[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 441, entitled from developer to educator, Jonathan Bossenger talks about WordPress DevRel. It was published on Thursday, the 16th of October, 2025.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we begin with that, chat with Jonathan, just a few bits of housekeeping. I'll keep this really brief.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, at the top of the show I mentioned that I'm gonna be chatting to Jonathan Bossenger. Jonathan is an Automattician, but he has a long story in the WordPress space, and today we're talking about DevRel and developer education.
So we get an introduction to Jonathan. We learn all about his background and credentials. We talk about the path to developer relations. What is that job? What does it mean exactly what even is it? And then we talk about the areas in which he's focusing on, but which other people might focus on. The evolution of skills and how Automattic handle DevRel. Hiring and team expansion, skills, qualities needed for a devel role. The challenges of developer education and communication, and how to handle feedback in the WordPress space.
There's a whole load more, and it's all coming up in the podcast, and I really hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Jonathan Bossenger. Hello, Jonathan.
[00:04:52] Jonathan Bossenger: Hello Nathan. How are you?
[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good. Nice to have you with us. we're gonna talk today about developer relations or derel. It's an area that I don't know a great deal about, so I'm hoping that Jonathan can steer me through it.
However, I do have an intuition that in order for the WordPress project to be maintained and to be pushed forward beyond the year 2025 and into the next decade, or so, work by the dev rails is gonna be increasingly important. And, so with that in mind, Jonathan, I know it's a terribly banal question, but we need to know that you have.
Credentials, that you are somebody that we ought to pay attention to. So I'm gonna ask you to give us your little bio. Tell us about your history with WordPress in a very short format and, maybe where you work, that kind of thing.
[00:05:37] Jonathan Bossenger: Sure. So I have been a user of WordPress as a personal blogging platform since around 2009. I started blogging because I was teaching myself PHP at the time, and I wanted to just record whatever cool things I learned. and then about 10, 10 years ago exactly to the year. I went to my first word camp, and I met the local WordPress community, and I'm sure those of you who have been to your first word camps, you'll know what an amazing experience that is.
and from that point on, I decided to focus on WordPress as a sort of foundation of what I wanted to build, the rest of my career on which then turned into. kinds of interesting stories, which I've spoken about at various different places. but ultimately that led me to where I'm today, which is a developer advocate or developer relations wrangler, whatever you wanna call it.
at automatic. my focus is on the WordPress software, the WordPress project, but also our internal automatic product, products. and I get to basically do something that I enjoy doing every day. I get to teach other developers or, enable other developers. To use WordPress, to build with WordPress, to extend WordPress, in all kinds of different, ways, through documentation, through video, through podcasts like this.
that that is what my day-to-day work looks like.
[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: That's really a really nice role given that you, I think, I think it would be fair to say you're a bit of a born educator. There's a part of you which loves to teach people things. I've, learned that about you. You make a lot, you had been making a lot of content. You still make a lot of content.
And so given that you are at the intersection of technology and education. That does feel like the perfect fit for you. I dunno if I've misjudged you, but that seems like I've got the target about right.
[00:07:30] Jonathan Bossenger: I would, say that's, a, that's an accurate description. It's, not something that I ever considered. I grew up in a time where education was very didactic. It was, schooling, it was tertiary education, colleges, universities. it was not something that I saw as a career path.
that having been said, I grew up in a world where. Considering a career path writing or, creating video content for YouTube didn't exist as a concept. So everything, changes, but I guess I have always been the kind of person who likes to help and share knowledge with others.
if I look back at my, life, one of the earliest examples I can remember of that is when I was studying programming in college. we decided to launch at the college and they decided to launch a sort of adult education night classes type environment where, and this was back in 2003, where folks who wanted to learn how to use Windows, how to use Microsoft Office, could come to free night classes at the college and learn how to use these things.
And my lecturer reached out to me and said, I think you have the capability of doing this. Would you be interested in leading this program? and that was the first time that I went, oh, somebody thinks that I'm actually somebody who can help others. And I guess it's just because I was doing it in the classroom environment, I was probably, without realizing it, supporting the folks in my class, when they got stuck, I was probably helping them figure things out.
and so that was my first sort of introduction to, oh, I can take the stuff that I like playing with and doing and working with, and actually impart knowledge to others. It's not something that I ever thought I would end up doing. I didn't know what Devereux was until around 20 16, 20 17 when I went to a PHP conference here in Cape Town and there was a DeVere speaking at the conference.
she was speaking about rest APIs at the time and documenting rest APIs. I still follow her today on Twitter. I dunno where she is now. Tessa Mero is her name. And and I was like, I got to speak to her afterwards and I said to her is this your job? And she said, yes. She said, I get to travel to conferences and I get to talk about the work that our company does and I get to share with others what we do and how we do things.
And I went. Wow, that's really interesting. but again, it never really struck me as, oh, this is something I could do. It was just like, oh, okay, this is a thing that that is a job. and it was really in 20, I wanna get the date right or the year It would've been 2017. It was the year that I turned 40.
I was. Working, I think, and you'll know Craig from casts. I think it was a roundabout. Yeah. I've been working with Craig for a while. I think we started working together in 2017 actually. and I got to my 40th year and I went what do I want to do with the rest of my life? And I was, you could call it a little bit of a midlife crisis if you want.
I didn't go out and buy Harley's and, do all that kind of thing. But I went, I don't, I know I knew at that stage something in me knew that I didn't want to be working in software development as a developer for the rest of my life. And about a year or so later, Craig and I had a conversation about the company was growing.
I think this was around 20 18, 20 19. and he said to me, the company's growing. We're getting bigger. The team is growing. What do you want to do? Where do you see yourself in the next five years at Kaos? And he brought up the words, engineering manager and this kind of thing. And I had been managing people before at different roles in different types of, management or leadership positions.
And I said to him, that's just not me. I. I'm not good at the people side of things, the managing people within projects and getting people to come on board and I'm, terrible at that for various personal reasons, but the best part of my day is when one of the folks in the team comes to me and says, Hey, I'm having a problem with this.
How do I solve this? And I go, oh, yes. And I go and find a piece of code, or I find an article that I read somewhere along the line and I share that with them and I do a quick demo and they're like, oh, they get it. They have that light bulb moment. And off they go and they solve their problem.
That is the best part of my day.
[00:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's so nice.
[00:12:22] Jonathan Bossenger: absolutely. And, that was and then Craig actually at that, in that conversation, Craig actually gave me a job listing at another company where they were looking for the kind of thing that we were talking about. And that kind of sparked this whole process of, oh, this is what Devereux is and this is what I could maybe do with it.
And it led me towards the path where I am now, which is where I'm doing that practically every day of my life.
[00:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: It's, yeah. It strikes me that people, how to describe this because I'm sure that if you're an educator, there must be ups and downs to that role. There must be profound moments of elation where you know, you are standing in proximity to somebody whom you have just taught and they suddenly get something.
There's a light bulb moment and you think, okay. That's the core of what I'm doing. That must be profoundly amazing. Equally, I'm sure there are other moments where, like any other job there are, you stare at the screen and think, what am I doing? Nevertheless, it does provide, there's some importance there.
There's something incredibly meaningful about passing on the acquired knowledge that you have. To other people and letting them run with that knowledge and do interesting and remarkable things. It's standing on the shoulders of giants in a way, and, I, think that's an amazing thing.
But also we are in a, we are in an industry where. The acquisition of knowledge, it must be incredibly difficult to teach technical things to people who, there's gonna be a whole broad spectrum of people tuning into the WordPress project, some with incredible development skills. Others who, you know, the, mere application of a diviv, in a text editor is something which is unfamiliar to them.
And so they're really at a different level. My question really there is where do you fit into all of this? Because we've got this, we've got this title, developer relations, so it's made up of two parts. We've got developer, presumably that's you, and then we've got relations. You stand in relation to the audience, I'm guessing.
where do you pitch your developer relations work? Do you go literally from the Otter Newbie right up to the most senior technical developer that you might have? how do you decide what content to make and where does that get steered from?
[00:14:39] Jonathan Bossenger: that's a very interesting question. And I think the answer to that question is different depending on the individual. there's a great website that I, would recommend that folks who are interested in learning about deral, just ge dere in general, read it's what is derel.com.
it's a great one pager that kind of dives into, what is developer relations. It talks about the three different types of DeVeres. and on that page, it has. a section with the three different types. And the three different types are community, content and product. So generally you've got dev roles that are working in the community space.
So they're organizing events, doing live streams, discord, slack, community, et cetera, et cetera. they're called, those are generally called community builders. then you have the content side of things, the developer educators. So they're writing blogs, making videos, doing courses, speaking at conference.
and then you have your sort of product, developer advocates or developer experience engineers. So they're iterating on documentation, they're doing coding examples and starters. They're working on integrations. They're, improving the overall developer experience. Generally. Generally your typical developer advocate or developer relations person will focus on two out of those three areas, but sometimes they'll be broad across the space.
for example, I have organized events. I have, run live stream, so I focus on the community side of things. I'm not great at the Slack community space, interacting with folks in Slack. I'm not great at the talking to users and getting feedback part. but then if you look at the content, I've certainly written blogs, I've certainly made videos.
I've certainly created courses as and I, do as much as I can speak at conferences. But then on the product side, I'm also trying to iterate on documentation. I like putting together coding examples, so it depends on the individual and it depends on the job that is required. getting, back to your question, what do you decide to work on?
In my experience with, and I've only been working in this sort of reux space for the last four to five years, it depends entirely on the software that you're working on. And I'll, talk about that in a second. But it also depends on where the need is. So let's go back to the software you're working on.
If you're a dev role of an open source project, the sky's the limit. You literally, you, have to go. what is the most important thing that people need to know right now in my mind? for example, in my mind, the most important thing that developers need to be aware of right now are the upcoming, AI focused things that are coming to WordPress 6.9.
for example, the abilities API, that, that is hopefully shipping in 6.9, the MCP adapter that enables abilities in terms of into MCP tools, the PHP, ai, SDK, all of that kind of stuff. To me, that is the highest priority because those are new things that are coming. there are things that enable new functionalities, new extensions, new whatever.
And the quicker we can get folks up to speed as to how these things work and where they should use them and how they should use them, the quicker folks can start using them. so what I'm currently doing in preparation for that is I'm live streaming as much as I can. I'm speaking at conferences as much as I can about it.
I'm writing blog posts about it. I'm updating documentation about it. So I'm working across that whole range of those three, three types. If you're working in a company that is more, Let's say finance driven or it's a product. It's a product that has customers, people pay money to use the product.
And that's where my job is interesting because I work for Automatic and we have those types of products as well. So I get to see both sides of the coin in that space. it's based on what are the products that are being built, what are the high priority products for the company? Where does the company need that Devra work done?
And so then you focus on those spaces. And so in, in that sort of space. It's a little bit easier to dial in where you want to focus. So for example, if it's a brand new application, like a Versal, for example, something like a Versal or, one of these other Netlify or those, they want to get people on board as quickly as possible.
So they want folks doing live streams, doing code examples, managing community, getting people to use the software. my time at Spin up, WP. when I was working for Delicious Brains, we launched a community platform on discourse, I think it was. So the goal there was getting our customers into that platform, understanding how they were using the software, what their needs were, and then based on that feedback, sating the software to improve it, to get people to sign up for better products or sign up for bigger packages, or whatever the case is.
So that's how the, type of product or project you're working on can define where you, end up working.
[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just interrupt there and ask you a couple of questions? It, so you've been doing this role for, I think you said four or five years or
[00:19:46] Jonathan Bossenger: Four to five years. Yeah.
[00:19:47] Nathan Wrigley: Do you, so there's a couple of questions in here. The first one is, if you were re-interviewing for your job today, would you have a different set of skills?
That, you would wish to focus on it. In other words, when you initially, were being, interviewed for automatic, presumably there was a lorry load of questions that you needed to satisfy and interview processes and all of that. And, not having done that job in the same way, I'm guessing that you would've said, oh, I would like to work on this and this, and then now four years on, has that role ended up being different?
So that's the first part of the question. And then the second part is, do you have. In the team that you are in the devel team at automatic, do you get to steer what one another are doing? In other words, do you huddle frequently and say, okay Jonathan, this is your area of expertise. You can handle that.
And okay, this other person, you can handle that. So hopefully you can remember those two parts.
[00:20:42] Jonathan Bossenger: I am literally making notes of them as we speak, so the first question is very interesting because I can answer that question very clearly and I'll tell you why. This is not something that I speak about a lot, but in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Just after my wife and our kids moved from one house to another, 'cause we bought a house before, before lockdown happened.
I actually applied for, a Devra position at Automatic. and it was going to be working with folks like Anne McCarthy and, I think, be it Pauly Hark is part of the team then as well. and they were basically, it was, they had two or three dev roles and they wanted to grow the team, and so they put out a call for dev roles.
I can't remember at the time if it was focused on the project or if it was internal or a combination of both. but it was it was around the time of me having had this conversation with Craig, him reintroducing this concept of developer relations to me and me going, oh, this is a thing.
Remembering my previous experiences, starting to look for work in that space, seeing something at automatic company I had always wanted to work for and going, maybe I could give this a shot. And so the one thing that I did, and to this day, I still don't know if it was cheeky or not, but my friend, Hugh Ashbrook, was working at Automatic at the time, and I reached out to him and I said, Hey, I'm applying for this position.
Is there anybody in our community that I might know? That I could connect with and just find out more about the role. and he said, sure. And he actually connected me with Anne. and that's where Anne and my friendship started because I knew of her in the space, but we'd never really communicated. But he connected me with her, and I pinged her with a bunch of questions.
And Anne being the amazing person that she has answered all my questions. And I gave me some good ideas about what to do for the role, for the trial, that kind of thing. during the trial. If I remember correctly, what we had to do was put together a project plan for a product launch, so very developer relations type work.
and the two things, looking back at that trial, what I've learned over the last two years, the two things that I could have done better was understanding the marketing aspects of developer relations. because essentially that is, if you look at a lot of software companies, the developer relations team falls under marketing.
[00:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like it. Yeah. It feels like a public facing marketing
[00:23:14] Jonathan Bossenger: facing marketing role with a developer twist, if you will. so I would've, it would've been good for me to have added some more sort of marketing thinking into my project plan in terms of deliverables and return on investments. And how does all this work bring us in more customers?
Or more users or whatever the case is, number one. And number two, the piece of feedback that I got of, and I didn't make it through to the final role at that point in time, somebody else did. I had no problem with it at the time because I didn't think I would actually, but I asked for feedback.
I said, is there any piece of, is there anything that you could say that you think I could have done better? And at the time before I tell you what the feedback was at the time, I was very upset with the feedback I got because I was like, what are you talking about? You looking back five years later? This person knew exactly what they were talking about.
They said to me, your project management, you need to improve your project management skills. because I was a developer. So when, whenever I have to manage things, I'm managing issues, I'm managing prs, I'm not managing a project. And a project is more than just code. A project is people, a project is time lines, a project is deliverables.
there's all that involved in it. So I was focusing very much on the low level sort of product side of things and not looking at a high level project. so looking back, those would've been the two things that, that I could have done better at. And that's where the, I know this, because. I was able to see who the other person on the trial was.
This is not something that's hidden. it's public information within the company when you're trialing. And that person had both the developer experience and the project management experience. and that's why they got the role. So I've, since then actually made it a point of spending my time working on my project management skills, to become better at, managing a project from a higher point of view.
[00:25:04] Nathan Wrigley: the second part of the question then probably relates to that really well in that there must be a team of people similar to you who have the same job title. And I was wondering in, in the automatic universe where you live. How does that work? How do you manage who is doing what? How do you basically cover the whole of this giant open source project?
How do you divvy that work up? So basically I'm asking you to peel back the curtain a little bit of all of the developer
[00:25:31] Jonathan Bossenger: the secrets. So I don't think this is something that is super secret or something that I'm sharing that, we, wouldn't feel free to talk about. But the team that I work with, Is and was primarily focused on the WordPress open source project. you may have heard about automatics, what we call the.org division.
So it's folks who are primarily focusing on parts of the open source project. and so my team primarily focuses on those things. And one of the things about our division is that we are treated. Internally within automatic, we are treated the exact same way as any other contributor to the project.
What does that mean? We get to choose where we think our work should take place. Now the difference, the one difference between me and anybody else in the project, 'cause number one, I get paid to do this obviously, unless you're a sponsored contributor outside of the product. But number two. I have direct access to a lot of the other folks contributing to the project.
So when I look at the scope, if, for example, if I look at what's coming in 6.9, if I think that projects or item X is important, I have easier access to ping the lead of that project or somebody working on that project and saying, Hey, what do we need to make people? Get into this and get that kind of direct feedback.
So that's where I have a little bit of a, an edge, if you will, other contributors would've to ping those people in Slack and ask them questions. There. I have a sort of an internal, way of getting hold of them, that, that speeds up my process a little bit, but other.
[00:27:18] Nathan Wrigley: that autonomy comes with some constraints. what I'm meaning by that is let's say that every single one of the people who does the work that you do decided to focus on exactly the same thing as you do. Then it would be almost like sheep. rather than the sheep being distributed throughout the field, there'd just be this little cloud of sheep all doing the same thing, munching on the same patch of grass, and it would quickly become obvious that this wasn't gonna work.
So I'm presuming there is some give and take and some discourse that goes on amongst you.
[00:27:48] Jonathan Bossenger: That's where it gets interesting because, and, the folks in my team are well known within our community. So it's beer, it's Ryan, it's Juanmar, it's Justin Tadlock, it's, Nick Yoga, it's myself currently. we all have. A lot of, a number of things in common that we like to work on, but a lot of different things that we like to work on.
[00:28:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's handy. Yeah, that's
[00:28:11] Jonathan Bossenger: And so it's actually, so far, so I've been part of this team now. I was part of another team at Automatic. We can chat about that later if you like, but I was part of a different team before I joined this team. And we all end up focusing on separate things anyway. it's very rare that what we decide to focus on actually overlaps.
And if it does overlap, it usually overlaps in the best way. for example, at the moment I am very interested in all the AI stuff I have been since the beginning of the year. I came back from my year in vacation and, one of our colleagues. Had recorded a video and shared it internally of how they were building something in cursor.
I went, this is amazing. Started playing with it. Started live streaming my experiences, and over the course of a year, that's become my, in my area of interest. Nobody else on the team has as much of an area interest in that area as I do. Juan Ma is quite interested in that area and he's done a lot of live streams around it, but he's more interested in more of JavaScript stuff.
And other things that are more interesting to him. so at the moment it's never really conflicted, but where it does work well together is, for example, bigot. she has a big focus on the developer blog. She's one of the editors on the developer blog. She has the Gutenberg time site that she runs.
She's very focused on block editor stuff. So that's where our sort of interests, merge nicely because then I can collaborate with her for the blog post that I'm writing for the developer blog. About the abilities API, she can help me with feedback and that kind of thing. So I don't know if it was planned this way, I don't feel like it was, but I feel like our team has almost come together as this almost mighty Orhan Power Rangers style set up, where we all have these specific strengths and interests, but when they come together, they form something so much greater than the whole.
Without too much overlap or conflict or, I've never had a situation where I've gone, I wanna focus on this and somebody else goes, but I wanna do it. And we're gonna, we're gonna, that's never happened. which is really cool.
[00:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: Do you, do you have, so let's say for example, that there was a requirement from automatic to hire another person, in, the dev rail role. So somebody would be added into your team, let's say, I don't know, there was a new role or somebody had stepped away and, done something else with their life.
would you have an input into that? And the reason I ask is so that there wasn't an overlap. So for example, if somebody with deep interest in ai. Was interviewing for the role that would maybe, maybe given the role of ai, that would be actually desirable. for example, if there was somebody coming along where there was an overlap with something which maybe wasn't so important that somebody was already covering, I think, you know what I'm saying?
Do you have a, do you have a, do you have an input into that or is it very much automatic, decide all of that and it trickles down.
[00:31:03] Jonathan Bossenger: So, that's where it's getting gets interesting because one of the things that I love about working at Automatic is how non-traditional our company is. it can sometimes make things a little bit more difficult because sometimes it would make more sense to do things in a more traditional way. but what it ends up doing is it ends up giving individual teams a lot of autonomy now.
I've only been with automatic now for three and a bit years, so I've never been part of the process of onboarding someone from outside in a role. I have been part of the process of onboarding an internal shift where somebody was with another team and they came internally, so I can speak to that.
And in that, space, everybody in the team has input. everybody in the team gets to review the, trial work. Everybody in the team gets to be involved in that process. We have a discussion about the person, about how we all feel about that person fitting. and if you've been following what Automatic does and how automatic communicates, we speak about the fact that we are open and we are public internally.
and that could be more true. So if there was a concern about somebody coming into the team, you are comfortable to express that. and then that is, is dealt with in a public way. I have never been involved in a situation where we were like, no, person X isn't gonna work and they shouldn't come in.
so, fortunately that's never happened. And even, and this is the interesting thing, even with my massive AI focus right now, there is so much going on that I wish I could duplicate myself. So if there was another person who was very keen on the AI stuff and they wanted to get in, I'd be like, come and join me, please.
but what's so interesting is. The other thing that works really well is because we have this autonomy. So we have this Dere team, our team that we work for, there is another Dere who works closely with us, but he is not part of our team. He's part of a different team. You might know him, Felipe, he's working with the playground folks.
He is the play currently the playground Dere. And he was a, job posting was put out 'cause they were specifically looking for a dere. Now I, as a dere part of rost, I could have applied internally for that position if I wanted to, but it also opens up for other people to come in. And then that team had their own trial process finding the right person for their effort.
And so their situation is unique because they have their own dere focused on their stuff primarily. but he and I will often work together 'cause I'm using playground quite a bit for various things that I'm fiddling with. And so if you go and have a look at the contribution history of, the playground repository, you'll see that he and I tag team on a couple of documentation items.
And so what Sematic has the structure where you can either have a core team of Devereux, or you can have a role as part of another team who works with the core team of dev roles. Or in the other case we have, there's the WooCommerce folks. Now the WooCommerce folks are more of that sort of product based.
Dev rails 'cause they've got the WooCommerce product that they're, wanting to sell and extensions and that kind of thing. So they have their own team that does things very differently. But we interact with them as well and we'll often have conversations with them and we'll help, we'll share things and we'll work together.
and so I don't think it would ever actually happen. It that you end up in the situation. I've never seen it in automatic where you've got two people who are fighting for the work. I think auto, I don't know if it's automatic, I can't speak because I haven't been here long enough, but I, feel like the automatic way of doing things is very good at bringing people together with different skill sets that can work together well.
if I look at my previous team when I was working on a team called Andromeda, we focused primarily on the learn WordPress project. There was myself, the developer educator. There was we who was more of the, instructional designer working, focusing on the user side of things. Sarah, also focusing in user designer.
We never really struggled. We supported, we assisted, but we never had any situations where we felt like anybody was stepping on each other's toes. so I do feel like automatic is through, its through its hiring process, through the trial process. It has figured out the secret to bringing together teams of people, the right amount of people in the right combination of people to make very successful teams
[00:35:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, think there, there must be something there in that, that there has to be a certain, I dunno how to describe this. You must have a certain set of characteristics, which will be a, which will enable you to adapt to that. I'm gonna say messy,
[00:35:38] Jonathan Bossenger: chaotic.
[00:35:39] Nathan Wrigley: working. Yeah. fairly, but at the same time, potentially very productive, just different, not top down, more kind of e even, and everybody figures it out along the way.
okay. just pivoting a little bit, given that this is a developer relations job. Let's imagine that somebody is listening to this and thinks, gosh, that just sounds right up my street. everything that Jonathan's saying that I'm so fascinated by that. How much of a developer, which is a silly question, but I'm gonna pursue it.
How much of a developer do you need to be? do you really need to be on your a game? one of the elite, if Do you need to know the ins and outs of. Every single aspect of WordPress, and obviously then refining that knowledge to a specific area in order to do this work. Or given that there's a marketing aspect to it, is it possible to be in this role and be less of a developer, but more of a kind of bi-directional functionary working with the community at large, the developers, and doing that interface work?
So really the question boils down to, do you need to be an out and out developer for this to be a position that you could work in?
[00:36:49] Jonathan Bossenger: Absolutely not.
And the interesting thing about it is that the, title is developer relations. So the developer part and the relations part are as important. I have met amazing Devereux who wouldn't consider themselves the best coders in the world. I, for example, don't consider myself the best JavaScript coder in the world, but I have my colleague Juanmar, who's been working in JavaScript for 20 years.
So when I get stuck, I reach out to him and I go, Hey, what am I doing here? And help me out, that kind of thing. the, thing that, I feel like you do need to have when it comes to developer relations. Is you need to have some understanding of the developer experience. So you need to understand the tooling, you need to understand the pitfalls, the, hurdles, the hiccups.
you need to be somebody who is a quick study, somebody who can learn something new very quickly. And this is something that people have said to me all my life. I pick up new concepts fairly quickly. So you do need to have that. And I look at all the folks in my team, they all pick up new things like that.
They can't necessarily. Implement them, but they can understand 'em. you also need to be somebody who has, and I'm gonna try and say this outside being egotistical, but you need to have a certain level of humility because ultimately the work that you do is often in the quote unquote shadows. You're often working on things that not a lot of people will see.
but once implemented, many people will get successful. And I'll be honest with you, some days it's difficult because some days people using things that you know, you've written and they're talking about how amazing these things are, and they don't credit you on your own. But couldn't you just mention my name?
And you have to be able to swallow that because ultimately your role is not to get the credit. your role is to, do the research and do the work and put the thing together so that they can go off and make something amazing. And I still struggle with that one a little bit. but I feel like those are the three things, and then the fourth one kind of is part of the role, but you have to be very good at expressing technical concepts in a way that folks can easily understand.
So one of the things that I've, I learned a number of years ago, and this was through a different sort of part of my instructional background, if you will, is trying to put together content that is accessible to everybody. But contains nuggets of gold for every level. So you, teach, to the, absolute beginner, but you incorporate things that the beginner might not be able to use today, but the intermediate can use right now.
And you also incorporate things that the advanced person can use right now and the intermediate can't use today, but might do later. So you, you put some layers into your content. so that the absolute beginner can get in, read it, understand it, maybe not implement all of it, but get going with it.
But then you add little bits and pieces here so they have more advanced, or the more, intermediate person goes, ah, okay, that's cool. how can I extend that? How can I go off with it? you add links to documentation, you add example code, whatever the case is.
[00:40:10] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like that soft skill is profoundly, it's amazing when you are in proximity to it. So for example, you'll be at a, I dunno, a word camp or something like that, and there'll be somebody on the stage trying to tackle what is. A very, difficult thing to do, and somehow it just passes into your cortex with no problem at all.
It just all, goes in, because of the manner of the delivery, the selection of the slides, the, choice of words, the, order of the, delivery and so on, and, that, that is such a difficult thing to pause. This is gonna sound silly, but I, think. The pedagogy of learning how to deliver information successfully and succinct, succinctly is a, lifetime study.
you'll never be the best at it, but you'll probably be on a journey at being, better at it. Conversely, we've all sat through the exact same presentation given by somebody who is just so in the weeds. They can't see how to sum it up, and none of it gets into your cortex and you're sitting there.
Probably doom scrolling on your phone because you're just disinterested. So I'm imagining that part of the jigsaw puzzle is terribly important as well. And you obviously alluded to that, but, I just wanted to reiterate that. Yeah.
[00:41:28] Jonathan Bossenger: absolutely. And I consider, so I used to worry about the fact that my journey towards. Developer relations, develop education, content creation, whatever the case may be, was very non-traditional because I don't have, I don't really have a traditional marketing or I'm a developer.
I've been writing code for the last 20 years. That's all I've done. But I'm very lucky in the fact that in another part of my life, separate from my development career, I chose to get involved in a style of martial arts that led me into a position of instruction where I was teaching others. And I went through an instruction, instructor's course to get to that point.
And there is nothing more difficult, in my opinion, than trying to get physical concepts into the
[00:42:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.
[00:42:21] Jonathan Bossenger: of 30 something year old adults who've just had a full day of work. Some of them have rushed home to get to class. Some of them have gone home first and had a big meal and now have come to class. It is 8:00 PM at night.
Some of them are there because they have to, but maybe they don't really want to. They wanna be home watching TV or whatever, but they wanna learn the thing. And now you have to make this engaging and you have to make it exciting and you have to give everybody in the class something that is interesting to them.
and that was like a trial by fire for me because I had to, during that process, it's where I built up my person, my onstage persona, if you will. the way I present, the way I talk, I've accepted my ums and my ahs. That's just part of who I am. I've accepted the fact that when I get excited, I start talking really fast and then I stumble over my words.
I've made that part of, the joke. when you come along with me in a presentation and I mess up my words, I'll go and I'll make a joke about it, because there's nothing worse than somebody trying to cover up when they've stuffed up. I'll just make it part of the presentation. I'll, be open about the fact that when I was in Portland, I'll, say to folks, I, it's, Friday, I think it was 10:00 AM and my body's still on 4:00 PM time, so I'm struggling here, so bear with me.
you it gets back to that humility aspect of it. in my opinion, and I look at everybody, excuse me, everybody in my team has this as well. You can't be a good dere if you go up on stage or if you're presenting on screen, or if you're putting together content and you have this attitude of, I'm amazing and that's why you should listen to me.
A good dere has an attitude of, look at this cool thing that I discovered and I wanna show you how cool this thing is and that's why you should listen to me. because that's more interesting and more engaging, and that brings. That brings the reader, the, listener, the viewer, along with you on the journey, as opposed to you talking down to them and saying, oh, look at me.
I'm amazing. I figured out this thing and this is why you should listen to me. and everybody in my team is like that. Everybody that I've worked with at my previous team was like that. it's less about look at me, and more about look at this cool thing. and I wanna show you how this cool thing works and you can go do even more cool things.
yeah.
[00:44:45] Nathan Wrigley: So just shepherding the conversation towards the end. I have a few questions around the marketing side of things and the bi-directional nature of things. So what we focus on largely at the moment is in, in, your sense, you are acquiring. Knowledge about ai and you're distributing that knowledge about AI in a variety of different mediums, so video and in-person events and blog posts and what have you.
Does that conversation happen in the other direction, though? Is part of the Dere job to gain feedback from? From the audience in whatever format that is, blog posts, comments, and in person chat and what have you, and then feed that back in, in the opposite direction of the food chain. So the question there is really, is it a bi-directional thing or is it more of a, you are using your dev roll role as a distribution platform for knowledge.
[00:45:40] Jonathan Bossenger: I think it's definitely a bi bidirectional thing. I think if you look at, and if we go back to, when I did my first ever trial, one of, one of the points was how are we going to gather feedback and how are we going to implement that feedback to improve the product? so my, my, Mindset is typically in the developer educator role. So I'm typically thinking about educating folks, showing them the cool thing, and that's why I probably wouldn't do well in a more traditional dev role, where it's about marketing the product. because then I have to worry about feedback more.
because how people are using it and what they're using it for becomes important. That's where again, I'm very, lucky, on any of the internal projects I work on, I work with the marketing team. so again, I don't know if this is specifically an automatic thing or if this is other companies do it, but if I'm working on an internal project product, I get to get feedback from the marketing team and I get to work with 'em and say, Hey, what are we gonna do with this?
And they help me with that process. and that's something that I'm still learning to this day. I've gotten better at the project management side. Now I'm learning about the marketing side and the getting of feedback and how we receive feedback and what we do with that feedback. Like how do you prioritize what is an important piece of feedback to work on what is not so important?
What will move the needle in terms of users, in terms of signups, in terms of that kind of thing. and, that's where my experience tends to be from the open source project side of things where we're not trying to sell something. We're just wanting people to use it. We're wanting to get people to use it.
So as long as I get feedback from people that are going, Hey, I've implemented this thing, I've used this thing, yes, this thing worked. I had this amazing piece of feedback from a number of folks after my word camp, US talk. They were on social media talking about how they're implementing this thing.
People were coming to the core AI slack. So that kind of really fed back to, okay, this is working, this is how, we move things forward. the marketing side of things, I'm still learning how to understand. and it's one of the reasons why I feel like I'm very fortunate that I get to spend a lot of time working on the open source project because I don't have to worry about the feedback too much as long as the feedback is we were able to use this.
Look at what we did. We built this plugin, or Mark West Guard for example, wrote a cool blog post on his site recently about how to use all that stuff. And I'm like, okay, cool. The community's seeing it. They're using it. They're working with it. Great. the job well done. so I'm very, lucky if I was working in a more sort of traditional company, let's say, maybe not a closed source project, but a project that was very focused on signups and subscriptions, I might not do very well there.
I might have to learn a lot about marketing and customer feedback and I had a little bit of that working at Spin Up. WP again, I was very lucky. I was working with the marketing manager. So she and I tag team together. She handled more of the marketing and how we use that internally, and I focus more on the, how we get the content out there.
[00:48:49] Nathan Wrigley: Curiously, though, I, often wonder about the level of feedback, and by the level of feedback, the amount of it, literally the quantity of feedback that comes back. So let's say, for example, that we had a product out on the internet and it was a, I don't know, a SaaS platform or something, and it had 43.
Or thereabouts percent market share. you can guarantee that product would have tons of feedback. They'd, have enabled something in that software so that you could click, a button and immediately give feedback. And presumably there would be bits in the ui, in the UX where, something's just gone wrong.
Okay. Tell us about this, and I'm always curious as to whether or not there's a bit of a black hole between the 43% of the internet that's using WordPress, the many tens of millions of people who potentially could give feedback, and what sometimes feels like more of a trickle than a tidal wave of feedback.
So I dunno if you wanna speak to that, whether you feel that. The, metrics that you get back, the intelligence, the feedback that you get back is enough to justify the decision making that the project makes. That's a, it's a difficult question because obviously we have no way to compel people to, to give feedback, but given its gigantic nature, you would imagine that we'd be completely inundated with feedback, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
[00:50:11] Jonathan Bossenger: I would, argue. That we are inundated with feedback, but the feedback comes in, ways that we can manage. So I'll give you a, I'll give you a simple example. I saw a track ticket the other day where somebody, requested an update to the software to change a setting somewhere a, value of something.
And there was quite a long conversation around that and testing was happening. And I, the last time I checked. I think it was resolved that yes, this was a good idea and we would do that. Now that's feedback. That's somebody using the software, hitting a pain point and submitting that as an issue to be updated.
And I think that again, it's the advantage of working on an open source project is the feedback comes in different ways, but in ways that is more manageable because it is more async. when I was working at Spin Up, WP, for example. Every day we had to check, I was one of the sort of community managers and every day I had to log into the app and I had to check for new updates and reply to people.
And I spent a large chunk of my day doing that. now that's a smallish company compared to, something like WordPress. But with WordPress there's so many different ways that you can send feedback. You've got the
[00:51:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.
[00:51:28] Jonathan Bossenger: you've got track tickets, you've got GitHub issues. So whichever is your comfort zone is where you provide feedback.
And then there are people working in those spaces to Process that view. So it's almost like it's become, the way the project works is it's become the self-managing feedback machine,
[00:51:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:51:47] Jonathan Bossenger: where the feedback is handled at different levels by different people and solutions are implemented without anybody even knowing it.
It, needed to be done, but it gets implemented. a simple, example of that. I had recently there was an update, so there was an update to how. Malt if you take a plugin that has multiple blocks registered, using the block dot json file, and I'm getting heavy technical here, but essentially if there are multiple blocks registered in a plugin, the functionality that processes the block json file to get all the block metadata has to pass every single block JS o file to get that information, which is a very resource intensive process.
So Felix aunt who works at Google, I think it is in the before East, one of the performance team contributors. He's also a core contributor. He worked on and shipped an update to WordPress based on him discovering this. Now, whether he found it, whether somebody else submitted it, I know, but he works on an update, which basically allows you to take all of that block, JSO, turn it into a PHP file, which contains an array of information.
And then PHP can just read that array. So in that example, let's say somebody logs that as an issue, multiple blocks, plug in issue. Then someone like Felix comes along and he checks it out and he goes, ah, there's a fix we could build for this. And he submits that fix. But now that affects multiple other things.
So I happen to one day, see, and that's, I'm telling the story 'cause it's about me. So I can, but I happen to one day see an update on the call blog that, oh, this is the way blocks are being registered now. But that affects the Create block, app that generates the block code. So then I go in and I push an update, or I submit a PR to update the create block tool to be able to use the new stuff.
So from someone sending, in the issue to one contributor, working on it to another contributor, working on it to another contributor, pushing that fix, you have five different people processing this feedback without them even knowing they're processing feedback. It just happens and we end up with a new thing.
Faster blocks in, faster, multiple blocks in a plugin, a new thing in the Create block tool. Everything's merged. Everybody's happy, but nobody actually realized they were processing that feedback. You know what I mean?
[00:54:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it's complicated. It sounds like you feel that there is a. adequate, I'm gonna use that word, that there is an adequate amount of feedback coming back, certainly enough to shape the project and for intuitions to be representative of what the users out there would like to see in the software.
But I guess one of the things that you highlighted is there are just so many ways. Of providing that feedback, be it on Slack, be it on track, be honestly Facebook groups, curious places like that where people go and describe their problems. And so there's a million different places where these things can be air, but I guess that's part of the job that you have, is to shepherd that information and try to figure out where it's being put and corral.
[00:54:45] Jonathan Bossenger: that's where I will give credit to the early DeVere teams. So Ed McCarthy, BI Ryan, when he first, 2020 thereabouts when the pandemic happened, is they started really looking at, how do we start bringing all this information together? How do we start making sure that people have eyes on these things?
I had a conversation with somebody, I won't mention names 'cause it was a private conversation, but it's somebody who I know from the community when I joined Automatic, or when I, sorry, when I applied for the Devra role. Yeah. And this person said, the project needs more devrees. We need more companies to be supporting Devrees to be doing this work.
'cause that's essentially what we do, is we keep an eye on what's happening, where the pain points are, and then we help folks figure out solutions. And so one day it'll be, I'm writing a blog post about this thing because that's what needs to happen. Another day it'll be, I'm submitting a PR because something needs to be updated.
that's, just part, that's just the nature of the job. Anne McCarthy is amazing. Like Anne does this so much better than I am of keeping an eye on all the things, it's where her source of truth comes from. she does an amazing job. Like I don't think we give Anne enough credit for the amounts
[00:55:56] Nathan Wrigley: sleeps.
[00:55:58] Jonathan Bossenger: I said this to her for the amounts of work that she does, just to surface things that are going.
I am working on a, so because I'm one of the core, test leads for 6.9. I'm currently working on a call for testing for the new template, stuff that's coming because Anne sort pinged me and said, Hey, I see you're a test lead. Can we put something together? Like without her doing that, I wouldn't know this is needing to be
[00:56:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:56:19] Jonathan Bossenger: so it's the people like Anne and others in the project that are keeping an eye on the overall situation, and keeping the, right, the connectors, keeping the right people up to date on what's going on within the different companies and what work needs to be done. I'm speaking purely from the automatic point of view, but there are definitely folks in other companies that are doing this, that are keeping their, sponsored contributors up to speed of what's going on and what needs to be done and where things need, to be input.
They're doing, and, that's why I said earlier, a lot of being a dev role is, being humble and going, I'm doing this work because it gets the word out. you'll never, you will never hear Anne. Say anything about herself, she's always talking about the work needs to be done, da.
And it just all happens because she brings it together. And that's why, every time I see her, I have the utmost respect for what she does. But that's the, sort of the secret work that happens in the background is making sure those issues with the triage, making sure that they go from either a triage issue to a PR or a discussion or a follow up issue, and then eventually getting to a point where somebody can actually work on it.
that's how we process feedback within the project. And, those, people are the folks who, who get it done.
[00:57:30] Nathan Wrigley: Jonathan, thank you. I, think at the 54 minute mark, we should probably put a pin in that, but sounds like a, really interesting body of work that you have to do and it certainly sounds like something that you are very much in tune with. I'm guessing that a subset of people listening to this will be thinking, I'd to be Jonathan Boser.
I would like to fit into that role and do what. He's doing, are you open to be contacted if somebody wants to just get their feelers out and talk to you about this kind of stuff? And if so, where would we reach out to you?
[00:58:01] Jonathan Bossenger: Absolutely I am always open to questions from anybody about anything related to my work or what I do or the WordPress project. the easiest way to get my attention is to email me. I don't mind sharing my personal email address. It's my name, Jonathan Passenger. At gmail.com. you're also welcome to ping me in the WordPress Slack.
If you're in the WordPress project, I will always respond there. I'm not great at dms in social media, so if you DM me on Twitter or LinkedIn, I might take a while to get back to you. So rather use either my Gmail address or WordPress Slack. and then I am on social media, so John Buser on Twitter. Jonathan Buser, I think on LinkedIn.
I think I'm on Blue Sky as well. And those rest other places. Or just go to my website, jonathan buser.com. All the information you might need is there. and I'm happy to have conversations with folks who are interested in this. I can't guarantee I'll always have all the answers, but I'll do my best to find out.
[00:58:56] Nathan Wrigley: thank you. I appreciate that. What I will say to the listeners is everything that Jonathan just said will be put into the show notes. Maybe I'll obfuscate the email in some way, but, but everything will be there so that you'll be able to find the episode with Jonathan Boser on it and then. Go click on the links and hopefully find the different places where Jonathan is available.
Jonathan, thank you so much for doing this. Very, important work. You and your team. Really appreciate it. And thank you for chatting to me today.
[00:59:22] Jonathan Bossenger: No problem. Thank you so much for having me, Nathan. It's always a pleasure to chat to you. I, remember fondly our very first conversation about the GPL,
[00:59:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yes. Yeah. Oh, I'd, like to put that behind me.
[00:59:36] Jonathan Bossenger: but that's, the funny thing is a lot, you talk about Dere, you talk about, I'm gonna, we're dere, of course we can talk, but a lot of what you do. Is part of that, a lot of the work that you're doing, the weeklies, all that is part of that dere idea about bringing information out there, talking to the different people.
So Dere is more than just the three things that we covered. it's, getting information out there, it's talking about it. And so I really appreciate the work that you and other podcasters are doing to bring this information out. A lot of podcasts become samey. and, I like to see podcasts that are, your WP Weekly is amazing because you're covering the weekly news and it brings.
It brings so much knowledge to me that I can then follow up on. So I wanna thank you for all the work that you do.
[01:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: You are far too kind and I very much appreciate that. Thank you very much.
Okay. That's all we've got for you today. Thank you very much for listening in.
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Okay. That's nearly all that I've got for you today. I'm just gonna say once again, thank you to Jonathan Bossenger for talking to me today. Really appreciate that.
And I hope that you stay safe. Have a good week. I'm gonna fade in some dreadful, cheesy music as I always do, and say stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
