Episode 172, Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly

Building an audience is always a bit of a paradox for DevRels. You have a genuine desire to foster a community, so you begin creating content. Yet the more effort you put into that content, the less it seems to draw people in. A balance between effort and authenticity must be struck in order to grow - and today’s guest, Brian Rinaldi has managed to strike this balance perfectly over the course of seven years of audience-building. Brian is the Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly, and he joins us for a chat not just about audiences, but also about his experience at the first company to roll out feature flags as a service. He breaks down his thoughts on the online vs in person conference debate, and tells us why he believes virtual can never truly replace live events, but also - why should they? Virtual has the capacity to be its own beast, and while that can’t replicate the feeling of being a crowded room, it can open many other doors that would have been closed in other circumstances. Finally, he takes us through his history. How did his role evolve into a DevRel position, and what did that transition look like over the course of ten years? I suppose we could call it a kind of natural selection of the technology world. We’re not sure if Darwin would be proud, or turning in his grave at that analogy. Reach out to Brian here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrinaldi/ Check out CFE.dev: https://cfe.dev/ Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups: https://voxgig.substack.com/ Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com