Our Origin Story & How You Can Help

Thanks so much for signing up to follow the development of the book. We can't achieve our goal of creating a reference text for DevRel without your support and input, but let's get started with a little tale...

Our Origin Story

In late 2018, Caroline was reflecting back on 12 years as founder of Wireless Industry Partnership, having been one of the first people to recognize the importance of developers in the mobile technology ecosystem. Caroline had a passion to share everything that she had learned and observed along the way, having worked with hundreds of startups and many large corporations who shared the common goal of successfully working with software developers.

Around 2006 some 4,500 miles away, James had been growing increasingly frustrated working in new product development and innovation roles inside Teleco's. Whilst being at the forefront of bringing new products to market was a role many craved, James could see the culture, processes and motivations were hindering success. The lightbulb came on, and James then spent the next 5 years championing the need to open up the Telco's infrastructure to enable developers to build on top of the network via APIs.

Caroline and James probably met for the first time in Cannes France, at Mobile World Congress. For those in the know, the meetings inside street cafes and pop-up events quickly became the place to meet the really interesting people, far away from the suits in the main halls.

Over the years as MWC jumped ship to Barcelona, Caroline & Carlo and the WIP team ended up bringing the side hustle and underground community into the main halls as the mainstream mobile industry tried to understand apps, APIs and developers. The "sideshow" grew and grew in popularity, whilst never quite being fully accepted or understood by the establishment. The WIP Jam parties, in particular, became legend. Video footage still exists of Caroline & James playing in the mobile developer community band, thanks to Terrence Eden (with apologies to Van Morrison!)

Fast forward to Summer 2019 when Caroline was on a trip to Europe - that seems a surreal concept these days - She popped by The Bradfield Centre in Cambridge, which James runs since he moved on from Twilio post IPO.

As the old friends were catching up, Caroline shared her idea to write a book and asked James if he would be interested in helping out. Coincidently James had also been thinking about ways he might do something constructive with his experiences, so thanks to some weird unexplainable cosmic alignment, he immediately said yes, and here we find ourselves today.

We need your help!

Clearly, to achieve our objective of creating a reference book to help DevRel professionalize, we can't do this alone. Throughout the process, we will be asking for your opinion and sharing early concepts and tools.

To start things off we have a 5-minute questionnaire to help test and validate some of the assumptions we have about the purpose of the book. We will deeply appreciate every completion we receive. ❤️