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What’s the secret to creating content for web devs? We continue our chat with Stefan Judis, developer relations lead at Contentful, blogger and front-end expert. Here is why and how he shares what he knows and learns with the community.

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Creating content for web devs

After building a career as a front-end developer, you’re now leading developer relationsfor Contentful. What does exactly the job involve?

Developer relations is still a fairly new field. What we see over the last decade is that a lot of technology companies. And especially the developers using these technologies have a lot of decision power. We at Contentful are one of these software providers, a headless CMS (Content Management System) that you can put anywhere. And our developer relations team doesn’t work directly on the product. We have completely separated engineering teams that are building the APIs and the product itself.

And the DevRel team is there to spread the word about Contentful but also going into the communities and helping developers with whatever they’re struggling with. And this can be Contentful related, but very often it’s also just web development related. So, what we’re doing is that we are blogging, we are building code examples, etc. And whenever we are talking to users or customers or friends; we are basically the bridge between the product and the developer communities out there.

When someone has a problem with something, our team are usually the first people that they go back to. And we’re then feeding all these things back into the process and building this trust within the developer community. So, yeah, we are blogging, speaking, writing, and hanging out on our community Slack. To connect with the people, have a little bit of fun and build cool stuff. That’s what I do for a living.

But you also enjoy creating content for web devs in your free time, right?

Yes. Since this year, so since 2021 and the pandemic and being stuck home, I’m writing a weekly newsletter. If people are interested in random web development stuff to read on a Monday morning over their coffee… It’s usually something around 10 resources, some GitHub repositories, some music, etc. And I’m writing that every Sunday. So if you’re up for some random good stuff I thought was good over the week, people can subscribe here.

So where do you draw the line between your personal blogging and the one you do as part of your developer relations job?

Well, when you work in DevRel, the line is very, very blurry. Where does work start and where does it end? So I usually do a lot of things on the side. Right. So I do a lot of blogging on my own blog and occasionally I do something for the Contentful blog. Lately, I am leading the DevRel team, which means that I’m not hands-on with the content that much anymore. But I’m still around and the line is very, very blurry.

When you work in these semipublic roles, it’s usually like “Oh yeah, Stefan is the Contentful guy”. And when someone writes me DM on Twitter on a Saturday because they’re struggling with something, well, I’m the last person to say “Yeah, no, it’s the weekend, not going to help you right now”. So it’s very hard to tell where it starts and ends. But I’m just really into web development and I like to share all the things that I learn and that are exciting. And that’s just what I do.

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What advice do you have for other IT pros who want to create content and share tips to help out others? How did you start creating content for web devs?

It’s hard for me to give advice, but I can say what I do. I made it a habit of writing something down or creating a video or some sort of content around things that I discover. I’m also reading a lot. I’m subscribed to a gazillion newsletters. So when on a Sunday morning, I read something and have this thought “Huh, I didn’t know that”, I put it somewhere. It could be on my own website, or it could be on Twitter. But just making this habit of constantly documenting what you’re learning helps with this whole idea that you don’t know anything about web development, because this fear is just so big.

I have been doing this for three or four years. And what that comes down to is that I now have, I don’t know, 200, 300, 400 learnings on my own website. And these are primarily for me. So this is how it started. Because I wanted to come back a month later or six months later and look at it and say “Man. You got a lot smarter over the last six months”. But, after some time, more and more people discovered what I wrote. Because, if it’s useful for me, usually I’m not alone.

And that’s one piece of advice that I would give to people that want to start creating content or blogging. If it’s useful for you, you are usually not alone. And there is nothing like “Oh, beginner content is not useful” or “It has to be this 2,000-word, in-depth article with a lot of scientific, engineering knowledge”. That’s absolutely not the case. We have so many people joining the industry. And whenever you learn something or when someone learns something, I think it’s a very good habit to just write it down.

And then you have the greatest feeling in the world. When some people write me an email or send me a tweet tell me “Hey, Stefan, I just learned this thing. You learned that three months ago and now there’s two of us.” And that’s just beautiful because you can kind of connect the two things, helping people but also documenting your journey.

And you have even built some tools to help you and others in the learning journey, Tiny Helpers and Random MDN. Can you tell us a bit about them?

Tiny Helpers is a very simple website that I created around Christmas one and a half years ago. There are so many self-built or quick build tools that you usually cannot Google. For example, there are a lot of people that build tools for accessibility or tools for defining font sizes, but when you Google them, you will never, ever find them because they are not SEO optimised. There are not a lot of words in them. If you find them and don’t bookmark them, you will always lose them. So, I just built this little resource collection that is Tiny Helpers, and I put it online because that’s what I do.

I thought, “Well, if it’s useful for you, then it’s probably useful for someone else.” And the whole thing is open for contributions. I think I have had over 100 contributions. And there are quite a few people that just come in and say “Oh, that’s useful. I should add that to Tiny Helpers because that’s where I go to find little online tools.” And, when I’m looking for a very specific tool that I’ve seen online, I’m going there as well and it’s the same thing. If it’s useful for me, it’s usually useful for someone else.

The other project that you mentioned, Random MDN is a quick and easy Twitter bot that I built to support my learning journey. So MDN is the developer resource for Mozilla, and it is huge. There is so much knowledge in there and I just had this random thought: “Hey, it would be kind of cool if there was something that tweeted out random MDN pages. It tweets six times a day. It just grabs the sitemap from MDN, picks a random page and tweets it out. And I learn new things just because of it. Sometimes I see a tweet and I am like “Huh, I didn’t know that.” And very often this me to blogging about it, just because my own bot taught me something about web development.

Check out more of our interviews from our podcast episodes.

Follow Stefan through his blog, Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Also discover our article: A Data Centre Migration Is About Technology and People

What makes a successful web dev? We interview Berlin-based front-end expert Stefan Judis. Stefan works for the content management platform Contentful leading developer relations. Whether it is by tweeting, writing, or streaming, he loves sharing his web development expertise with the broader community. He also helps maintain Tiny helpers and Random MDN.

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Let’s start from the beginning. How did you get started in technology?

I started working in a completely different field after school. I was working as a sound engineer, and I worked in German television. So, what I did for a couple of years was mixing stuff mainly for sports TV shows. But then I figured out that I didn’t want to do that my whole life, that that wasn’t going to fly going forward. So, I thought, well, you’ve been always good with computers.

Then I started studying here in Berlin, where I learned to program stuff. So, it all began with a little bit of C++ and Java and these kinds of things that you learn at university. Berlin is a very start-up-heavy city, so I landed an internship working with Magento and PHP – not real front-end stuff like we do these days; that was not really a thing yet back then. But yeah, I took my first internship and from then I just jump from company to company and learned that I love the web and love writing and creating content around web technologies.

What made you fall in love with web development?

I’ve always liked the visual aspect of it. When I started, I was really into the Magento stack and I thought it was kind of cool, but I always liked the whole visual animation part of doing web development. And when I started, it was still the early days. Then, you know, slide up, slide down, fade in, fade out, all of these tiny functions. But II found these incredibly appealing. And then slowly but surely, front-end development became a real thing. Then more complexity got into that, and I was completely hooked by all this new technology that was coming out. Then I found out that building for the web is fun. And since then, I tried to build the best stuff possible.

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What was the hardest part of your transition into tech?

Well, especially in web development, learning is difficult. I have been doing web dev for 10 years, and when I started, I was incredibly impressed with what people were doing there. So, I remember I was sitting next to a colleague, and they opened their terminal, and they were doing some fancy stuff in this black window and I was like, “holy moly this is a completely different world.”

I think it was rather challenging to figure out what exactly I had to know. What should I know how to do? But also building a career around that. I think it’s also important to figure out what you actually like.

So, even though now I say that I specialise in front-end technologies, that took me quite a while. Then, I would say that it took me two or three years to figure it out and get a clearer picture of what is actually out there. And it’s only getting worse, especially in the front-end sphere, because there’s just so much technology out there. A lot of people keep asking me: “Hey Stefan, what should I learn?” And I’m like, “well, good luck figuring that one out.” So, I think that is definitely a challenge that we have at the individual level, but also at the industry level, because there’s just so much stuff happening these days.

Given how many open fronts there are these days, what would you recommend to those who don’t know what to focus on?

For people who are just entering the industry: do whatever is fun and useful, really, because there’s so much stuff to learn and it feels very, very overwhelming. Build your website, get it off the ground and do whatever is fun and useful. But what I usually recommend to people is: don’t forget to be curious about the technology when doing so.

What we see right now is that there are a lot of people just learning a framework when they enter the industry. And, while that is great to get a product off the ground, I think it’s very important to understand what is actually going on. I’m a big fan of the pillars of the web, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and I think it’s still important to have a very good fundamental knowledge of these technologies. And these are huge areas by themselves. You cannot be an expert in all three areas, especially when you have frameworks on top and that and maybe something on top of the frameworks. But I think curiosity and having this drive to say: “Ok, I’m using that. But how does it actually work?” — I think that’s very important to become a good web developer.

In your experience, what separates a good web dev from a great one? Is it soft skills, or is it more about hard skills? What make a successful web dev?

I think there are two areas. Soft skills are usually a very underrated thing when we speak about software developers. Being a team player in general, I think this is definitely a crucial part of a solid career. Being humble, being helpful, all the kinds of things that make you a good team player. That’s something, for example, that probably should have been taught at university when I studied. Good or great teams or developers really depend on soft skills. And I would love to have the industry focus a little bit more around that.

And speaking from the technology side of things, I think a great web developer is someone who always puts the user first. What happens in web development right now is that we have a lot of technology fatigue. We’re using the latest and greatest just because it is the latest and greatest or just because everybody is doing it. So, what I see very often are overengineered sites and products where something simpler would have done the job.

There’s nothing wrong with building something with the latest and greatest when you’re playing around and you’re building your own blog. But when you’re building a commercial product, I think it’s very important to take a step back and think: “Hey, did that make the whole thing slower, or is it now more inaccessible or is it less robust just because we wanted to use the latest and greatest technology?” I think great developers keep the bigger picture in mind and think about the user to build the best possible product. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re paid for. We’re not paid for playing with tech. We are paid for building something great.

What would you say are the top three soft skills a successful web dev should have?

I would say it’s the usual things, from being helpful to being humble. Putting yourself into the shoes of your colleagues and customers, I think that is a very underrated skill. Very often it always feels like everything is on fire and everybody wants something. But very often, and I’m guilty of that myself, it’s necessary to take a deep breath and think about where the other person is coming from. I think this is very valuable when it comes to building a career or working together in teams.

One piece of advice that I received a few years ago and that I now keep close to my heart is that when you’re working it can get quite stressful, always under pressure. And very often, what happened to me is that I had this kind of “anti-” mode. I was like, “everything is too much.” And I just ranted a lot to other people. And I once ranted in a situation where the person was in front of me. They went like: “Stefan, I feel you, I empathise with you, but what’s the solution?” And I didn’t have one. I just wanted to rant.

Since then, when I really had the feeling that something had to change or something was really going on with my nerves. Try to think about the solution first and then propose that to colleagues, your bosses, your mates or whoever is around you, because very often ranting doesn’t solve the problem. And it’s very easy to rant instead of changing something. And that’s something that I learned and that I have kept with me for a couple of years now. And it’s definitely helpful.

Check out more of our interviews from our podcast episodes.

Follow Stefan through his blog, Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.