Over the past few months, several people have asked me how to find and hire people to do community management and developer outreach. I decided to profile the community managers that I respect the most on my blog in order to provide some insight into the types of people that do this work, as well as their day-to-day activities.
To kick things off, I conducted a short interview with Ana Hevesi, the head of community at Nodejitsu, a company that provides node.js cloud products and services. I met Ana through the Union Square Ventures network when she was working at Shapeways. She has always impressed me with her insights on community, so I’m pleased to share her story here.
Tell me about the community that you manage.
I work with the node.js developer community; these are the people who are pushing the boundaries of server-side Javascript. The community is driven by open source, and it’s attracting a lot of industry veterans as well as hackers who are new to the game. People are passionate about this technology and in many cases they’re coming together across different companies and disciplines to help it succeed.
Describe your role and day-to-day activities.
One of the best things about Nodejitsu is that our company was built out of the node.js community itself. My role is to expand the greater node ecosystem and to build out the people-facing side of Nodejitsu. Specifically, this means I handle all of our sponsorships, our engagement at events (hackathons, conferences, meetups), collaboration with friends and partners on community initiatives, our user feedback pipeline, and keep a watchful eye on engagement with our open source projects. Most recently, I’ve been on a mission to connect to organizers of independently run node meetups around the US (and soon, the world!).
How did you become community manager at nodejitsu?
I’d been working as a community manager for a few years, most recently at Shapeways, but had always found myself drawn to hanging with and working with developers. At the beginning of this year, I decided to start learning Javascript. I’d known HTML and CSS for years, but was frustrated that my front-end development skills stopped there, so I hunkered down and realized that I really loved it. The Nodejitsu team actually found me online, met with me in person, and convinced me to come on board. It was kind of the luckiest thing ever.
You can find Ana on Twitter at @anoemi. Get Ana’s perspective on community by following her awesome blog, Enemy Gate Down.
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