at several stages along the way. I think it was As an advisor to APImatic, which is a SDK generation tool, that I realized, “Oh, there’s actually like the bit that’s, that I do well actually does better from the outside,” like being able to have that objective view is actually more helpful externally.

And it doesn’t require doing all of the rest of the job necessarily. If you can identify what are these key areas? What are the problems that developers have that lead them to need SDK generation in this case, right? What yeah. What are the other things that developers are considering before they end up at your tool. Those sorts of things are actually way easier to say from the outside. Yeah.

Joel: The same thing, you know, it wasn’t until I got to an agency and was looking across a portfolio of, you know, 12, 13 different companies and realizing that we’ve got to differentiate and the way that we’re trying to differentiate through brand and cheeky messaging and stuff. That’s all fine.

Fine and good. But there are fundamental challenges that technical organizations have. And yeah, from the outside is the best perspective, because I have several clients who, you know, would come up to me and I’d say, “what’s your big idea?” And they’d rattle something off. And I would say, “well, that’s your Gartner category.

But What’s your big idea?” And they would spout something corporate and it’s like, “well, yeah, let’s Google that. Yes, you and 20, 000 other companies.” 

What do you think are some of the largest challenges that someone who is technical has when they’re When they put their marketing hat on, when you ask, when you get in front of a developer and you ask them, what’s, you know, what’s, my language is what’s your Big Idea, but how do you broach that with them to start doing some diagnostics?

Adam: I should say that while it is very useful to have someone like us come in and see it from the outside, there are techniques you can use to be able to understand how others see it. There’s research you can do. Even as a technical person, you’re in a better place to say, “how would I solve this without the product that I helped create?” And then you can go, Oh, there actually are some, I mean, maybe there’s some direct competitors, in which case, I think to your point, the question becomes, how are you different, but there are often. multiple open source projects that you could piece together, and you can start to get a feel for who is this audience who doesn’t know the product.

But in terms of the, like, nuts and bolts of technical communication, I think probably the biggest challenge for a technical person is becoming comfortable with imprecision. So you know so much of the details that you want to elevate those into how you talk about it. And even if your audience is technical, like the companies that I work with, you still need to become comfortable with imprecision because you can’t put all the details at the forefront.

That won’t fit in an H1 on a website, all the details, right? And This actually was pretty early in my story that I think I first saw this I early days of APIs again I was tasked at Wired with writing about REST. What is rest this new API formats you know, approach. And I. I dug into it and wrote something from the mindset of a web developer who has seen URLs for their whole web development career and realized like, Oh my gosh, like REST is basically that it’s like, but instead of returning HTML, it’s returning XML in those days.

Right. And. Wrote up a pretty short, admittedly, but still, you know, like within the requirements of my assignment article on what is REST and somebody shared it on on Reddit programming and on Digg, this’ll, that will date it, right? Like, and it like made it to the top. My editors were like thrilled cause it was getting all of these views.

But then I went and read the comments and. And it was a bunch of technical people saying that I had completely glossed over the details. One of them even went like line by line and sort of

Joel: Oof.

Adam: tore me down for each line. And, you know, one of them was like, you didn’t read Fielding’s thesis that created REST and and they were right, which is the worst thing.

And this still, maybe it’s, maybe I shouldn’t admit this in a, in something that’s going to be public. I have still not read Roy Fielding’s entire thesis, his entire dissertation on APIs, which I’ve been a part of for a long time. And I think that’s because I don’t have to, and most of us don’t have to be able to actually use this technology for, in the way that it’s useful, and that is that’s a, being comfortable with imprecision, being comfortable not having every last bit of, in that case it was REST, but, I mean, I bumped into this with with security topics, it’s really hard, you know, you want to be able to, you know, To have some edge cases in there and describe it, that’s still important to do, but you have to find the right spot for that, and and that is tough, and I have a feeling that for the for the nerds, I guess we can say, since that’s you’re self identified in the title, right?

For the nerds listening that is yeah, that’s something to to that you have to get comfortable with. And I think maybe any marketers listening might have an aha that says, Oh, this is when I am trying to do that translation. This is one of the problems I run into, which is, I’ve been too imprecise.

And so some of that feedback, you have to incorporate. But then, at some level, someone has to become comfortable with that.

Joel: I tell a story in my workshop when I was at my startup. The product was based on an ant swarming technology, ant swarming algorithm. And I went back and forth and back and forth with the lead developer. My metaphor was, it’s the way that ants find food. So it’s the way that they detect these particles, and then they spread out, and then they build branches, and it’s the way they find food.

And I went back and forth and back and forth with the lead developer, and he said, “No, it’s an ant colony optimization algorithm. It’s more technically like the way they build tunnels.” And I found what worked was, Number one, I thanked him for the correction. And I said, “you know what, I totally appreciate that distinction, and I would like you to write me in the white paper a very detailed description of what an ACO is, and that it’s how they build tunnels.

However, for the purposes of this one sheet, for the purposes of this paragraph on the website,” I said, “Is it accurate enough to get a point across without more questions?” And I said, “because frankly, everyone has seen ants in their kitchen during the summertime. Very few people have observed ant tunnels.”

Adam: Yes.

Joel: And when he would start hemming and hawing and saying well, yes, technically, an ant colony optimization could be applied to the communication structures…” I”…, knew I’d had him you know, it’s very difficult sometimes for a technical person to admit that they were wrong or admit that they’re coming from a place maybe of being overbearing.

But we, yeah we hashed it out and we were able to use both metaphors at different levels of communication.

Adam: yeah.

Joel: And I guess the other thing to your story is, you know, Wired Magazine you know, for better or for worse for what it was a popular culture magazine. You weren’t writing a white paper,

Adam: . Yep.

Joel: but how do you thread the needle and make sure that, because technical people are going to stumble across the marketing.

Right? So this is what you do. You leave enough enough technical undergirding to pass the sniff test to get to that next level of content where you really blow them out of the water. What are some of the techniques that you use to make sure that you’re remembering that balance?

Adam: I think it does go back to the understanding how the other one sees it, and so looking to ground it in that. Also I find some of the, the oversimplification and extreme imprecision that you might see in marketing is kind of the flashy the, “this is the easiest way to do this.

This is the simplest, this is highly scalable,” right? Like that’s a, that’s like a. That rings a bell in a developer mind because they’re, they say, “Oh, what does that mean?” Like they want to know, they want to know what that actually means in the market. It really just means “it’s great. It’ll work for everything you do.”

Right. Which is too imprecise. And so looking for ways to not ring those bells. And then actually saying things simpler is often the solution. How, you know, how plainly can we say this? Not plain, like generic, because you want to stand out, but, you know, yeah. How can you kind of simplify this concept without saying it’s simple, right?

Without saying you know, the sort of uh, hand wavy. Type of things.

Joel: What I love about your book Developer Marketing Doesn’t Exist, number one is it opens up with the Matrix story and the and as do I. What can you recount that and just sort of, and it, for anybody looking up the book it does have a picture of a bent spoon on it. So you know what scene we’re talking about

Adam: Yeah yeah the idea is that when Neo goes to see the Oracle he sees the Spoon Boy, I believe is how he’s known…

Joel: in the credits.

Adam: …in pop culture, at least. Is he in there, in the credits that way? That would be great. Yeah Spoon Boy is bending a spoon, as far as Neo can tell, in front of him, and and Neo’s asking about that, and Spoonboy says “there is no spoon,” because the Matrix is a simulation, and so in that same way, I’m saying developer marketing does not exist.

Because done right, it shouldn’t appear, right? Like, it shouldn’t be the thing that you are focused on in that same way as, you know, the spoon isn’t actually the thing that you’re focused on. And yeah, and that is that’s the approach. A lot of people have told me that they think it works beyond developers.

And I say, yes, absolutely. Let’s get it right with devs first. And then we can start having marketing not show up in other in other areas. I think where it’s especially important for developers is like that highly scalable phrase that I mentioned. Developers are extremely skeptical.

And their job is to look for edge cases and put things together and pattern match. And so they see things like that. And they say, “when I’ve seen that before, it’s usually BS” or “what do they mean by that? I can already think of several reasons why that’s false, right?” So it’s trying to avoid those situations.

And yeah. And then again, comes back to how does developer see it? What are they doing before they have discovered my thing.

Joel: When you were talking earlier about competitors, I get a lot of companies saying, “well, we have no competition”. And I’m like, “well, doing nothing is competition.” Dealing with the problem is a competition. And if the pain of dealing with that problem isn’t bigger than, you know, the pain of fixing it…

Adam: yeah.

Joel: …then you don’t have a motivated audience.

So yeah, I, I love that bringing it back to the, to, I don’t want to even say the buyers because I think developers are not in the mindset of buying, they’re not in the mindset of being marketed to they’re in the mindset of seeing something that works and learning.

Not speaking for you but I find with a lot of my workshops that I do, it is their focus on the marketing. So I think that spoon not existing, don’t focus on the spoon, focus on the objective, which is imparting information, developing those relationships and building trust with your audience. 

What are some of the tools and resources that you use that you’d suggest to maybe a company as they’re doing that research, as they’re looking outwards of different scales too.

Cause you know, you strap, strappy startup doesn’t have access to a research wing.

Adam: Yeah. And, you know, there aren’t a lot of resources. That’s part of why I wrote the book. I imagine that’s part of why you wrote your book, too. So there are a handful of books like ours in this space. I have a post I’m happy to share that you can put in the notes of some that are worthy reads and and, you know, based on who is, who’s listening to this? It might, you know, maybe you choose three of the ten or whatever it is, right?

But on different levels of, you know, of approaching documentation of certainly the marketing side, developer relations And so happy to share those. And they’re, it’s great that there are more than there were, you know, a few years ago.

I obviously need to add your book when it comes out to that to that list of resources. 

But yeah, on the tool front, I mean, I keep it pretty darn simple. And like the first thing that comes to my mind will not blow your mind. And that is Google Docs. Like it’s, it is, it’s how, it’s what we use for everything.

And. You know, it seems like a generic thing to suggest, but I will say, and especially to the technical people listening to this, that you might be attempting to get collaboration from less technical people through like Markdown in a GitHub repo. And if you’re wondering why you aren’t getting feedback, try copying and pasting that into a Google doc and you’ll be amazed what you see.

And it’s just, you know, the things are built in for it. I’ve tried a lot of tools. I would love to find like the perfect writing tool that does a few things that maybe Google docs doesn’t. But so far I keep coming back to it. I mean, being able to comment and, Suggest changes and really collaborate on the document.

I, you know, I keep coming back there and we’ve definitely worked with clients where after it goes there, it needs to go into Markdown. That was, I mean, even at Zapier the whole marketing team at Zapier would work with Markdown written into Google Docs. This is before Google Docs supported Markdown.

And then. It went out to whatever, you know, wherever that content had to go after that just because of the collaboration features that are in there already.

Joel: Yeah. And I guess you’ve got the benefit of of being in a technical organization and people being slightly technical, but you can’t live out of a JIRA or an Asana queue. It’s not for knowledge sharing.

Adam: Yes, yep.

Joel: So do you, when you’re working with a client what are your steps or your approach to building kind of that, that I would call it a first principles messaging, like the large muscle movements, the big rocks is that put into a document or put into a repository that you make available to everybody.

A lot of marketing teams like to hand out that brand PDF. And they think that covers it. How deep do you need to go when you’re doing technical?

Adam: Yeah, and we tend not to do kind of the messaging type of like messaging frameworks and sort of that bit to communicate. We’re a lot more focused on what do we need that will reach those devs, right, in the first place. And what we do, which, I actually have a second book. If you haven’t read any book, read Developer Marketing Does Not Exist.

But once you’ve read that, I do have a second book which talks all about technical content strategy. And so that’s a big part of what we do. And we like to think in concepts, not topics. So a lot of, so we dig into what are the things that someone’s doing before they find us? That’s the. Kind of top level question, right?

Another important one is What do we believe that our competitors don’t? So that’s being able to answer that question kind of gets to what you had said about okay, that’s your Gartner category. How do you differentiate? But then from there, we create and describe these concepts.

And so a concept is something that could be multiple topics, it could be, blog posts, a deep guide, could be a series of webinars or talks at conferences. I mean, It’s an overall approachh that we think is something the developer cares about before they get to you.

So in terms of what do we deliver that then clients see? We have a concept catalog, we call it, that describes that and has and has potential topics within it, and we maintain that as a living document with the clients we work with, and in some cases they go off and they, and there’s, you know, might have like programming language tutorials as one angle. We do that, but maybe they want to do that internally with their product team or something. So they’ll kind of take that one off and and go and begin to produce those. And we’ll work from that with the stuff that we produce also. And so having this kind of one place where we can, it’s in Google Doc again.

See, I told you I love Google Doc so that we can easily just Copy and paste, you know, move it up, move it down, depending on kind of priority and and work from that. But it’s way different than a content calendar. It doesn’t have dates on it. That’s too detailed. Like a lot of times a content calendar will say, Joel needs to write a Python post on, you know, March 2nd.

And it’s like, okay, well, what is this? Like, what’s the whole point of like, that would be that’s just not enough. It’s not specific enough for a topic. And it’s not even, it’s not even specific enough for a concept because the concept has to be, what does someone want to do with Python? Is this someone who’s brand new to Python?

Or is this someone who is writing, you know, writing a lot of production Python, right now? So getting more specific, even with the concepts so that you can then you can pull things that are actually useful and you know there’s a good chance that this will resonate once you write it, as opposed to it’s just like, it’s like a blindfolded dartboard with a with a content calendar, most of the time, the way most organizations do it.

And yeah, so that, that document kind of helps direct the effort that we do and that clients do.

Joel: I’ll definitely pick up the the other book. I’m flipping through the Developer Marketing Doesn’t Exist book, and I like how you’re calling out how the different chapters are really the places that developers hang out, right? You know, blog posts, yes. But tutorials, guides events, open source communities; how you can actually use the tool that you have as marketing as maybe like a community edition or, you know, a free open source version of it.

I’m not seeing a lot of social media in here. And I think that’s something that a lot of people get hung up on. They’re ” my marketing calendars got to have, I’ve got to have my three posts for the day and or three posts for the week. And I’ve got to make sure that I’m hitting all these other things.”

And there’s so many other places that you can provide air cover. But they have to be coordinated and the messaging has to thread between one to the other. So I imagine that’s a large piece of what that simple little Google doc does for you guys.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah, and I think, I see social as sort of amplification of other of other content. And also it’s because so much of what I think about is how are we gonna find the, find those devs in the first place. I’m not sure that’s the best way to find the Find devs in the first place, especially now in what year is it?

Yeah. So it’s yeah, it, you know, search is still a good way. And if you’re showing up where the places that devs are. So if you find a a social platform that has devs, if you can show up with that right mindset, and that’s really what, I mean, that Developer Marketing Does Not Exist says, you need to have this dev mindset, and here’s how you’d apply it in each of these places as the, as it goes through the chapters.

Yeah, you show up in that, whether it’s an event or it’s you know, the right subreddit. If you show up with that same kind of authentic dev mindset you’ll succeed.

Joel: I think the spray and pray social and advertising is not the way to go anymore. And, you know, we’re seeing a fracturing of social media right now anyway, where a lot of communities are starting to develop. 

I’ve been on, you know, an information security Mastodon instance, and I’m like, my peeps are there, and we can talk a little bit lower level, but we also cut up and there’s personalities and a community developing there, whereas you flip over to, you know, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and it’s a garbage fire, or, you know, true.

BlueSky does seem to be segmenting itself a little bit. It’s interesting. I’m reserving judgment on it. But what are some of the more surprising places that you found success sharing that technical information and getting the resonance? Obviously. You know, you don’t go into the the REST subreddit anymore, cause they’ll boo you out of there, but where else?

Adam: Yeah, I, you know, I think so first of all, on BlueSky, it definitely has a feel of early Twitter. I think it, for me, it might be that those are some of the same people who I originally met on early Twitter that I’m seeing there, you know, early adopters.

Joel: I have bumped back into people. Yeah, yeah, very much.

Adam: And I think finding those folks who are talking about the things and yeah, like you mentioned, if you found a Mastodon for security nerds, like that seems like a good place.

And that’s, so I guess that’s actually, it’s a, it’s more a general answer, which is, I think if you understand who that actual audience is, then you’ll be able to discover where they are. It’s still, it is it’s tough. It’s tough to get, you know, replies to emails or even you know, any sort of engagement on a social platform with the technical audience.

So that is still why I returned to search as the primary way. And if you’re talking about the problems and not your product, you’re going to do better in, in search. And I have found that continuing into AI as well. For better or worse, there’s a someone I know, former client also. There’s one YouTube video that talks about using their product in a completely wrong way.

It’s not possible to do what this YouTube video says you can do with their product, but it’s somehow it’s things people search for. And so they would get lots of new signups trying this. And then of course. AI picked that up and that actually increased as people were asking ChatGPT, “Can I do this thing” that it turns out this product doesn’t do, but it doesn’t know not to say it.

So that’s the downside. On the upside, the things that are working to have your content discovered, and in typical search seems to be translating, you know, if you’re talking about the problems people have, that’s the sort of thing that they type into these AI tools, so I think your discoverability in those will also increase if you’re able to if you’re able to really zero in on what’s the stuff they care about, not what the heck does my product do, and how can I tell them all about that.

I actually, I have a story of a client where we did that. In a in a really great way that has that is maybe not obvious on the surface. And that’s, so Algolia is a search platform, right? So you can take their stuff, plug it in and be able to have like really good, search on your own site or e commerce store or whatever it is.

And one of the features is that handy one where it starts to suggest what you are typing, right? So we worked with them and identified this autocomplete feature. As a potential kind of concepts area where that we could have some content about. And there’s a couple ways you could go about that and the product focused way is to say this is all about like, here, go here, get your Algolia API key.

Do all that. So in the book, it’s the developer content mind trick in the guides section, but that approach can be used in any type of content. And so we said, what if we help them actually do this without anything? So this goes back to the, your, really your biggest competitor as a technical product is someone just building it themselves, which devs want to do anyway.

Technical people want to go and build it all themselves anyway. And this post goes through and says, here’s how, you know, you need this this HTML. You need to connect it to some JavaScript here. And oh, you’re going to have something some API in the background that is attached to a database of potential things to be able to look up these things.

And it’s like, oh, right. That sounds hard. And so at the end of that, you’ve got your steps. If you really want to do it, you know, the pieces that you need to be able to do this. But at the end. After you’ve taught them, you’ve earned a little, “hey, by the way, Algolia does this.” And that post, it’s been a couple years and it continues to do really well.

And I think the reason for that is that it actually answers the question that the dev has at that time, not the question Algolia wishes they had, which is, How can I sign up for Algolia yesterday, right? Like that’s what, that’s whatever a marketer wants it to be.

Joel: And at the same time, you haven’t promised it’s, it does it like magic. And that’s one of those, one of those red flags where your dev is going to go “bullshit…”

Adam: yeah.

Joel: “…I want to know how they’re doing this magic.” And then they say, “wow, that’s a 20th level spell. Maybe I’ll just bring them in to do that for me because I’m only here.”

Yeah that’s, I love that story. That’s really super helpful. 

 Who are some of the communicators and authors? And I will post that, that article to those other books. But who are some of the technical communicators that you really admire and why?

Adam: Yeah. You know, recently on, so on speaking of social places to see people. LinkedIn. I mean, I’ve been a long fan of LinkedIn, but but it’s definitely has picked up traction in the last year or so. And in my API world Emanuel Paraskakis, I had to look up to make sure I could say his name.

He’s formerly at a startup called Apiary long ago and then they were acquired by Oracle and he has been talking a lot about sort of API product management and it’s it’s one of those roles that I think speaks a lot to what we’ve been talking about, which is it could be taken as a super technical role in an organization. And yes, Emmanuel has that background and can speak those words, but it really is about identifying what those problems are. What are those things that you are trying to do? And how can you get people internally on the same page and communicating and so he has had a lot of great things to to say kind of in his unpacking his his API experience.

 That’s someone I go to.

 Then another, I’m not sure where to find her now, but Taylor Barnett-Torabi is someone whose career you might look at, especially if you’re a technical person. Taylor is a computer science person who worked as an engineer, developer relations, product sometimes did product without it even being in the title, which might be something for someone technical who wants to communicate might be thinking about that. Yeah, so she’s someone who I have always looked to and kind of watched her career path as she’s worked in very technical roles, very technical companies and been sort of that translator type of person.

And so she’s someone that I go to also for those insights.

Joel: Yeah, it’s always good to have people to keep an eye on and learn from I’ve been podcasting, you know, forever, but just getting back into it. And I’m like, who are the NPR interviewers that I really enjoy? And what is it about them? And finding somebody to look at and sort of, deconstruct that is super helpful.

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We now return you to our podcast already in progress.

Besides nerding out, which I’m sure you, you have to do to continue to keep yourself in the in the industry. What fun and personal projects do you do? What really keeps you grounded and unplugged sometimes?

Adam: Yeah. So I, like many people, start every day with a couple of puzzles. And so I do the New York Times Connections, but I also do a baseball one called Immaculate Grid every day. And where you have to name nine players and they have to fit the grid in the right way and discuss that with friends.

And that got me kind of re energized in, like, I got old baseball cards out, and speaking of BlueSky, I I started a little project this year where I just share one baseball card a day, and it was, it’s mainly, I mean, it is entirely for, really, this handful of friends, but I enjoy doing it, and this gives a little bit of glimpse into into me as a writer.

I decided it wasn’t enough to just write about these cards, but I had to do precisely 300 characters every day. At first that wasn’t the case, but like, it’s just, it’s another puzzle of how can I know what I want to say here, there’s only so much room to say it anyway. But now, how can I, like, go and edit and find the right way to reword this and tweak this so that I can see that zero characters left sign?

And so that’s just another puzzle that that I do every day and it lets me, you know, See old baseball cards and and kind of be able to, yeah, unwind, like you say, in that way. But I can’t turn it off still. Can’t turn the writer and editor off.

Joel: That is a hardcore copywriter. Like that’s an in depth thing, but. You know, I have tons of clients who, they’ll write a blog and, the title wraps two lines and I’m like you’re SERP, you’re search engine results page will have, no one will be able to see this. Let’s like, let’s put the most important stuff in the first two words.

And it’s just a habit that you get into. I will definitely be following that, that baseball card journey. This is, this has just been great. I mean, you know, like, like I said, you were the enemy when I saw that you had this book and I was like, man, another handsome bald guy writing about technical communications, but I’ve learned a ton from the book from our chats.

If people want to get in touch with you follow along drop some links for us. Where can they find you?

Adam: Yeah. So definitely find me on LinkedIn, but then EveryDeveloper.Com. And if you go to slash weekly on there, you will find the email that I send that pulls out insights into technical communication from unlikely places. And I send that every week.

Joel: This has been a real blast, man. I look forward to seeing what’s happening next. When we talked earlier, you said you’ve got some stuff on the horizon. Thanks for joining today. 

Adam: Yeah. Thanks, Joel.

Joel: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.