Building and Growing a Community behind Technical Products
The biggest takeaways from our interview with Rob Lauer, Director of Developer Relations at Blues Wireless
Developer Relations: Building and Growing a Technical Community behind your products
To be really successful in the role, in any kind of role in developer relations, you need to have some traits of all those different kinds of individual contributors.
What differentiates us [developer relations] from marketing is that we are as authentic as we possibly can be. Mostly because developers can smell bullshit really quickly.
We are focused on the individual developer and making individuals successful, even if they are just a basement hacker.
We [Rob’s team] have pretty good technical backgrounds and those soft skills that are required to be successful in a technical role.
I've only been successful when I've hired people who have been really fantastic and very self-motivated and self-driven.
When we see folks posting Hackster projects using the Notecard, purely organically, that's amazing. That's when we know that we've really done our job.
Blues Wireless: and it’s world-class IoT Technology
[The Swan MCU], it's the most extensible feather compatible microcontroller.
The Notecard is the core of what we do. Ray Ozzie started the company in 2017 officially. But it took a couple years before they launched publicly with the Notecard, but the whole point of the Notecard was to make cellular IOT cheaper and easier to use.
Then you have the [NoteCarrier] A, that's the black one that we just released. That's my go to, really generic, it's got great onboard antennas on there. You can access virtually any pins on the Notecard with it as well. The [Notecarrier] B is what a lot of people go to production with actually, because it's a really small form factor.
New Products Coming Soon
In about two or three weeks, we have a new Notecarrier coming, that's exciting. We have the Notecarrier AF today, which is our largest Notecarrier. That's got the feather socket on there. We have a new, pretty dramatic revision of that coming out, it's a smaller form factor.
And I believe in August, we’re releasing our Sparrow project, and this one is pretty interesting. So what Sparrow does is provide a single Notecard gateway. It's got a gateway with one Notecard in it, but then the gateway communicates with n number of nodes over LoRa. So you can have a bunch of different LoRa sensors with a long range. And the gateway will, using some novel techniques of polling the individual sensors, one at a time, will continually gather that data and then pipe it up to the cloud through that one gateway.
We are looking at doing a new revision of the pi hat as well, so that'll hopefully be coming by the end of the year.