Origins and Evolution of Developer Relations.

Developer Relations did not begin as a profession. It began as a problem: how do you convince software engineers to build on your platform when they have other options? The history of DevRel is the history of how that problem was answered, formalised, professionalised, scaled, broken, and rebuilt — across four decades.

The 1980s — Evangelism is born

The earliest direct ancestor of modern DevRel is Apple’s developer evangelism work for the Macintosh, beginning in 1983. The Macintosh’s value depended entirely on third-party software, and Apple needed a way to convince a skeptical industry to build for what looked, in 1983, like a toy. Apple’s response was to hire technically credible people whose full-time job was to convince developers.

Guy Kawasaki joined Apple in 1983 and became the most visible of Apple’s Macintosh evangelists. The term “evangelist” was a deliberate borrowing from religious language — Kawasaki and his peers were charged with spreading genuine belief, not running campaigns. Kawasaki’s 1991 book Selling the Dream is the closest thing the field has to a foundational text, written as a generalist manifesto on evangelism but unmistakably the product of his Macintosh experience.

By the late 1980s, Microsoft had begun building its own developer evangelism organisation under Steve Ballmer’s “developers, developers, developers” thesis. The reasoning was simple: Windows’ value was the application ecosystem. The Windows Software Development Kit (SDK), launched in the late 1980s, was paired with developer events, technical newsletters, and traveling evangelists.

Other 1980s artefacts that would later be recognised as proto-DevRel:

• Borland’s aggressive developer-facing marketing (Philippe Kahn) for Turbo Pascal and later Delphi.
• IBM’s relationships with mainframe and OS/2 developers.
• Sun Microsystems’ developer outreach, which would intensify dramatically with Java in the mid-1990s.

What did not yet exist: formalised job titles, career ladders, dedicated teams in the modern sense, or measurement frameworks. The work was real; the profession was not.

The 1990s — Microsoft scales it; Java arrives

Two things defined DevRel in the 1990s:

1. Microsoft’s Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) organisation, which would grow over the decade into one of the largest developer-focused organisations in the technology industry, with regional teams across North America, Europe, and Asia. DPE’s structure — regional teams, specialty (server, client, mobile, games), evangelist career ladder, and an established events presence — became the template that everyone copied.
2. The Java launch (1995) and the rise of Sun’s developer-facing operation: JavaSoft, JavaOne (1996), the Java Community Process, and the global Java User Group network. Java demonstrated that an open-ish platform could outcompete proprietary alternatives if it cultivated developers aggressively enough.

Two underlying enablers also matured in the 1990s:

• The MVP program. Microsoft formalised the Most Valuable Professional award on October 22, 1999, building on community recognition practices that had emerged organically on Usenet, CompuServe, and the early Microsoft online communities. MVP became the prototype for every later third-party recognition program (AWS Heroes, GDE, Oracle ACE, etc.).
• The early web changed information distribution. Microsoft launched MSDN as a quarterly CD-ROM in September 1992, expanded it onto the web, and made it the canonical destination for Microsoft technical information.

By the end of the 1990s, “developer evangelist” was a recognisable job title and a senior career path at a handful of platform companies. It was still not a profession, and there were no shared frameworks, books, or standards.

The 2000s — Web, blogs, and Scoble

Two forces reshaped DevRel in the 2000s:

1. The web ate the desktop. New platforms emerged (Google, Amazon, Facebook, the various web frameworks) and each needed developers. Programming-language communities (Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP, Node.js) became powerful in their own right, independent of any single vendor.
2. The corporate blog arrived. Tools like Movable Type, WordPress, and Blogger made it trivial for technologists to publish under their own names. Robert Scoble at Microsoft (joined 2003) became the archetype of the blog-era evangelist — a personal voice operating somewhat outside the marketing organisation, with permission to be candid. Scoble’s blog and his Channel 9 video work (launched 2004) showed that authenticity beats polish, a lesson the field is still relearning.

Other 2000s milestones:

• WWDC became a tentpole event again under Steve Jobs’ Apple, beginning around 2002.
• Amazon Web Services launched (2006) and within a few years began building one of the largest developer evangelism organisations in technology.
• Google’s developer-facing work scaled rapidly through the late 2000s: Google Developer Day (2007) renamed Google I/O (2008), the Google Developer Experts program (mid-2010s), and Google Developer Groups.
• Twitter (2006), GitHub (2008), and Stack Overflow (2008) created entirely new channels through which developer relations could happen at scale, peer-to-peer.

The vocabulary started shifting in the late 2000s: “developer advocate” began displacing “developer evangelist” at companies wanting to signal that the role’s purpose was advocating for developers internally, not just advocating for products externally.

The 2010s — Professionalisation

If the 2000s were the blog era, the 2010s were when DevRel became a profession. The defining shifts:

• DevRelCon launched in London on September 30, 2015, founded by Matthew Revell. It was the first conference dedicated entirely to DevRel practitioners, and it survives in 2026 as the canonical industry gathering.
• Books arrived. Caroline Lewko and James Parton’s first work on developer marketing predated this decade, but the genre crystallised with:
  • Jono Bacon, The Art of Community (O’Reilly, 2012).
  • Stephen O’Grady (RedMonk), The New Kingmakers (2013) — argued the strategic thesis that developers had become the central force in technology procurement.
  • Christian Heilmann, The Developer Advocacy Handbook (open-source, 2010s).
  • Mary Thengvall, The Business Value of Developer Relations (Apress, 2018) — the discipline’s first systematic treatment of DevRel ROI.
  • Lewko & Parton, Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program (Apress, 2021, but reflecting late-2010s practice).
• Strategy frameworks emerged. Phil Leggetter introduced AAARRRP in 2016. The Orbit Model appeared at orbit.love starting around 2018–2019. The discipline now had vocabulary to discuss strategy.
• AWS Heroes (launched 2014) became the dominant model for third-party recognition programs at developer-product companies, eventually copied (with variations) by MongoDB, HashiCorp, Cloudflare, GitHub, and dozens more.
• API-first companies institutionalised DevRel as core. Twilio (founded 2008) was particularly influential, holding its first developer conference in the early 2010s, later renamed SIGNAL. Stripe (founded 2010), Postman (2014), Algolia (2012), and others followed.

By the end of the 2010s, DevRel was a recognised function with a recognised set of practices, books, conferences, and frameworks. The job title “Developer Advocate” was on tens of thousands of LinkedIn profiles. Most developer-product companies of meaningful scale had a DevRel team.

The early 2020s — Boom and bust

Three things shaped DevRel from 2020 through 2024:

1. The pandemic forced everything online. In-person conferences collapsed in 2020 and reinvented themselves as virtual or hybrid events. Companies discovered that some forms of DevRel content (livestreams, on-demand video, async community) reached more developers than physical events ever had. Some never went back. Others recovered to roughly 2019-scale by 2023.
2. The 2021–2022 hiring boom over-extended DevRel teams. With cheap capital, companies hired aggressively into DevRel without strategic clarity, and DevRel teams ballooned at companies where the function did not have a strong business case.
3. The 2022–2024 layoff wave hit DevRel hard. As capital tightened, companies cut functions whose business value was unclear. DevRel teams — sometimes correctly identified as oversubscribed and underfocused, sometimes simply structurally vulnerable to budget cuts because they sat under marketing — were among the most visibly impacted. Microsoft Cloud Advocates, Twitter’s developer-facing teams (post-Musk acquisition, late 2022), portions of Google’s DevRel org (2023–2024), and parts of Heroku’s DX team (Salesforce, 2024–2026) were all affected. The “Is DevRel dead?” debate ran across blog posts, podcasts, and conference talks for two years.

See ./death-and-rebirth.md for a detailed treatment.

2024–2026 — Rebirth and AI

By late 2024, the corrective narrative was settling. DevRel was not dead; bad DevRel was getting killed, and good DevRel was being structurally rebuilt with clearer business alignment.

Key signals of the renaissance:

• The Developer Relations Foundation was announced on August 12, 2025, under the Linux Foundation. Inaugural Steering Committee members included Wesley Faulkner, Stacey Kruczek, Arun Gupta, Divya Mohan, and others. The Foundation institutionalised the field at a level it had never had before.
• Frameworks like AAARRRP, Orbit, and the DevRel Capability Maturity Model entered mainstream use.
• Product-Led Growth crystallised DevRel’s centrality. At PLG companies (Stripe, Twilio, Vercel, Supabase, Neon, MongoDB Atlas, Snowflake, OpenAI), DevRel is no longer a brand-building function — it is part of the activation funnel. See ../11-trends/plg-and-devrel.md.
• AI companies built DevRel from scratch. OpenAI’s developer organisation (Romain Huet, Olivier Godement, Logan Kilpatrick until early 2024), Anthropic’s developer-facing work around Claude Code, Hugging Face’s deep open-source-led community, and the LangChain/LlamaIndex tooling ecosystems all built their DevRel functions in the 2023–2026 window. The discipline now has AI-native templates.
• Documentation became a category of its own. Mintlify, Docusaurus, ReadMe, GitBook, Stoplight, and Redocly grew into a serious tools market as companies recognised that docs are not a back-office artefact but a primary product surface.

The macro arc

Five eras, each adding rather than replacing what came before:

1. Evangelism (1980s–1990s). Convince developers; ship books and SDKs.
2. Advocacy (2000s–2010s). Listen to developers; represent them internally.
3. Experience (2010s–2020s). The whole developer experience matters, not just the people doing outreach.
4. Strategy (2020s). DevRel must connect to business outcomes via measurable funnels.
5. Agent-mediated (2024+). Documentation is read by LLMs as well as humans; developers route research through AI; DevRel must serve both audiences.

Each era introduced new practices that the next inherited. A modern DevRel team is doing all five at once.

See also

• ./timeline.md — Year-by-year milestones.
• ./death-and-rebirth.md — The 2022–2024 contraction in detail.
• ../06-people/pioneers.md — Profiles of the people who shaped each era.
• ../11-trends/ai-and-llms.md — How AI is reshaping the field from 2023 onward.

Primary sources

• Guy Kawasaki, Selling the Dream (HarperCollins, 1991).
• Stephen O’Grady, The New Kingmakers (O’Reilly, 2013).
• Mary Thengvall, The Business Value of Developer Relations (Apress, 2018).
• Caroline Lewko & James Parton, Developer Relations (Apress, 2021).
• Microsoft MVP Program history, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (Wikipedia and Microsoft archives).
• DevRelCon archive (developerrelations.com / hoopy.io).
• Linux Foundation, Developer Relations Foundation announcement, August 2025.