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DevRel pioneers

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This directory profiles people who shaped DevRel through evangelism programmes, community work, books, research, talks, and developer tools.

For the works produced by these figures, see DevRel notable works.

Guy Kawasaki

Best known for. Apple Macintosh evangelist from 1983 to the mid-1980s; author of Selling the Dream (1991); subsequent career in venture capital and as an author and speaker.

Significance. Apple hired Kawasaki in 1983 to convince software developers to build for the Macintosh. His work popularised “evangelist” as a technology job title. Selling the Dream, his 1991 book, set out practices he had used: identify a cause, recruit converts, equip them with tools, and let them spread the message.

Kawasaki is sometimes credited with the term itself; whether or not he invented it, he made it stick. His later work included venture capital at Garage Technology Ventures, the chief evangelist role at Canva, the Remarkable People podcast, and several books including The Art of the Start (2004).

Adam Wiggins

Best known for. Co-founder of Heroku (2007); author of The Twelve-Factor App (2011); subsequent work at Ink & Switch (research lab).

Significance. The Twelve-Factor App methodology and Heroku’s developer experience gave later Platform-as-a-Service companies a concrete model for documentation, deployment workflows, and product-led adoption.

James Whittaker

Best known for. Software-quality researcher; Microsoft test architect from 2006 to 2009; Google engineering director from 2009 to 2012; Microsoft technical evangelist after returning in 2012; author of How to Break Software, How Google Tests Software, and others.

Significance. Whittaker’s research and leadership roles spanned software testing, Chrome, Maps, Google+, Bing, and technical evangelism. He co-authored How Google Tests Software (2012), documenting the company’s approach to testing at scale.

Robert Scoble

Best known for. Microsoft technical evangelist, 2003 to 2006; corporate blogger pioneer; long subsequent career across multiple companies as an industry commentator.

Significance. Scoble’s blog (scobleizer.com) gave Microsoft a named, candid voice outside its press releases. His clashes with Microsoft’s marketing team also exposed the practical limits of that arrangement. His Channel 9 work helped establish unscripted interviews with company engineers as a corporate video format.

Stephen O’Grady

Best known for. Co-founder of RedMonk (2002); author of The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World (O’Reilly, 2013); long-running RedMonk blog, tecosystems.

Significance. Through RedMonk’s developer-focused analyst work and The New Kingmakers, O’Grady argued that developers had gained influence over enterprise technology procurement. The Software Paradox (2015) extended his analysis to commercial software’s pricing dynamics.

James Governor

Best known for. Co-founder of RedMonk (2002); long-running developer-trends analyst.

Significance. Governor popularised vocabulary including “Progressive Delivery” and the framing of “GitHub Generation” and “Kubernetes Generation” developers. He also presents RedMonk research at conferences including All Things Open and Monki Gras.

Jono Bacon

Best known for. Community manager for Ubuntu (Canonical) 2006 to 2014; author of The Art of Community (O’Reilly, 2012) and People Powered (HarperCollins, 2019); subsequent independent community-strategy consulting and writing.

Significance. The Art of Community (first edition 2009, second 2012) argues that communities require purpose, structure, leadership, and recognition. Bacon applied those ideas while managing the Ubuntu community at Canonical. He later continued the subject through his YouTube channel and consulting practice.

Mary Thengvall

Best known for. Author of The Business Value of Developer Relations (Apress, 2018); former Head of Developer Relations at multiple companies; long-running DevRel Weekly newsletter; co-host of Community Pulse podcast.

Significance. Thengvall’s book is an early systematic treatment of return on investment in DevRel. Her newsletter (DevRel Weekly) is one of the longest-running curated DevRel publications. She introduced the DevRel Qualified Lead (DQL) framing in 2019 for describing valuable community relationships that do not fit a conventional sales lead.

Matthew Revell

Best known for. Founder of DevRelCon and the DevRel agency Hoopy; long-running organiser of the DevRel community. By 2026, leads developer-relations strategy and consulting at Major League Hacking.

Significance. Revell created the first dedicated conference for DevRel practitioners. DevRelCon has been held in London, San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, Prague, Beijing, Suzhou, Bengaluru, and online. DeveloperRelations.com, Hoopy’s content property, hosts the conference’s talk archive.

Phil Leggetter

Best known for. AAARRRP strategy framework (2016); long career in DevRel leadership at Pusher, Nexmo (later Vonage), and several others; DevRel.Agency consulting practice.

Significance. AAARRRP adapts McClure’s AARRR funnel by adding Awareness and Product. Leggetter has explained how teams can connect DevRel activities to business outcomes through his blog, DevRelCon talks, and consulting work.

Christian Heilmann

Best known for. Yahoo, Microsoft Edge, and later WeAreDevelopers; author of The Developer Advocacy Handbook (open-source); long career writing accessible technical content.

Significance. Heilmann’s freely available Developer Advocacy Handbook covers conference speaking, accessible examples, web standards, and technical communication for non-experts.

Caroline Lewko and James Parton

Best known for. Co-authors of Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program (Apress, 2021), drawing on careers in developer programmes and marketing.

Significance. Their 2021 book presents the Four Pillars framework: Developer Education, Developer Marketing, Developer Success, and Developer Programs.

Jeff Sandquist

Best known for. General Manager and Vice President at Microsoft Cloud Advocates, 2017 onward; earlier work on Channel 9.

Significance. Sandquist established Microsoft Cloud Advocates as a team distributed by geography and technology, with a cross-platform remit and some autonomy from product marketing. Earlier, he worked on Channel 9 alongside Lenn Pryor, Charles Torre, and Robert Scoble, using unscripted interviews with Microsoft engineers.

Jeff Barr

Best known for. Joining Amazon in 2002, moving into a Web Services Evangelist role soon afterwards, and later serving as AWS Chief Evangelist.

Significance. One of the longest-tenured evangelists in technology. Barr has written the AWS Blog since 2004 and has explained major product announcements there throughout AWS’s growth. He also publishes detailed re:Invent previews and wrap-ups.

Werner Vogels

Best known for. CTO of Amazon since 2005; primary technical voice for AWS at industry events.

Significance. Vogels uses the All Things Distributed blog and architecture-focused re:Invent talks to explain AWS engineering decisions in public. His work is an example of a technical executive carrying part of a company’s developer-facing communication.

Kelsey Hightower

Best known for. Former Distinguished Engineer and Staff Developer Advocate at Google Cloud; author of Kubernetes Up & Running; creator of Kubernetes The Hard Way.

Significance. Hightower explained cloud-native infrastructure through live KubeCon demonstrations, talks, and runnable tutorials. Kubernetes The Hard Way, a free GitHub repository, teaches Kubernetes by having readers assemble a cluster from its constituent parts. He announced his retirement from Google in 2023 and continues to speak about platform engineering and developer tooling. See DevRel notable works for a fuller inventory.

Scott Hanselman

Best known for. Microsoft Cloud Advocate and Partner Program Manager, among other titles; long-running blog hanselman.com (since 2002) and podcast Hanselminutes (since 2006).

Significance. Hanselman has used his blog, Hanselminutes, conference talks, and Microsoft role to explain web development and tooling. He also writes about accessibility in software and answers questions from beginners as well as experienced engineers.

Brian Douglas (bdougie)

Best known for. First Developer Advocate at GitHub (2018 to 2022); founder of OpenSauced (2022).

Significance. Douglas’s GitHub work combined developer advocacy with open-source community programmes. OpenSauced provides analytics for repository activity and contributors. He also publishes live-streams and videos about open-source development.

Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith: the Ajaxian era

Treated as a single profile because their work was joint for most of two decades.

Best known for. Co-founding Ajaxian.com in 2005; technical leadership at Mozilla, Walmart Labs, Google, and other companies; coverage of the Web 2.0 and HTML5 transition.

Significance. Ajaxian covered Ajax techniques, JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, Dojo, and YUI, browser APIs, and the emergence of HTML5 from 2005 through roughly 2012.

At Mozilla Labs in the late 2000s and early 2010s, they led work on Bespin, later renamed Skywriter and then evolved as Ace. It was one of the early browser-based code editors. Ace remains embedded in many products.

Their subsequent work included senior developer-platform roles at Walmart Labs and Google. Both have remained publicly active as advisors and writers.

Ajaxian showed that working web developers could sustain a publication around detailed technical writing. Its subject matter and editorial model overlapped with publications including Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, and CSS-Tricks.

John Resig

Best known for. Creator of jQuery (2006); work at Mozilla and Khan Academy; programming-education leadership at Khan Academy.

Significance. jQuery paired accessible documentation with an active forum, a plugin ecosystem, predictable releases, and direct maintainer participation. Resig also wrote Pro JavaScript Techniques (Apress, 2006) and later worked on Khan Academy’s computer-science curriculum.

Brendan Eich

Best known for. Creator of JavaScript (1995, at Netscape, in ten days); co-founder of Mozilla; later founder of Brave.

Significance. Eich remained a public participant in the JavaScript community through standards work, conference talks, and discussion of the language’s design.

Douglas Crockford

Best known for. Identifying and formalising JSON; JavaScript: The Good Parts; engagement with Yahoo’s developer community.

Significance. Crockford’s writing and conference talks argued for using a deliberate subset of JavaScript. JavaScript: The Good Parts (O’Reilly, 2008) collected that argument. At Yahoo, he also appeared in developer-facing talks and technical material about JavaScript and JSON.

Sara Chipps

Best known for. Co-founder of Girl Develop It (2010); engineering leadership at Stack Overflow; subsequent founder and investor work.

Significance. Girl Develop It built chapters across major US cities to teach software development to women. Chipps later worked on community products in Stack Overflow’s leadership team.

Anil Dash

Best known for. First employee and later a vice president at Six Apart; CEO of Glitch; long-running tech-industry writer.

Significance. Dash has written at anildash.com since 1999 about developer culture, online community, and the responsibilities of technology companies. He led Glitch from 2017 to 2022, when it offered a browser-based environment for creating and remixing web applications. His work at Civic Hall and Data & Society also connected developer culture with technology-policy discussions.

Adam DuVander

Best known for. Long-running developer-marketing analyst voice; former editor at ProgrammableWeb; subsequent work at SendGrid, Zapier, and as an independent developer-marketing analyst.

Significance. ProgrammableWeb catalogued public APIs and reported on the API industry through the 2010s. DuVander edited the site, then wrote about developer marketing through the Developer Marketing newsletter and everydeveloper.com.

Erica Joy Baker

Best known for. Engineering and community leadership at Slack, Patreon, GitHub, and other companies; writing and speaking on inclusion in technology.

Significance. Baker has written and spoken about race, inclusion, and the limits of technology-industry diversity programmes while working in senior engineering and community roles. She also co-founded Project Include, which publishes guidance for companies working on diversity and inclusion.

Tim Falls

Best known for. Former SendGrid DevRel practitioner during the company’s independent growth period.

Significance. Falls worked on SendGrid’s DevRel function before Twilio acquired the company in 2019. The programme combined API documentation, a free product tier, and developer advocates.

Carter Rabasa

Best known for. Former Twilio DevRel; one of the architects of SIGNAL and the Twilio Quest-style community work; subsequent work in API DevRel and founding-team roles.

Significance. During Twilio’s growth years, Rabasa worked on SIGNAL, developer-evangelist hiring, hackathons, and technical content. He later carried that API-focused experience into other DevRel and founding roles.

Sam Ramji

Best known for. Roles at Apigee, Google Cloud, and DataStax working on API platforms, open-source commercial models, and developer-platform strategy.

Eric S. Raymond

Best known for. The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999); long-time open-source community organiser and writer.

Significance. The Cathedral and the Bazaar described distributed, community-led software development for a commercial audience. Raymond’s annotations on the leaked Microsoft memos known as The Halloween Documents also became part of the industry’s early open-source debate.

Karl Fogel

Best known for. Producing Open Source Software (O’Reilly, 2005; continuously updated online); contributions to Subversion and other early OSS projects.

Significance. Producing Open Source Software is a practical guide to governance, communications, releases, infrastructure, and contributor management in open-source projects.

Founder-pioneers and language stewards

These founders and language stewards also did developer-facing work through documentation, public technical decisions, talks, and community governance.

Linus Torvalds

Creator of Linux (1991) and Git (2005). His mailing-list posts, conference keynotes, and involvement in technical disputes have influenced kernel governance and open-source community norms.

Guido van Rossum

Creator of Python (1991). He remained publicly involved through language governance and Python community discussions, serving as “Benevolent Dictator For Life” until he stepped down in 2018.

James Gosling

Creator of Java (1995). Sustained presence at JavaOne, Devoxx, and adjacent Java-community events through Sun and after.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Created Ruby on Rails (2004); partner at 37signals, which operates Basecamp and HEY. He communicates with developers through writing, conference talks, and public discussion of business and technical decisions.

Patrick Collison and John Collison

Founders of Stripe (2010). Patrick has written through Stripe’s developer blog and his personal site, patrickcollison.com, and takes part in public technical discussions. Stripe publishes API references, integration guides, and example code for developers.

Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar

Co-founders of HashiCorp (2012). Mitchell Hashimoto has given public demonstrations of HashiCorp tools, while Armon Dadgar has spoken about their architecture.

Bryan Cantrill

Cantrill has held technical leadership roles at Sun, Joyent, and Oxide Computer. His public talks cover operating systems, debugging, Rust, and the engineering decisions behind Oxide.

Liz Fong-Jones

At Honeycomb, Fong-Jones has written and spoken about site reliability engineering, observability, and inclusion in technology.

Other mid-career and adjacent figures

Additional people covered elsewhere in the almanac include:

  • Eric Holscher. Read the Docs co-founder and Write the Docs co-founder.
  • Daniele Procida. Diátaxis framework (see DevRel notable works).
  • Stephanie Hurlburt. Long-running graphics-programming community work and writing on technical-community culture.
  • Justin Garrison. Developer-relations roles at AWS and Sidero Labs; Kubernetes community work.
  • Aja Hammerly. Firebase Studio (Google); long-running Ruby and education-focused community work.
  • Liz Rice. Isovalent and Cisco; container-security and eBPF advocacy; multiple O’Reilly books.
  • Tanya Janca. Independent (We Hack Purple); application-security advocacy.
  • Donnie Berkholz. Contributed to the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings after joining the firm in 2012; subsequent industry-analyst and engineering leadership.
  • Jess Frazelle. Oxide and independent work; writing and talks about systems engineering and security.
  • Tom Hudson (TomNomNom). Independent security researcher and developer-tool author.

See also