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Ask HN: How do you build a developer community?
On Monday I start a new job that involves building a developer community around a software product.
(My employer makes a CMS-style platform. Developers create apps/modules that run on top of the platform.)
I was hired in large part because I have built a healthy developer community around my open source project, the Nitrogen Web Framework for Erlang (http://nitrogenproject.com).
Some lessons I've learned are:
- Focus on providing organization and growing leaders, you can't do everything
- Success is when a community starts answering its own questions
- Help to publicize anybody who blogs or tweets about you. This leads to more blogs or tweets
- If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a screencast is worth a thousand blog articles
- If all else fails, go to your newsgroup and answer one question at a time
Do you have experience in building tech communities? What lessons have you learned?
Any good books or articles?