05 COMPANIES ✣

Developer Relations at DevTools and Developer-Platform Companies.

The companies in this section operate developer products whose users are developers. Unlike cloud providers (who also serve devs but are full-stack businesses) or API companies (who serve a single integration point), these companies buil…

ENTRY · 4 MIN · 930 WORDS

The companies in this section operate developer products whose users are developers. Unlike cloud providers (who also serve devs but are full-stack businesses) or API companies (who serve a single integration point), these companies build platforms, IDEs, frameworks, and developer infrastructure as their core business. Their DevRel functions are correspondingly central.

GitHub (Microsoft, since 2018)

GitHub’s developer relations function is large, structurally important, and historically influential.

DevRel leadership. Cassidy Williams serves as Senior Director of Developer Advocacy in the mid-2020s, with senior advocates including Christina Warren, Burke Holland (cross-Microsoft), and many other named voices.
GitHub Stars. Recognition program for the most influential GitHub-using developers globally. Provides amplification, early access, and direct engineering input.
GitHub Campus Experts. Student leader program. Requires post-secondary student status, more than one year remaining before graduation, six months of GitHub use, and an application with video resume. Annual July application window.
GitHub Universe. Annual flagship conference (San Francisco, late October). The 2026 edition was scheduled for October 28–29.
GitHub Satellite. Regional event format launched 2017; satellite editions in India, Berlin, Tokyo, etc.
GitHub Octoverse. Annual state-of-software-development report.
GitHub Education. Free Pro accounts for students, Student Developer Pack with dozens of partner-product benefits.
GitHub Copilot DevRel. Significant team dedicated specifically to Copilot’s adoption.
Brian Douglas (bdougie). The first Developer Advocate at GitHub (2018–2022), later founded OpenSauced. One of the most influential alumni of GitHub’s DevRel function.

GitLab

GitLab operates open-core development. Its DevRel function is significant but smaller than GitHub’s.

GitLab Heroes. Recognition program.
GitLab Connect. Customer events.
Unfiltered open development. GitLab’s company handbook (handbook.gitlab.com) is the canonical example of public-by-default operations; the company’s openness functions as continuous DevRel.

JetBrains

JetBrains (founded 2000) operates one of the longest-running IDE-vendor DevRel functions.

JetBrains Academy. Training platform.
Campus Ambassadors. University-focused student program.
Content Creators Program. 250+ creators producing JetBrains-tool tutorials and reviews.
KotlinConf. Annual conference for the Kotlin programming language (which JetBrains created). 2026 edition in Munich.
JetBrains AI tooling. JetBrains AI Assistant, Junie agentic coding tool — increasingly central to DevRel emphasis.
Arun Gupta. VP of Developer Experience at JetBrains, joined from prior roles at Intel, Apple, Amazon, and Red Hat. Steering Committee member of the Developer Relations Foundation.

Vercel and the Next.js ecosystem

Vercel (founded 2015) operates a small, high-leverage DevRel function organised around the Next.js framework and the Vercel deployment platform.

DevRel leadership. Lee Robinson (Head of DevRel, also VP Product). One of the most-followed individual voices in JavaScript / React.
Advocates. Delba de Oliveira (Senior Developer Advocate), Steven Tey (formerly Developer Advocate, also founder of Dub.co).
Next.js Conf. Annual virtual / hybrid conference for the Next.js community.
Vercel Ship. Annual customer / partner event.
AI SDK. Vercel AI SDK has become a primary surface for client-side AI integration in JavaScript, with substantial associated DevRel content.

Netlify

Netlify (founded 2014) helped popularise the Jamstack movement and operates a respected DevRel function.

Jamstack Conf. Annual conference (multiple editions: San Francisco, London, virtual).
Netlify Developers (DevRel team). Long-running, with public-facing advocates like Sarah Drasner (former VP of Developer Experience, now at Google) and Cassidy Williams (now at GitHub) shaping the function in the 2018–2022 era.
Netlify Build. Customer / community events.

HashiCorp (IBM, since 2025)

HashiCorp (founded 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar) operates the largest infrastructure-tooling DevRel function. Acquired by IBM in 2025.

DevRel structure. ~50 staff contributing to community programs across the company, approximately 35% of total marketing headcount.
HashiCorp Ambassadors. Program launched 2020; 102 ambassadors across 31 countries by 2024.
HashiCorp User Groups (HUGs). 173 groups across 61 countries, reaching 49,000+ people.
HashiConf. Annual flagship conference; co-located with IBM TechXchange post-acquisition (2026 in Atlanta, October 26–29).
HashiCorp Learn (learn.hashicorp.com / developer.hashicorp.com). Comprehensive tutorial library across Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Packer, Boundary, Waypoint, Vagrant.
Notable early advocates. Nic Jackson, Anubhav Mishra — whose technical demos and tutorials in the mid-2010s shaped the function.

Datadog

Datadog Ambassadors. Annual cohort (2025 cohort published); recognition for community contributors across observability, DevOps, security, and AI.
DASH conference. Annual flagship event (NYC).
Datadog Learning Center. Self-paced training.

New Relic

FutureStack. Annual customer / developer conference.
New Relic University. Training.
New Relic Champions program.

Snyk

Snyk Ambassadors. Program for enterprise customer AppSec experts.
SnykCon. Annual conference.
DeveloperRelations.com (Snyk). Strong content focus on developer security.

Other notable developer-platform DevRel programs

Cloudflare. Covered in ./cloud-providers.md.
Hashicorp/IBM above.
Cloudinary, Fastly, Akamai. CDN / edge platforms with established DevRel.
Linear, Notion, Airtable. Productivity-platform-with-developer-API model; lighter-weight DevRel.
Sentry. Error monitoring; SentryConf annual; large open-source community.
PagerDuty. Incident response; PagerDuty Summit.
LaunchDarkly. Feature flags; Galaxy annual conference, Trajectory developer event.
Split, Flagsmith, ConfigCat, GrowthBook. Feature-flag market peers with smaller DevRel.
Replit. Browser-based coding environment; long-running DevRel via Replit Bounties, Replit Apps, and Replit AI programs.
StackBlitz, CodeSandbox. In-browser dev environments (see ../08-tools/code-sandboxes.md).
Render, Fly.io, Railway. Modern PaaS competitors to Heroku; smaller but tightly focused DevRel.
Heroku (Salesforce). Historically one of the most influential DX teams in technology. Substantially reduced through Salesforce restructurings 2024–2026.
DigitalOcean. Covered in ./cloud-providers.md.
Hugging Face. Covered in ./ai-companies.md.
Notion, Figma, Linear developer APIs. Smaller DevRel functions where the API is a secondary product surface.