By Practitioners for Practitioners: A Look Inside the InfoQ & QCon Editorial Model - Daniel Bryant

InfoQ recently caught up with Daniel Bryant, a well-known DevRel Leader, Java Champion, and - for the past decade - a Cloud & DevOps Editor for InfoQ.com. Daniel is also InfoQ’s News Manager, where he helps to drive the site’s comprehensive coverage of key innovations and trends that professional software engineers need to know about. 

Hi Daniel, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, some of the different hats that you wear, and your professional journey thus far?

Hello, I’ve held various roles in my career, from academic to coder, from software architect to platform engineer, and from CTO to product marketer. I jokingly say I approach job titles with a Pokémon mindset: “gotta catch ‘em all!”

Looking back, however, I can see that there are three key themes that knit together my career choices: (1) I revel in constantly learning new things and exploring new problem spaces, (2) I enjoy helping people learn about and understand technology, and (3), I thrive as a generalist rather than a specialist. 

In a nutshell, I like to “connect the dots” across a range of problems, people, and technology. Currently, I’m doing this as a product marketing and developer relations advisor to several startup organizations within the dev tooling and B2B developer platform SaaS spaces.

You’ve written for and spoken for a wide range of community sites, publications, and conferences. From what you’ve seen, what makes the InfoQ and QCon editorial model unique?

The most noticeable differences with InfoQ (and QCon) in comparison with other sites are the “by practitioners for practitioners” approach and a lean towards senior engineers and technical leaders. I’m obviously biased, but I think we strike the perfect combination of these two things.

Of course, as with any approach, this comes with strengths and weaknesses (otherwise known as “opportunities”!). 

The strengths include our ability to spot trends emerging from people actually doing the work, e.g. we covered NoSQL, platform engineering, and the ML transformer architecture before many others did, and we were able to connect the dots on how these trends may impact the day-to-day lives of software engineers and architects. 

The weaknesses, or opportunities, include not being able to cover every topic or event we would like. This is probably true for most news and education-focused organisations like InfoQ, but it’s especially noticeable for us as we don’t have any journalists or staff writers on the team. However, I’ll take this opportunity to say that we are constantly growing our team of contributors!

The InfoQ Trends reports seem to encapsulate InfoQ’s editorial mission to some degree. What are the Trends Reports and how do they aim to serve InfoQ’s readership?

The InfoQ Trends Reports are designed to help readers identify and track interesting technologies and trends over time. We act as “information Robin Hoods” and constantly scout new technologies. We also provide guidance on where we believe these technologies are heading and the required context for the successful adoption of techniques. This often translates into a recommendation (or not) for readers to incorporate these technologies and techniques into their current development plans and product roadmaps.

We aim to create a trend report for each core topic once a year (e.g. software architecture, Java, cloud, DevOps, AI/ML, etc), and we use Geoffrey Moore’s classic “crossing the chasm” model to track the “diffusion of innovation”. Things generally move from “innovator” and “early adopters”, and sometimes they cross the chasm to the “early and late majorities”. Depending on the risk profile of a reader’s organization, they can choose to adopt technologies from the lifecycle accordingly.

The InfoQ trends reports are typically our best-performing and most talked-about content, and they also are only opinion-type pieces we create and share publicly. 

What makes InfoQ’s approach to ‘news’ different from other publications?  What does the ‘news process’ look like on InfoQ and how does the team decide ‘what is important’?

As mentioned above, all of the content on InfoQ is created by practitioners, and this is our (not so) secret sauce!

Any contributor at InfoQ can submit story ideas and news leads via our issue tracking system, and topic leaders either approve or reject this. Anyone within our contributor community can also add comments to an issue. This way, there is a nice balance between leadership and the team selecting what stories are written up for the site.

Once a lead is available in our issue track, a contributor typically explores the respective technologies, learns more about the techniques, or reaches out to other experts in order to provide additional value over any coverage already available on breaking news sites. We aim to provide the “best, not (necessarily) first” coverage.

How can a B2B marketer get the attention of a highly time-constrained - and often suspicious of poor marketing - audience?  What can marketers learn from the InfoQ approach to writing News? Are there any tips and tricks you can share that might help with writing marketing copy or product positioning?  

I frequently recommend that marketers should be super clear on the goals they are looking to achieve. As part of this, they must understand their intended user persona (within their ideal customer profile) and define the metrics of success. Honestly, if they do these simple steps, they’ll probably be within the top 10% of marketing teams!

Once you have your goals, metrics, and personas clearly specified, the best thing you can do is to create content that authentically addresses the challenges identified.

For example, I really like what the NGINX marketing team did with their “Microservices March” campaign. They appeared to be genuinely excited to educate folks about the benefits and challenges of adopting microservices. The content was created by practitioners, who invested in building a community without being overly aggressive in marketing to the people who joined.

With over 310K subscribers, the InfoQ Software Architects’ newsletter provides a unique platform to reach both current and aspiring software architects.  How would you describe the editorial vision behind the newsletter?  What are some of the key topics and themes that are typically covered?

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed bootstrapping this project, and it’s amazing to see that this many readers have subscribed over the 75+ editions of this monthly newsletter. 

The editorial vision is focused on providing deep coverage of a topic through the lens of a software architect. Each month we scour InfoQ and the Internet for the best content on the chosen topic, summarise this, and collate it into one easily digestible newsletter.

We’ve covered topics as diverse as frontend architectures, programming languages for the enterprise, cloud computing, leading teams, data engineering, and more, but all through the lens of senior software leaders.

We also regularly listen to feedback from readers, and this has helped shape both the topics covered and the blend of news and case studies covered in the newsletter each month.

At QCon San Francisco 2023, you assembled and led the “Platform Engineering Done Well” track.   What goes into assembling a QCon track? What are some of the key challenges - and decision points - that a track host needs to make?

Assembling a track for QCon is always a lot of fun but also always a lot of work! The key decisions include the positioning and goals of the track. For example, my track was focused on platform engineering, but we wanted to cover the human/people aspects of this in addition to the technology.

Once I have the topics in mind, I then go looking for speakers. And I am always keen to make sure we have a track with speakers that have diverse representation, backgrounds, and thinking.

For anyone interested in a deeper dive into how I approach building tracks, I wrote more about this specific conference in a recent blog post. 

Platform engineering has become a bit of an ‘umbrella’ term for some marketers, being used interchangeably with DevOps.  What is platform engineering from your perspective, why is it important, and how does it relate to DevOps?

There’s a great meme about how DevOps is dead and all we need to do is build platforms using DevOps practices and tools. This is spot on!

I like to think of platform engineering as a subset of DevOps, focused on establishing practices, systems, and tools to enable software developers to code, ship, and run their applications successfully.

I’ve quite enjoyed watching the concept of platform engineering emerge, as it has given the industry a chance to reflect on important qualities of the platforms and tools we build to deliver software. I very much like the focus on self-service, product mindset, and systems thinking – and a lot of this is what the Team Topologies authors espoused for quite some time.

There’s the ‘people’ side to Platform Engineering and then there’s the ‘tools/tech’ side. How should B2B marketers think about introducing - and talking about - their platform engineering offerings to the software development community?

My advice is to focus on the goals and “jobs to be done” of their target users. If you understand the biggest pain point that your potential customers have and can map this to how your product genuinely will help them fix this, the sale should almost be automatic.

The next piece of advice is to always be authentic. Educational content should be created by practitioners, and all assets and copy should be produced as a collaborative effort between marketing and practitioners (engineers, DevRel, CS, SEs, etc). There’s a trope that developers hate marketing, but in my experience, it’s really that developers hate bad marketing.

Compared to other conferences that you’ve spoken at and attended, how is QCon’s audience different?  How are the speakers different?

The biggest difference with QCon’s speakers and audience is the diversity of backgrounds and the levels of seniority. And all of the speakers are practitioners.

As QCon is a multi-track conference focusing on topics from architecture to coding to culture and methods, you will meet people from all (software development) walks of life. The majority of people attending a QCon are either senior practitioners or aspire to be in a senior role, and therefore the quality of conversations is super high.

You currently advise a number of startups on how to build highly effective DevRel teams. You were also previously Head of Developer Relations at Ambassador Labs for six years. How is the role of Developer Evangelist changing and evolving?  How should companies think about DevRel in relation to other, more traditional ‘marketing functions’?

I’ve shared some initial thoughts on the evolution of DevRel early this year on my Avocado Bytes Substack. 

One of the biggest changes we’re encountering now results from the end of the “zero interest rate policy (ZIRP)”. When funding was cheap, and VCs and private equity firms were deploying a lot of cash in search of higher returns, the focus for many companies was on growth at all costs. Over the last 18 months, we’ve very much fallen back into “measured growth” as a goal.

DevRel teams are typically well positioned to create the content “fuel” for the marketing team “engine”, and with the measured growth approach in mind, my advice is to approach content creation with an experimental mindset. Most of us are now doing “more with less”, and so we must be sure of the value each campaign provides. Create a hypothesis with well-defined metrics of success, test this, and either lean into or away from a campaign, depending on the results.

As a B2B marketing executive planning for next year, what are some of the key technology trends - and pain points faced by software engineers - that I should be paying attention to? 

Most of us are still being impacted by the end of the ZIRP environment, and so focusing on trends that act more like “painkillers” as opposed to “vitamins” is my recommendation. 

Security and observability-related trends tend to be less susceptible to budget cuts, as everyone needs to address the pain of being both secure and having the capability to understand what is happening in production.

That’s not to say there isn’t a budget for some of the more developer experience-related “vitamins” (which have a lot of overlap with platform engineering), but this will be harder to tap into.

With AI poised to disrupt everything under the sun, how do you see the media landscape evolving?  How do you see AI impacting the roles of marketers, evangelists, and product management/marketing?

It really is early days here, and I assume a lot will change in the coming years. 

The good news is that a lot of the mundane jobs and “boilerplate” work should be automated away with new and improved AI-infused tooling. The bad news is that it’s going to be ridiculously easy to create content. 

The folks that will succeed here are those who can create content and campaigns that stand out against the increasing background noise of AI-generated content.