DevRel origins | DevRel Almanac

Developer Relations began as work intended to persuade software developers to build on a company’s platform. Over four decades, companies formalised that work into dedicated roles, teams, conferences, and frameworks. Some of those teams were then restructured after the 2022 to 2024 contraction.

The 1980s: Evangelism is born

The earliest direct ancestor of modern DevRel is Apple’s developer evangelism work for the Macintosh, beginning in 1983. The Macintosh’s value depended entirely on third-party software, and Apple needed a way to convince a skeptical industry to build for what looked, in 1983, like a toy. Apple hired technically credible people whose full-time job was to convince developers.

Guy Kawasaki joined Apple in 1983 and became the most visible of Apple’s Macintosh evangelists. The term “evangelist” was a deliberate borrowing from religious language: Kawasaki and his peers were charged with spreading genuine belief, not running campaigns. Kawasaki’s 1991 book Selling the Dream is the closest thing the field has to a foundational text, written as a generalist manifesto on evangelism but unmistakably the product of his Macintosh experience.

By the late 1980s, Microsoft had begun building its own developer evangelism organisation under Steve Ballmer’s “developers, developers, developers” thesis. The reasoning was simple: Windows’ value was the application ecosystem. The Windows Software Development Kit (SDK), launched in the late 1980s, was paired with developer events, technical newsletters, and traveling evangelists.

Other 1980s artefacts that would later be recognised as proto-DevRel:

Borland’s aggressive developer-facing marketing (Philippe Kahn) for Turbo Pascal and later Delphi.
IBM’s relationships with mainframe and OS/2 developers.
Sun Microsystems’ developer outreach, which would intensify dramatically with Java in the mid-1990s.

Formal job titles, career ladders, dedicated modern teams, and measurement frameworks did not yet exist. The activity preceded the profession built around it.

The 1990s: Microsoft scales it; Java arrives

Two things defined DevRel in the 1990s:

Microsoft’s Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) organisation, which would grow over the decade into one of the largest developer-focused organisations in the technology industry, with regional teams across North America, Europe, and Asia. Its regional and specialist teams, evangelist career ladder, and established events presence became a widely copied template.
The Java launch (1995) and the rise of Sun’s developer-facing operation: JavaSoft, JavaOne (1996), the Java Community Process, and the global Java User Group network. Java demonstrated that an open-ish platform could outcompete proprietary alternatives if it cultivated developers aggressively enough.

Two underlying enablers also matured in the 1990s:

The MVP program. Microsoft established the Most Valuable Professional award in 1993, building on community recognition practices that had emerged on Usenet, CompuServe, and the early Microsoft online communities. MVP became the prototype for many later third-party recognition programs.
The early web changed information distribution. Microsoft launched MSDN as a quarterly CD-ROM in September 1992, expanded it onto the web, and consolidated Microsoft technical information there.

By the end of the 1990s, “developer evangelist” was a recognisable job title and a senior career path at a handful of platform companies. It was still not a profession, and there were no shared frameworks, books, or standards.

The 2000s: Web, blogs, and Scoble

Two forces reshaped DevRel in the 2000s:

Web platforms multiplied. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and various web frameworks each needed developers. Programming-language communities (Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP, Node.js) became influential in their own right, independent of any single vendor.
The corporate blog arrived. Tools like Movable Type, WordPress, and Blogger made it easy for technologists to publish under their own names. Robert Scoble at Microsoft (joined 2003) became the archetype of the blog-era evangelist: a personal voice operating somewhat outside the marketing organisation, with permission to be candid. His blog and Channel 9 video work (launched 2004) gave Microsoft a recognisable individual voice outside conventional corporate communications.

Other 2000s milestones:

WWDC became a tentpole event again under Steve Jobs’ Apple, beginning around 2002.
Amazon Web Services launched (2006) and within a few years began building one of the largest developer evangelism organisations in technology.
Google’s developer-facing work scaled rapidly through the late 2000s and early 2010s: Google Developer Day (2007), Google I/O (2008), Google Developer Groups, and the Google Developer Experts program.
Twitter (2006), GitHub (2008), and Stack Overflow (2008) created entirely new channels through which developer relations could happen at scale, peer-to-peer.

The vocabulary started shifting in the late 2000s. “Developer advocate” began displacing “developer evangelist” at companies that wanted the role to represent developers internally as well as products externally.

The 2010s: Professionalisation

During the 2010s, DevRel became a profession. The defining shifts were:

DevRelCon launched in London on September 30, 2015, founded by Matthew Revell. It was the first conference dedicated entirely to DevRel practitioners and remained active in 2026.
Books arrived. Caroline Lewko and James Parton’s first work on developer marketing predated this decade, but the genre crystallised with:
- Jono Bacon, The Art of Community (O’Reilly, 2012).
- Stephen O’Grady (RedMonk), The New Kingmakers (2013): argued the strategic thesis that developers had become the central force in technology procurement.
- Christian Heilmann, The Developer Advocacy Handbook (open-source, 2010s).
- Mary Thengvall, The Business Value of Developer Relations (Apress, 2018): the discipline’s first systematic treatment of DevRel ROI.
- Lewko & Parton, Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program (Apress, 2021, but reflecting late-2010s practice).
Strategy frameworks emerged. Phil Leggetter introduced AAARRRP in 2016. The Orbit Model appeared at orbit.love starting around 2018 to 2019. The discipline now had vocabulary to discuss strategy.
AWS Heroes (launched 2014) provided a model for later third-party recognition programmes at developer-product companies, including MongoDB, HashiCorp, Cloudflare, and GitHub.
API-first companies institutionalised DevRel as core. Twilio (founded 2008) was particularly influential, holding its first developer conference in the early 2010s, later renamed SIGNAL. Stripe (founded 2010), Postman (2014), Algolia (2012), and others followed.

By the end of the 2010s, DevRel was a recognised function with a recognised set of practices, books, conferences, and frameworks. The job title “Developer Advocate” was on tens of thousands of LinkedIn profiles. Most developer-product companies of meaningful scale had a DevRel team.

The early 2020s: Boom and bust

Three things shaped DevRel from 2020 through 2024:

The pandemic moved conferences online. In-person events were cancelled in 2020 or moved to virtual and hybrid formats. Companies found that some forms of DevRel content, including livestreams, on-demand video, and async community, reached more developers than physical events. Some retained those formats; others recovered to roughly 2019 scale by 2023.
The 2021 to 2022 hiring boom over-extended DevRel teams. With cheap capital, companies hired aggressively into DevRel without strategic clarity, and teams expanded rapidly where the function did not have a strong business case.
The 2022 to 2024 layoff wave hit DevRel hard. As capital tightened, companies cut functions whose business value was unclear. DevRel teams were among the most visibly affected. Some were oversubscribed and underfocused; others were structurally vulnerable because they sat under marketing. Microsoft Cloud Advocates, Twitter’s developer-facing teams (post-Musk acquisition, late 2022), portions of Google’s DevRel org (2023 to 2024), and parts of Heroku’s DX team (Salesforce, 2024 to 2026) were all affected. The “Is DevRel dead?” debate ran across blog posts, podcasts, and conference talks for two years.

See DevRel layoffs and recovery for a detailed treatment.

2024 to 2026: Recovery and AI

By late 2024, companies were rebuilding DevRel teams with clearer business alignment after the contraction.

Key signals of the recovery:

The Developer Relations Foundation followed a September 16, 2024 intent-to-form announcement. On August 25, 2025, the Linux Foundation announced it as fully formed. Inaugural Steering Committee members included Wesley Faulkner, Stacey Kruczek, Arun Gupta, Divya Mohan, and others.
Frameworks like AAARRRP, Orbit, and the DevRel Capability Maturity Model entered mainstream use.
Product-Led Growth gave DevRel measurable activation work. At PLG companies, DevRel contributes through documentation, examples, onboarding, and community support. See Product-led DevRel.
AI companies built DevRel from scratch. OpenAI’s developer organisation (Romain Huet, Olivier Godement, Logan Kilpatrick until early 2024), Anthropic’s developer-facing work around Claude Code, Hugging Face’s open-source-led community, and the LangChain/LlamaIndex tooling ecosystems all built their DevRel functions in the 2023 to 2026 window. Their common practices include cookbook repositories, executable examples, and documentation designed for both people and agents.
Documentation became a category of its own. Mintlify, Docusaurus, ReadMe, GitBook, Stoplight, and Redocly grew into a serious tools market as companies treated documentation as a primary product surface.

Five overlapping periods

Five eras, each adding rather than replacing what came before:

Evangelism (1980s and 1990s). Convince developers; ship books and SDKs.
Advocacy (2000s and 2010s). Listen to developers; represent them internally.
Experience (2010s and 2020s). The whole developer experience enters scope alongside the people doing outreach.
Strategy (2020s). DevRel must connect to business outcomes via measurable funnels.
Agent-mediated (2024+). Documentation is read by LLMs as well as humans; developers route research through AI; DevRel must serve both audiences.

Each era introduced new practices that the next inherited. A modern DevRel team is doing all five at once.

Primary sources

Guy Kawasaki, Selling the Dream (HarperCollins, 1991).
Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers (O’Reilly, 2013).
Mary Thengvall, The Business Value of Developer Relations (Apress, 2018).
Caroline Lewko & James Parton, Developer Relations (Apress, 2021).
Microsoft MVP Program history, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (Wikipedia and Microsoft archives).
DevRelCon archive (developerrelations.com / hoopy.io).
Linux Foundation, Developer Relations Foundation announcement, August 2025.