Devrelshow Episode 52 - Joel Hans From Ngrok  🔗 **Source:** [Devrelshow Episode 52 - Joel Hans From Ngrok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ4KmED0Mlg#transcript) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [developer-relations, brand-marketing, developer-education, networking-fundamentals, content-strategy, workplace-autonomy, career-change] > author: Frédéric Harper > source: devrelshow (YouTube) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ4KmED0Mlg#transcript > date created: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}} > # 🏷️ Title: devrelshow episode 52 - Joel Hans from ngrok <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ## 📝 Summary - Frédéric Harper interviews Joel Hans, Developer Relations Lead at ngrok, about how his role has quietly turned into brand marketing, and about a personal networking-fundamentals project he's using to relearn the internet from the wire up. - Joel started at ngrok as a "senior developer advocate" writing deep technical content (a widely-cited piece on ngrok's traffic policy language), then over about two years watched the job shift toward re-establishing ngrok's brand perception — countering the outdated "just a tunneling tool" reputation and competing for mindshare against self-hosted alternatives and AI coding agents that default to whatever tool they already "know." - Fred draws a direct parallel from his own role at TinyMCE: a 20+ year old product that people assume is dead, so a large share of his DevRel job is now pure awareness-building, not documentation or activation. - Both agree the deciding factor for whether people even consider a tool now is whether it exists in a developer's (or their AI agent's) mental map at all — onboarding polish matters less than getting into the "unaided consideration set" in the first place. - Their shared prescription: publish genuinely useful, product-unrelated "cornerstone" content (Joel cites a teammate's 7,000-word piece on LLM quantization) that earns attention on its own merits and pays off in brand recall months later, rather than chasing weekly content quotas that produce burnout and mediocre output. - Joel demos "Little Internet," his own raspberry-pi networking lab (github.com/ngrok/little-internet), where he's teaching himself Ethernet link states, IPv6 neighbor discovery, and ARP by physically wiring Pis together and watching packets — framed explicitly as a sanctioned "folly" (a nod to Walt Disney's Disneyland gamble) rather than a KPI-bound deliverable. - Risks/tradeoffs: this style of DevRel is hard to justify to a business that wants fast, measurable ROI; it depends on a high-trust relationship between DevRel and leadership, and its payoff (perception shift, brand recall) is genuinely difficult to attribute to revenue. - Bottom line: as AI-assisted development and TL;DR culture compress the middle of the funnel (onboarding, docs, activation), DevRel's most defensible value is now at the very top of the funnel — being remembered, trusted, and interesting enough to be in the running at all. ## 📖 Main Content - **The role keeps shifting under people's feet.** Joel notes he's had three employer names in under two years without changing jobs (Cube first → Constant Contact-owned entity → absorbed into Seva), and frames DevRel generally as uniquely unstable compared to adjacent engineering roles: an engineer's job looks similar wherever they go, but "developer relations" can mean ten different job descriptions depending on the company and the quarter. - **DevRel as "10-20 jobs in one."** Joel likes the variety (advocate, support engineer, community manager, public speaker, content producer) but names it as also the role's core fragility — priorities can reset entirely when leadership or company strategy shifts. - **Joel's arc at ngrok.** He joined as a "senior developer advocate," his early wins were deep technical writing (a "10 things you didn't know you could do with traffic policy" post that surprised ngrok's own engineers) plus some live-stream demos and product-marketing video. By year two, the job had drifted far enough from classic DevRel that he says "I'm not really a DevRel person anymore," even though his team is still called developer relations/education. - **Why the shift happened: ngrok has a stale-brand problem.** People who've heard of ngrok often still picture it as "the tool that tunnels my localhost to share with a friend" — true, and still the majority of daily signups — but ngrok now positions itself as production API-gateway infrastructure (DDoS protection, WAF, full gateway). The DevRel team's real job right now is closing that perception gap, not teaching people how to use features. - **Fred's TinyMCE parallel.** TinyMCE predates Gutenberg, is still used in Moodle and Umbraco, and suffers the same "I didn't know you were still around" reaction at conferences. Fred says a big chunk of his job is back to first-principles awareness: reminding the market the product exists and is actively maintained, often via content that doesn't even mention the product. - **AI coding agents change the awareness calculus.** Joel observes a steady stream of "I built an ngrok alternative you can self-host" posts on Hacker News/Reddit/Twitter, and argues that if a tool isn't already inside a developer's (or their coding agent's) frame of reference, it never enters consideration — the agent just picks whatever it already "knows," and the human doesn't do the comparison shopping that used to happen manually. - **Onboarding/activation is being deprioritized relative to top-of-funnel awareness.** Joel frames this as a historical inversion: DevRel used to be measured heavily on reducing time-to-activation/"aha moment"; now, with abundant competing options, simply getting into the funnel at all is the harder, more important problem. - **"Cornerstone" content as the new lever.** Joel's team (three people, including "phenomenal writer" Sam Rose) is deliberately producing long-form, product-unrelated educational content — e.g., a 7,000-word explainer on LLM quantization — betting that genuine expertise and craftsmanship earns attention and recall now, purchase consideration later. He's explicit that he doesn't know for certain it will pay off, but the team is committed to the bet. - **Explicit anti-calendar, anti-quota stance.** Joel names forcing a fixed cadence of content ("x pieces per week/month") as actively dangerous — it produces burnout and subpar, deadline-driven work — and says he's negotiated with leadership toward measuring long-term brand impact instead of output volume. - **"Side quests" reframed as sanctioned "follies."** Joel used to offer new hires "side quest" time but felt that framing implied extra unpaid effort. He now uses Walt Disney's "Disney's Folly" (the wildly expensive, uncertain Disneyland gamble) as the model: leadership grants time/space for speculative work with no guaranteed payoff, on the belief that even failed follies produce learning and that trying strange things beats uniform, me-too content. - **How he got buy-in.** Joel is careful not to claim he invented the culture — leadership (particularly his CRO) already recognized brand perception as a top-level business problem before he pitched anything; his role was more "lead by example," building a track record (engagement, comments, unsolicited "I hadn't heard of ngrok but their posts are good" feedback) that lets him keep making the case. - **Trust as the load-bearing variable.** Both hosts converge on the idea that this style of DevRel only works in a high-trust relationship with leadership — without it, DevRel reverts to KPI-driven content-mill work, which both frame as a common failure mode across the industry. - **The "Little Internet" demo.** Joel <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/Devrelshow Episode 52 - Joel Hans From Ngrok.md|Devrelshow Episode 52 - Joel Hans From Ngrok by Frédéric Harper]] ## Highlights - the ground is always shifting under your feet ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kx704a300fkcxztj1pfp9cw8)) - Note: Framing DevRel's structural instability compared to engineering roles. - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - DevRel has ended up pointing a lot more, it looks a lot more like brand marketing ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kx7044vn8kec8nc50k1d8qrn)) - Note: Core thesis of the episode — DevRel's practical work has drifted toward brand marketing. - Tags: atom/literature/h1 - good taste and have a high bar for quality ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kx704f8d7pqd6ceyeqjw3hmr)) - Note: Argument for what differentiates human-curated DevRel content in an AI-abundant landscape. - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - forcing dev realm people to produce like x number of pieces of content every week or month ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kx704s67j3g4mcffwgwdkhgf)) - Note: Explicit stance against calendar-driven content quotas as a burnout driver. - Tags: atom/literature/h2 - it leads us to burnout ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kx704m05t52cw83epa5cqj62)) - Note: Direct causal claim linking fixed output quotas to burnout. - Tags: atom/literature/h2 - the internet's not going away anytime soon ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kx704y2gvmbegmssdgj7c53w)) - Note: Rationale for teaching networking fundamentals as durable, AI-proof brand content. - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - the address resolution protocol in which the two devices are negotiating ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kx7052sk6ce15jmrk94v9a13)) - Note: Key technical moment in the Little Internet demo — ARP resolves IP-to-MAC mapping. - Tags: atom/literature/h3