2023 Wrapped: PagerDuty Community Year in Review
What a year for the Developer Relations team! The Developer Advocates–or the avocados as we like to call them–helped spread PagerDuty’s presence in the practitioner community across 4 continents: Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania! We asked them to share some highlights from 2023 and here are some of their best stories:
Xenda Amici, Community Manager (Portugal):
“In August I had the great pleasure of joining Dormain, Kat, Mandi, Tara and Tiago on the Community & Advocacy team. I manage the Community Forums and I’m happy to see that the efforts of revamping the program have been paying off: more active members, peer to peer support in discussions, lots of knowledge sharing and insightful feedback about the products. I’m really excited about new program features coming in 2024 – stay tuned!
These few months have been a fun and exciting journey, with unique experiences and countless learnings. In September, Kat, Mandi and Tara visited Tiago and me in Lisbon and we were able to get to know each other better and align our team’s values. In October. I had a great time meeting our VP of Platform Advocacy, Dormain, as well as the UK team and some customer champions, during PagerDuty Connect in London, and attended Dormain’s inspiring talk about PagerDuty Operations Cloud.”
Mandi Walls, Developer Advocate (USA):
“Our events were all over the place this year. Mandi started the year in Sandusky, Ohio, at CodeMash. Other in-person highlights were WTFisSRE and SREday in London and SCaLE in Pasadena, as well as DevOpsDays in Baltimore, NYC, and Atlanta! We’re still doing a nice mix of virtual events, too, so we can still hangout with folks who aren’t traveling yet, including All Day DevOps and DeveloperWeek.
This year, too, Page it to the Limit crossed 100 episodes! Thanks to the other folks at PagerDuty who were so generous with their stories and allowed us to share them with you in our awesome 100th episode! We had a lot of amazing guests this year, including our own CTO Tim Armandpour, Helen Beal, Gene Gotimer, J Paul Reed, and JJ Asghar. Thanks to all of our guests, and if you’re out there and want to be on the show, let us know! I love hearing about what folks are working on and how their work makes tech work better.
We’ve also had some great stuff on the live streams. Our session with Abby Allen and Vivek Raj Saxena on the challenges we have with SMS communications was so deep and nerdy, and answered so many questions folks ask us about why we don’t support various things in notifications. Watch here:
Failure Fridays are a big part of the engineering culture at PagerDuty – we need to know how things break so we can fix them before they do. Rich Lafferty and Stevenson Jean-Pierre hung out with me to talk about Failure Fridays at PagerDuty. If you’ve not run a Failure Friday or Failure Anyday scenario before, check it out!
We hope to bring you more great stuff in 2024, and we hope we’ll get to see some of you at in-person events!”
Tara King, Director of Developer Relations (USA):
This year took the DevRel team around the world – Tara’s had their first speaking engagement in Mumbai, covering the high-level principles of incident management. “It takes me back to my days as a customer of PagerDuty.”
Tara also debuted a brand new talk at DevRelCon London – “a conference I’ve always wanted to speak at, in a city I love – about mental health and burn-out. The conference was a gathering of kind and passionate folks trying to make sense of a tumultuous time, and I’m grateful I got to be there.”
But Tara’s favorite part of the year was welcoming two new teammates, Tiago Barbosa and Xenda Amici. “Meeting up in Lisbon was magical, and I’m so excited for what 2024 brings.”
Kat Gaines, Developer Advocate (USA):
“This year felt like it went by so fast!
Events and IRL connections:
Spring and fall were packed with events. Here are just a few of the memorable ones:
Elevate CX remains an amazing connection vehicle for the customer support and customer-focused communities. I really enjoy a well-organized single-track event; it allows for fewer speakers but creates a stronger sense of connection among attendees and speakers alike. I was only able to make it to the spring event this year and missed out on fall, but really cherished the learnings and community from those two days. Kudos to Sarah Hatter, the mastermind behind it all, for consistently putting on such an intentional and well-organized event.
I also made it to two Support Driven events this year: Leadership Expo in Philly and the fall Expo in Las Vegas. The resilience and dedication to knowledge-sharing in the Support community is so impressive and I’m so grateful to the speakers and connections made there, and another chance to see my online friends in real life!
DevopsDays Taipei, Devops Barcelona, and SREDay were all such welcoming events for a speaker traveling pretty far. Thank you to the organizers for making sure it was extremely worth the time and travel!
At pretty much every event I spoke at or attended this year, there were people who hunted me down in the hallways to discuss their own incident management practices. Speaking is so much fun, but these kinds of conversations are not-so-secretly my “why” for attending events. I really love talking about challenges with folks who are either implementing some incident management practices for the first time or just know that they can do some work to streamline everything and make their teams’ lives easier. Please don’t ever hesitate to say hello if you see me at an event!
Great conversations online
I also had so much fun recording some of our podcast episodes this year. A few of the highly memorable ones for me were the Pagey Nostalgia Hour to celebrate our 100th episode, where we took a trip down memory lane with some of our longest tenured Dutonians. Reminiscing about what things were like years ago was really fun and a cool reminder of how far we’ve come.
Also of note: Sustainable On-Call Culture with Paige at Chronosphere, and Bridging the Gap Between Customer Support and Engineering with Rachel at Redmonk. These were both conversations that I had a lot of fun hosting and which had a lot of great takeaways that are worth a listen if you haven’t had the chance!
Team time!
My last highlight is being able to get together with our team in our Lisbon office. We’re scattered throughout the world, and usually only see each other on zooms, or if two of us happen to be speaking at one event, so getting a couple of days to work on planning, get to know each other, and even bake pasteis de nata together was a great treat.”
Tiago Barbosa, Developer Advocate (Portugal):
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” they say. That’s exactly how 2023 was for me!
“I joined the amazing DevRel team at PagerDuty about 6 months ago, and I’m really excited to be here. In such a short time, I’ve met many great individuals at PagerDuty, starting with my own team and others across different parts of the business. The amount of knowledge and passion displayed by everyone at PagerDuty is truly inspiring and motivates me to bring my best every day.
During my time at PagerDuty, I had the opportunity to contribute to various activities such as running our podcast (Page It to The Limit), hosting live streams, publishing the article From Chaos to Actionable Insights with PagerDuty Integrations and Automation, and assisting multiple customers on 1:1 meetings and the Community forum.
While most of these tasks are done from the comfort of my home office, I also love to travel and meet people to learn how we can provide better service to our customers. This year, I had the chance to visit London and Chicago. I hope that in 2024, I get to explore new places and have the opportunity to meet YOU!
However, one of my main achievements this year was becoming a maintainer for the PagerDuty plugin for Backstage. This allows us to collaborate with our developer community through open source and contribute to a project that I’m truly excited about. It also helps improve the user experience for any PagerDuty customer using Backstage. If you haven’t checked out our plugin yet, please go here and don’t miss out.
I’m really excited for 2024 and eager to showcase what our team has prepared for the community. Just a few more days to go!”
The team is growing!
In November, we welcomed Jacopen, our newest team member based in Japan, who also shares his first impressions with us. We’re also excited to have a new Dev Advocate joining the Lisbon team soon!
Be part of the PagerDuty Community
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We’re on Twitch! Don’t miss our streams covering all things PagerDuty. Our regular shows are: The Unplanned Show with Dormain! (Mondays), Terraform Time with José Antonio! (Wednesdays) and HowTo Happy Hour (Fridays), Missed any of our shows? Follow PagerDuty on LinkedIn and/or subscribe to the Youtube channel to watch on-demand.
We wrapped up our 2023 live streams on a #TwitchRecap and you can watch the recording:
Did you know we have a podcast too? Page It to the Limit is a podcast that focuses on what it means to operate software in production. Hosted by the PagerDuty Community Team, we cover the leading practices used in the software industry to improve both system reliability and the lives of the people responsible for supporting it. Follow the show in your favorite audio streaming service to be notified of new episodes!
In the last podcast episode of 2023, Dev Advocates Mandi, Kat and Tiago take a trip down the memory lane and talk about their favorite shows, events and features. Listen now.