Richard talks to Natalie Gray, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Codurance. Natalie is a former colleague and an expert community builder, previously with Voxgig and now with software consultancy Codurance.
In Codurance, Natalie and her colleagues are inherently linked to the Software Craftsmanship manifesto– a mindset to software engineering. Can your software scale with your business? Natalie explains that the Software Craftsmanship mission is to raise the bar in the software industry through professionalism and technical excellence. Ingrained in this mindset is the desire to always be and do better—to continuously push the limits in pursuit of excellence. The genesis of Codurance is in the Software Craftsmanship community founded by Sandro Mancuso and Mashooq Badar. With a community of over 6,000 developers in London alone, this is a living manifesto in a thriving community.
With regard to community success, Natalie is a firm believer in the need for integrity in your community purpose. A lot of people want to focus on quality and are proud of what they do, so a space for them to share and come together without a commercial reason allows new tech ideas to be born. An important aspect of preventing things to feel commercially driven is in your approach to content – are you producing resources and content people need and want rather than just selling stuff?
DevRel measuring gets touched on again, specifically on community, how do you know its sustainable? Natalie’s advice is to talk to your community. Ask them, is this what you want? And watch out for the core groups, the committed returning members, their enthusiasm is the thing to measure, not the size of the attendance.
All in all, this is a focused discussion on creating and supporting communities to ensure and recognise success and impacts.
Reach out to Natalie Gray: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliejgray/
Codurance: https://www.codurance.com/services
Software Craftsmanship: https://sc-london.com/
Find out more about Sandro Mancuso and Mashooq Badar here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandromancuso/
https://www.codurance.com/publications/author/mashooq-badar
Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast
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