Released: Wed Oct 21 2026

About the interview

HackerNoon invited me to its new "Meet the Developer Advocate" series. The format is an interactive interview: a template with 13 questions that you answer by typing or straight into your device mic, and HackerNoon editors then turn the answers into an article. I filled it in after DrupalCon, and it was published on October 21, 2026.

Read the interview on HackerNoon

What it covers

  • DevRel beyond marketing: earning developers' trust through hands-on value, working on par with the product teams, and why DevRel that only repeats what marketing says is not DevRel.
  • Real projects as the middle ground: showcases built on actual use cases, so developers see how the product is used (and bent) and the feedback I bring back inside stays concrete.
  • Many communities: framework developers, the CMS and DMS platforms that ship CKEditor, and the invisible OEM integrators, met on their terms by contributing back.
  • The CKEditor AI on-premises campaign: built around deployment honesty instead of a glossy launch. For enterprise developers, architecture transparency is the marketing.
  • Docs readable for AI agents: a docs MCP server and an AI best practices skill, because the first integration a developer sees is more and more written by an agent.
  • Measuring DevRel: goal oriented OKRs instead of initiative tracking, with developer enablement first, then advocacy, community and developer marketing.
  • Making the developer the hero: "look what you just shipped" tutorials, and the Ondrej askin' interviews that put the people I meet at conferences in the spotlight.

Ways to read it

  • The full article, with a TL;DR at the top
  • An audio version you can listen to right in the article player
  • Lite version for a plain, fast read
  • Terminal version in HackerNoon's retro terminal reader