Year in Review: AvocadoBytes in 2023

A look back over my last year of DevRel, PMM and GTM writing and advising, and a look forward to what's in the future

Happy New Year to everyone! 🥳 I’ve meant to write this reflective post for over a month, but I kept getting “distracted” with paid advising work and holiday cheer — I can’t really complain! 2023 was a year of (professional) change for me, and so I wanted to take a moment to look back and share some highlights.

The value of taking a moment to reflect

For the last ~10 years or so, I’ve taken time out around the winter holidays to retrospect on my personal and professional life. I’ve taken my cues on this from Chris Guillebeau, Pat Kua, and others, and if you haven’t ever done one of these retrospective exercises, I highly encourage it!

I’m by no means perfect, nor have I achieved all the goals I set out to accomplish each year, but this practice has previously helped me set priorities for spending more time with my family, training for marathons, and offering more focused mentoring. The forcing function of sitting down for a day and looking back over the past year quickly shines a light on my current strengths and weaknesses.

This practice of retrospecting also gets better over time. Not only have I become more efficient at the process, but there has been a compounding effect. For example, it’s fascinating to look back over the years each December and spot recurring habits, patterns, and people that massively influence your life (for better or worse!). I’ve had more than a couple of face-palm moments where I’ve asked myself, “Am I still doing that negative thing? After I spotted it five years ago… D’oh!”

It can take time to put monthly, quarterly, and annual processes in place to record critical data, but as they say, as long as the signal/metric can (and will) drive change, the time and energy spent capturing this isn’t wasted.

All change, please, all change…

Professionally, this year was very different than previous years. After ~6 years on the cloud native rocket ship that was Ambassador Labs, I decided to move on and try something different. I shared some of my memories from this role on LinkedIn. As with many things in life, the highlights were all about the people. I joined the organisation as employee number seven (or so) and left when there were 70 people. Along the way, I had the opportunity to build the DevRel team from scratch, learn from a fantastic group of people, and be mentored by folks I know will be part of my professional life for quite some time.

The best way to learn is to teach

It was a privilege (and a lot of fun) to take a few months out over the summer and reflect on what I wanted to do professionally, as well as spend more time with family and friends and invest more in ad hoc mentoring. It was great to chat with and help so many folks, and as usual, I’m sure I learned as much as the folks I was talking to.

There were several unexpected highlights of offering these calls; for example, I helped some people figure out what they wanted to do (professionally) in life. I also had the chance to offer concrete advice on what hiring managers were looking for in these challenging times. I’ll give a special shout-out to Kira Komshilova, who created a heartwarming LinkedIn post detailing our chat's outcomes.

My continued role at InfoQ and QCon

During 2023, I remained active in the amazing InfoQ community, primarily working behind the scenes with leadership and management, attending and helping at QCons, and publishing podcasts.

Here are my InfoQ highlights of the year:

• 2023 Year in Review Podcast: AI/LLMs, Tech Leadership, Platform Engineering, and Architecture + Data

• The InfoQ Trends Reports 2023 eMag: From Culture to Cloud and more

• “My Journey at InfoQ and QCon”, with bonus content “By Practitioners for Practitioners: A Look Inside the InfoQ & QCon Editorial Model - Daniel Bryant”

Key takeaways from the InfoQ Year in Review podcast

The birth of AvocadoBytes!

2023 also saw the creation of this newsletter alongside my work in advising dev/ops tooling startups and scale-ups on how to effectively implement developer relations, product marketing, and general go-to-market strategies!

Although I haven’t published quite as regularly as I wanted, I’ve realised that I’ll realistically be able to write one or two posts a month. The messages, feedback, and questions generated from the content have been amazing, too. Please keep them coming!

Here are the top three AvocadoBytes posts of the year:

Looking for reading/listening inspiration?

Another fun habit I aim to (re-)establish is sharing my reading list each year. Check out the twenty or so books that I read this year:

As part of my professional reset (and also part of my traveling and exercising routine), I listened to a lot (maybe too many???) podcasts this year.

My top five recommendations, most relevant for this audience, are:

• Lenny’s Podcast: A regular tour de force of all things product, marketing, and leadership

• The Twenty Minute VC: Fast-paced coverage of VC, product, and GTM

• Shomik’s Software Snack Bites: Wide-ranging coverage of building dev tooling and enterprise tech companies (and more!)

• The Official SaaStr Podcast: Deep-dives into building, running, and leading at SaaS-based organisations

• ProducTea with Leah Tharin: Fantastic (and very human) coverage of all things product, PLG, and GTM.

And here’s the complete list of my top 20 podcasts, ordered by listening time according to Podcast Addict.

What’s next? You decide!

What does 2024 hold for me? I plan to continue my advising roles in the dev tooling and cloud native space (and stay tuned for more exciting news on this soon!), and I also aim to write here once or twice a month.

I’m always open to hearing feedback, and if you have a topic or questions that need exploring in this format, please drop me a line!

I wish you success in everything you do in 2024! 🚀