The companies in this section build platforms, IDEs, frameworks, and infrastructure for developers. Unlike cloud providers with broader service portfolios or API companies centred on an integration point, developer tools are their core business, so DevRel often supports product adoption directly.
GitHub (Microsoft, since 2018)
GitHub runs developer advocacy, education, student, event, and recognition programmes around its platform.
- DevRel leadership. Cassidy Williams serves as Senior Director of Developer Advocacy in the mid-2020s, with senior advocates including Christina Warren and Burke Holland (cross-Microsoft).
- GitHub Stars. Recognition program for developers who teach, contribute to open source, and support GitHub communities. Provides amplification, early access, and direct engineering input.
- GitHub Campus Experts. Student leader program. Requires post-secondary student status, more than one year remaining before graduation, six months of GitHub use, and an application with video resume. Annual July application window.
- GitHub Universe. Annual flagship conference (San Francisco, late October). The 2026 edition was scheduled for October 28 to 29.
- GitHub Satellite. Regional event format launched in 2016, with editions in cities including Berlin and Tokyo.
- GitHub Octoverse. Annual state-of-software-development report.
- GitHub Education. Free Pro accounts for students, Student Developer Pack with dozens of partner-product benefits.
- GitHub Copilot DevRel. Advocates produce demos, tutorials, and event sessions for Copilot.
- Brian Douglas (bdougie). The first Developer Advocate at GitHub (2018 to 2022), later founded OpenSauced.
GitLab
GitLab operates open-core development and publishes much of its operating documentation.
- GitLab Heroes. Recognition program.
- GitLab Connect. Customer events.
- Open development. GitLab publishes its company handbook at handbook.gitlab.com, giving developers direct access to product and operating documentation.
JetBrains
JetBrains (founded 2000) runs developer programmes around its IDEs and the Kotlin language.
- JetBrains Academy. Training platform.
- Campus Ambassadors. University-focused student program.
- Content Creators Program. 250+ creators producing JetBrains-tool tutorials and reviews.
- KotlinConf. Annual conference for the Kotlin programming language (which JetBrains created). 2026 edition in Munich.
- JetBrains AI tooling. JetBrains AI Assistant, Junie agentic coding tool: increasingly central to DevRel emphasis.
- Arun Gupta. VP of Developer Experience at JetBrains, joined from prior roles at Intel, Apple, Amazon, and Red Hat. Steering Committee member of the Developer Relations Foundation.
Vercel and the Next.js ecosystem
Vercel (founded 2015) organises much of its developer outreach around the Next.js framework and the Vercel deployment platform.
- Next.js Conf. Annual virtual / hybrid conference for the Next.js community.
- Vercel Ship. Annual customer / partner event.
- AI SDK. Vercel AI SDK has become a primary surface for client-side AI integration in JavaScript, with substantial associated DevRel content.
Netlify
Netlify (founded 2014) helped popularise the Jamstack movement through Jamstack Conf, technical content, and a public developer-relations team.
- Jamstack Conf. Annual conference (multiple editions: San Francisco, London, virtual).
- Netlify Developers (DevRel team). Long-running, with public-facing advocates like Sarah Drasner (former VP of Developer Experience, now at Google) and Cassidy Williams (now at GitHub) shaping the function in the 2018 to 2022 era.
- Netlify Build. Customer / community events.
HashiCorp (IBM, since 2025)
HashiCorp (founded 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar) runs ambassador, user-group, conference, and tutorial programmes around its infrastructure tools. IBM acquired it in 2025.
- HashiCorp Ambassadors. Program launched 2020; 102 ambassadors across 31 countries by 2024.
- HashiCorp User Groups (HUGs). 173 groups across 61 countries, reaching 49,000+ people.
- HashiConf. Annual flagship conference; co-located with IBM TechXchange post-acquisition (2026 in Atlanta, October 26 to 29).
- HashiCorp Learn (learn.hashicorp.com / developer.hashicorp.com). Comprehensive tutorial library across Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Packer, Boundary, Waypoint, Vagrant.
- Notable early advocates. Nic Jackson and Anubhav Mishra, whose technical demos and tutorials in the mid-2010s shaped the function.
Datadog
- Datadog Ambassadors. Annual cohort (2025 cohort published); recognition for community contributors across observability, DevOps, security, and AI.
- DASH conference. Annual flagship event (NYC).
- Datadog Learning Center. Self-paced training.
New Relic
- FutureStack. Annual customer / developer conference.
- New Relic University. Training.
- New Relic Champions program.
Snyk
- Snyk Ambassadors. Program for enterprise customer AppSec experts.
- SnykCon. Snyk held virtual conference editions in 2020 and 2021.
Other notable developer-platform DevRel programs
- Cloudflare. Covered in Cloud providers.
- Cloudinary, Fastly, Akamai. CDN / edge platforms with established DevRel.
- Linear, Notion, Airtable. Productivity-platform-with-developer-API model; lighter-weight DevRel.
- Sentry. Error monitoring with a large open-source community.
- PagerDuty. Incident response; PagerDuty Summit.
- LaunchDarkly. Feature flags; Galaxy annual conference, Trajectory developer event.
- Split, Flagsmith, ConfigCat, GrowthBook. Feature-flag market peers with smaller DevRel.
- Replit. Browser-based coding environment; long-running DevRel via Replit Bounties, Replit Apps, and Replit AI programs.
- StackBlitz, CodeSandbox. In-browser dev environments (see Code sandboxes).
- Render, Fly.io, Railway. Modern PaaS competitors to Heroku; smaller but tightly focused DevRel.
- Heroku (Salesforce). Its documentation and deployment workflow influenced later Platform-as-a-Service products. The DX team was substantially reduced through Salesforce restructurings from 2024 to 2026.
- DigitalOcean. Covered in Cloud providers.
- Hugging Face. Covered in AI and ML companies.