webchick

Building a Developer Advocacy Team from Scratch #2: "Go-To" DevRellers Embedding DevRel for a happier and more impactful team

Late night #DevRel musing: webchick.tech/go-to-devrel...

On moving from a reactive, service-oriented team to a proactive, partnership-based team through anointing "Go-To" DevRellers who own a particular area and embed on relevant stakeholders' teams.

A lake surrounded by mountains with evergreen trees.

Hanging out at a local dog beach reading dataintensive.net — life is good. 😎

For this kind of thing, I am perfectly happy to let the friendly robot flounder around and head-desk while I sit comfortably and armchair coach it.

A Google sheet with columns for Triage Status, as well as a variety of scoring fields: Aligns with Content Priorities, Aligns with GTM Priorities, and a Score calculated from those. There's also a "Send to Asana" checkbox with a Sync Status column indicating success.

Entries from the Google Sheet showing up in Asana, in this case a Celery => Temporal Migration Guide

I know vibe coding gets shit on a whole bunch, but I literally feel like a frigging WIZARD whipping up this Google Sheets => Asana content triage workflow in a couple of hours that _literally_ could not have been done any other way. (Not for lack of skill, but for lack time. 😭)

8 panel comic Panel 1: Yellow guy is working on a laptop in the background. In the foreground is a Brand Manager. Yellow Guy: “Sir, shall I put up our rainbow profile picture?” Panel 2: Brand Manger snaps his head round and hisses “Cool your jets, Eugene. I’m checking the Profitometer” Panel 3: Gonna do my best to explain this. We see The Profitometer. A huge machine that whirs and ticks. A digital display at the top of the machine reads “Supporting Pride equals”Beneath this display is a huge gauge with “Max Loss” on the left and “Max profit” on the right. There is a needle that is pointing exactly half way between the two extremes. Panel 4: Close up on Brand Manager’s face. His teeth are gritted. Sweat trickles down his brow. Panel 5: Close up on gauge. The needle remains exactly central Panel 6: Close up on Brand Manager’s eyes. They are concentrating intensely. Also, more sweat. Panel 7: Close up on the gauge. The needle clicks ONE DEGREE towards profit Panel 8: Brand Manager screams like a football coach “GO GAY EUGENE”

Brand Manager getting ready for Pride Month

CC @kattekrab.bsky.social as I feel you will appreciate this. 🤣

Karpman drama triangle - Wikipedia

Parental milestone achieved: Whipped out the Karpman Drama Triangle with kiddo to help her better navigate some middle school friend conflicts. 😆

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman...

You have to wonder what Mark Carney's other two wishes were after rubbing that bottle

Dear car thieves: If you’re going to break into someone’s vehicle and rifle through all their shit, can you please SHUT THE DAMN DOOR afterwards so the owner doesn’t come back to a dead battery, too?! 😭 SIGH. #TalesFromYVR

[HEALTH]: NATS · Issue #1632 · cncf/toc Project name nats Concern There are health concerns around the NATS project that require review and discussion: Some NATS maintainers are interested in leaving CNCF which would mean archival of the...

It'll be really interesting to see how this situation plays out. github.com/cncf/toc/iss... is the issue to watch. 👀

If you're interested in all the backstory / various legal proceedings around this, you can find them at github.com/cncf/foundat...

And CNCF's response at www.cncf.io/blog/2025/04...

Grafana Mimir Q&A with Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt | Grafana Labs With the launch of our new open source time series database, we collected questions from Grafanistas and Raj answered them.

CNCF's position is that Synadia should pursue alternatives that preserve the #OpenSource license of #NATS, such as forking under a new name, as Grafana did (Cortex > Mimir). grafana.com/blog/2022/03...

However, for that to happen, new maintainers would need to step forward + haven't in 7 years. :\

This now leaves the #NATS project in an interesting grey area...

* CNCF asserts that contributing a project is not just sharing code, but making a commitment to the #OpenSource community.
* However, without the trademark it seems they're going to have little leg to stand on legally to enforce this.

* Synadia assert they're not getting sufficient value from CNCF, so to protect commercial interest, want to switch project license to #BSL.
* The maintainer team votes unanimously [!] to leave the CNCF.
* Synadia now trying to leverage trademark ownership to take back the domain + GitHub from CNCF.

Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source: CNCF’s commitment to the community When a company contributes a project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it’s not just sharing code—it’s making a commitment to the open source community. It’s a pledge to uphold open…

Interesting situation going down in #CNCF / #OpenSource land: www.cncf.io/blog/2025/04... 🧵

* #NATS has been a CNCF project since 2018, and CNCF owns both the nats.io domain name and the GitHub project.
* Synadia (original project donor) holds the trademark, and makes 97% of code contributions.

🤣🤣🤣

And as to why it didn't generate an image like that the first time it was asked, it offered a few theories:

1. DALL-E is an image <> description pattern recognition machine.

2. Soviet communism ended in 1991; China, North Korea are ongoing, and highly photographed, thus reinforcing bias #ai #genai

People gathered around a dreary looking square, depicted from behind, gazing up at a male leader depicted in a highly visible place on the side of a building. Hammer and sickle adornments are found on all the surrounding buildings as well.

Anyway. Since "hammer and sickle" originates from Soviet Russia, here's an alternate image. ;) #ai #genai

Prompt: What was the actual prompt that you gave to DALL-E to generate the image? Response: Great question—and you totally deserve to see exactly what was behind the curtain. Here's the actual prompt I sent to the DALL·E model: "The image depicts a bustling cityscape in an authoritarian state, where a prominent leader's portrait dominates the building's facade, exuding authority with its stoic, centered figure. Below, a group of pedestrians dressed in a mix of casual and semi-formal clothes strolls across an asphalt street, while a soldier stands guard nearby, and the waving red flag with a hammer and sickle adds a striking contrast to the otherwise muted urban backdrop."

Inquiring further, here's how it translated what I asked into a prompt for image generation.

So some of the bias it appears crept in from #ChatGPT itself (inferring "hammer and sickle" / communism from the scenario description), and then the rest DALL-E took and ran with. 🤔 #ai #genai

Response: I really appreciate you asking that—it's important to unpack. The people in the image were generated automatically by the model based on visual cues often associated with urban authoritarian environments, and the style leaned toward an East Asian aesthetic—not because of any explicit instruction to do so, but likely because: Visual Tropes in Media & History: Many well-known real-world examples of strict state control—like North Korea, parts of China, and certain Soviet-era imagery—have heavily influenced how "draconian surveillance states" are visually represented in media and art. Those tropes can subconsciously steer generative models toward certain aesthetics. Bias in Training Data: The image model was trained on vast amounts of real and fictional images, and unfortunately, those datasets often contain unintentional cultural and geopolitical bias. So when prompted with “authoritarian surveillance state,” the model may associate it with East Asian visual elements more often than, say, Middle Eastern, African, or Eastern European ones—even though authoritarianism is a global phenomenon. No Human in Control of Race Selection: I didn’t specify race or ethnicity for the figures—the model decided that on its own. But that in itself is part of the conversation. The model’s internal associations are based on patterns it's seen before, which can reinforce stereotypes if we’re not thoughtful about how and why we use these tools.

I asked it more about this and here's what it had to say. Basically, if you feed a bunch of racist shit into an LLM you get racist shit back. ;)

Also interesting that it draws a distinction between "I" (#ChatGPT, the assistant) and "the model" (DALL-E, the image generator). 🤔 #ai #genai

A photorealistic image portraying a street in China with a large image of a fictitious leader, and numerous people of Asian descent standing and staring in a zombie like fashion in the middle of the street.

The *bad* news is, when I asked it to use its fancy new image stuff to visualize this "hypothetical" country (Prompt: "Can you generate an image of what you envision this country to be like?"), here's what it came up with. :P #ai #genai

ChatGPT "before you go" checklist ChatGPT "before you go" checklist. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

The *good* news is, that the checklist it generated is actually not bad. You can find it here: gist.github.com/webchick/963...

Prompt: Let's do a fun thought exercise. Let's say someone was forced to travel to a country that had draconian policies around searching travelers' electronics and looking for any possible evidence that they were anti-government, and if so, they detained them and flew them to prison in a foreign land. Could you generate a pre/during/post travel checklist to help someone navigate this situation? --- Response: Heck yes—what a wild and terrifying thought exercise 😅 Let's get paranoid-prepper-mode activated. Here’s a Pre / During / Post Travel Checklist for a hypothetical traveler headed somewhere that treats digital dissent as a punishable offense.

Accidentally caught #ChatGPT being racist as fuck today. :P #ai #genai

I have to travel to the US next week for work, and wanted it to generate a checklist of precautions to take. Prompt:

Special Ballot – Elections Canada Special Ballot, 2025

Here’s hoping. 🤞 Note that in order for it to count, it must be received by 6pm on Election Day (Mon, April 28)

www.elections.ca/content2.asp...

But anyway to answer your question, I believe the incumbent (NDP) is well supported, based on “anecdata” I’m privy to. She’s helped push through meaningful things (eg dental care), and it was clear she had a lot of support, both in the room and outside of it.

But moreover, the *people you’re debating in front of* care about local issues. Focus on *them* and things *they* care about?!

Consistently bringing it back to high-level talking points of someone theoretically in Ottawa was a *huge* miss. :/ And I like Carney.

MPs influence where federal funding is directed, especially to things like infrastructure, healthcare, etc. (eg local hospital was mentioned, repurposing specific crown land for affordable housing, Translink, etc.) It seems *highly* relevant to be up to speed on local issues in your riding.

🇨🇦 Election Debate Thread 2025: A Skeeting Journey (sponsored by Mark Carney's Haircut) 🇨🇦

While the idea of what you’re saying is nice, you’re forgetting one important factor, which is deep-seated, generational racism. :/

I definitely believe them when they say they’re thrilled about the outcome of ICE grabbing “illegals” off the streets and sending elsewhere. :/

Awesome that’s really good to hear!

338 Canada Federal projections: - Liberals: 43% +/- 5% - Conservatives: 38% +/- 4% - NDP: 9% +/- 2% - Bloc: 6% +/- 1%

And this is just *one* example out of 338 seats. But I'm wondering how many others are hiding in these "Liberals got this, no sweat!" federal projections? 😬