New: Roadmaps ordered paths through our cheat sheets and flashcards, so you always know what to study next.
Explore themSee what's new on GitHubFrom your first developer talk to a DevRel program you can defend with real metrics.
A 14-step learning path. Follow it in order, or jump to what you need.
For engineers, content creators, and community managers moving into developer relations, whether that means landing a first Developer Advocate role or turning an existing community habit into a real job. Plan on about 7 weeks at a few hours a week. This path stays on the advocacy, community, and program side of the job: it does not go deep on documentation architecture and style systems (see Technical Writer) or on general-purpose public-speaking mechanics outside a developer audience (see Communicating with Impact). By the end you can build a working sample app and turn it into a tutorial that gets a developer to their first success, grow and moderate a community around your work, and read DevRel program metrics well enough to defend the function's value to leadership.
Expected: comfort working in a professional tech-adjacent role, whether that's engineering, content, community management, or product. Helpful but not required: prior experience with Git, APIs, or public speaking.
Opens the path here because a short talk is the fastest way to test whether developer advocacy suits you, and every later step in this path assumes you can stand up and explain something out loud.
Names the three very different jobs hiding inside one 'DevRel' title, so you can pick a target instead of chasing a vague conference-speaker stereotype.
Turns the talk structure from step 1 into a narrative arc, since developers remember a well-told debugging story long after they forget a feature list.
You can already give a short talk and shape it into a story, and you know which of the three DevRel jobs you're actually aiming for. Next up: building something real enough to demo.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Gives you the version control fluency every sample app, pull request, and docs contribution in the rest of this path runs on.
Teaches you to read an API the way the developers you're advocating for will read it, which step 6 asks you to put into a working demo.
This is where advocacy stops being talk and starts being proof: shipping a real integration with the Git skills from step 4 and the API judgment from step 5; expect to feel behind engineers here, and closing that gap is the point.
A real sample integration lives in your own git history now, not just a slide about one; a few minutes of due flashcards on step 5's API patterns keeps them fresh while you turn this demo into a tutorial next. Next up: getting it in front of people.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Packages the sample app you just shipped in step 6 into a getting-started guide that gets someone else to their own working result, not just yours.
Puts the tutorial from step 7 in front of an actual audience instead of letting it sit unread in a repo.
Turns the readers step 8 reached into a place they come back to, with the moderation and onboarding patterns that keep a developer community healthy instead of just loud.
The unglamorous half of DevRel: routing the friction your community surfaced in step 9 back into product decisions; it's the work that decides whether the function survives budget season.
You've published a tutorial, grown a following around it, and closed the loop by turning what the community told you into real product feedback. Next up: making your name recognizable and proving the whole thing was worth the budget.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Ties your talks, stories, tutorials, and community work into one recognizable identity, so the next opportunity finds you instead of the other way around.
Take this if the community you're building in step 9 lives on Discord specifically: server structure, moderation bots, and permissions get their own learning curve.
Worth it if you want the conference hallway conversations and cross-company relationships that turn step 11's personal brand into real partnerships and speaking invites.
Pulls every earlier step into the language budget owners actually respond to: the metrics, reporting, and portfolio that prove a talk, a tutorial, and a community really moved the needle.
You can walk into a DevRel interview knowing which track you're aiming for, with a personal brand, a shipped demo, a community, and the metrics to defend all of it. That's what the Developer Relations badge certifies: you can run this job as a measurable function, not a vibe.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Finish every required step, at least 70% of them genuinely done (not skipped), to earn this badge and 500 XP.