Fireside with Voxgig

Welcome back! We’re bringing in 2025 (and with it a new, exciting lineup of guests) with an oldie but a goldie - Eoin Boylan. Eoin first visited us fireside in 2022, and we are delighted to have him back for an update on all he’s been up to since our first chat. SDK strategy can be divisive, with some business strategies being to avoid the topic altogether - but Eoin, who’s currently working as the Head Engineer at Evervault, finds them to be worth their salt as an investment. Evervault is a data security platform focusing on the payment space, serving as a one-stop-shop for developers. At their core, they remain developer first, retaining the knowledge from their early days, but now applying it to a more specific group of buyers. While we have time, we may touch on the current state of developer knowledge, and how, as useful as it may be, how ChatGPT may be influencing our bidding developers for the worst. Check out Evervault: https://evervault.com/ Reach out to Eoin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoin-boylan/ 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

Today, we're revisiting this New Year's episode from 2024. Our guest was Andrew MacLean, the developer relations manager at DevCycle, a feature flag management platform for developers. If you’ve never heard of feature flag management, that’s probably because it’s a relatively new space, despite feature flags having been around forever. If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of feature flags, one of their main benefits is allowing you to update your platform without having to deploy so many versions that you lose the ability to maintain quality. As with many of the people we feature on Fireside, this service could have been a game changer in some of the startups Richard has worked on over the years. Andrew dives into the history of feature flags, and what launched them into the mainstream. From Github devs, to articles, to implementation by major SaaS companies, word of mouth popularisation has made feature flags the staple they now are. Andrew also gives us some insight into his history. It’s a typical DevRel story, of falling into the industry somewhat by accident, but in Andrew’s case his starting point was studying for a career in forensic science. With a background almost as interesting as the work he does now, Andrew makes for a fascinating interviewee. Reach out to Andrew here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewdmaclean/ Check out DevCycle: https://devcycle.com/ 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

Top tip: if you’re thinking of getting into DevRel, just know that you will hate boxes of t-shirts for the rest of your life. Or at least that’s how today’s guest, Phil Leggetter feels about them. Merch getting stuck in customs is a minor issue for sure, but it’s one of the pitfalls of DevRel we get into in this episode. Phil is the Head of DevRel and Developer Marketing at Hookdeck, an event gateway that strives to be a backbone for event driven applications. We talk to Phil about the utility of SDKs, and where their detractors tend to miss out on their ultimate purpose. We speak about the connection to revenue, and the key to demonstrating it, if you have higher ambitions for DevRel. We also ask the question - is there an advantage for DevRel to stand apart from marketing, or does this cause us to miss out on another community that we might gel well with? Reach out to Phil here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leggetter/ Check out Hookdeck: https://hookdeck.com/ 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

Today, we’re speaking to Kevlin Henney, who, if you scroll back far enough, you’ll see was one of our earliest guests on the podcast. We’re thrilled to have Kevlin back for a discussion on microservices, agile development and how developers can avoid the “factory line” work style. Kevlin talks to us about how there isn’t one service or language that has “the answer”, and the approach to tools should be broad and open to change. When developing a system, you’re creating something new - it’s not manufacturing, there is always an element of novelty to what you’re making, and that should be understood and accounted for. We also get into the subject of legacy code and systems, and how to interact with and manage them. The accommodations required to run such a system can often result in it making more decisions than the developers working on it. A code base that’s a decade old with multiple component systems fighting each other can present problems, but if everyone’s too afraid to change things up, then the maintenance costs will continue to rack up. It was a pleasure to have Kevlin back and we can’t wait to see what he’s up to, 200 more episodes down the line! Reach out to Kevlin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevlin/ Check out his website: https://about.me/kevlin 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