PinnedConsidering Developer Relations as a Career MoveI think that Developer Relations is a fabulous career, and I’m often asked how I got started, or how someone else could get started. There are a lot of people hiring for Developer Relations roles just now (including me!) so here are my tips. There are so many different Developer…Devrel4 min readDevrel4 min read
Nov 8, 2022Sphinx extensions for developer portalsI’ve been gushing about docs-as-code, but realised that I haven’t shared many hands-on tips for actually building different types of sites in this sort of toolchain. I’ve been mostly using Sphinx which generates much better-looking documentation than its website suggests. It’s a python-based static site generator, with a thriving community…Devx4 min readDevx4 min read
Sep 26, 2022Internal DevRel: Colleague EnablementI work in Developer Relations for a very technical company (Aiven), and I usually describe my job as half explaining my employer’s technology to developers, and half explaining developers to my employers. However in the last year or so, I’ve realised that there is a variation on this theme that…Colleague6 min readColleague6 min read
Jan 5, 2022VSCode setup for technical writersI’m working almost entirely with docs-as-code setups for prose at work these days and while I do use vim for most of what I do, VSCode is increasingly in the mix. …Restructuredtext3 min readRestructuredtext3 min read
Dec 12, 2021What Happened to your Blog?What happened to my blog? Nothing happened, I still blog … except then I looked at my site the other day and realised, it’s been a while. The blog here at lornajane.net is mumble years old. It is full of things I wanted to write down, and tells the story…Work3 min readWork3 min read
Nov 26, 2021Add Aiven database magic to your Laravel projectOur mission at Aiven is to make developers’ lives better. Today I’d like to share our new tool that makes Laravel developers’ lives better by adding some helpful functionality to their projects. Laravel is the most popular PHP framework in use today, and is usually backed by either MySQL or…Laravel4 min readLaravel4 min read
Aug 12, 2021A developer’s first look at M3What immediately strikes me about M3 is how it is designed to fit in alongside the other tools in a likely architecture. It has interfaces to match the ones we already know and love from Prometheus and InfluxDB. The integration with Grafana is also seamless. It’s as if M3 is…Database2 min readDatabase2 min read
Aug 8, 2021Hold Attention on the Virtual StageHow do I ensure that I keep my attendees’ attention when I’m presenting virtually? I don’t. I have seen a few tactics for holding people’s attention during virtual events. One is to require everyone present to perform a particular action such as typing a message or clicking an icon, several…Events2 min readEvents2 min read
Jul 30, 2021Telling the difference between time series data and eventsTime series data can be defined as a collection of data points or measurements taken at different times (as opposed to data about many objects concerning a single point in time). So structurally, time series data shares many characteristics with event streams. In this article, we will go through some…Database2 min readDatabase2 min read
May 14, 2021Tips for designing payloadsGetting the different components in your systems talking nicely to one another relies on a rather mundane but crucial detail: a good data structure in the message payloads. …Data6 min readData6 min read
