Yesterday evening my former colleague Fred Harper invited me to be his first guest on his new DevRelShow. For about 70 minutes we talked about all things Developer Relations, how to get started as a developer advocate and I showed some tools to make it easier for you.

I also covered how I wrote the Developer Advocacy Handbook and how it affected my career.

The tools I talked about were:

• VideoTap which creates long-form data like blog posts and transcripts from videos as well as automated Tweets and short videos
• Hemingway a text editor that tells you when your writing is too complex and offers AI generated alternatives
• FFMPEG to batch convert videos to other formats on the command line

I am currently on a company trip with my brand new MacBook and here are the things I always install first to get started:

• Homebrew – makes installing of low level stuff a breeze (free)
• Node/NPM – many things rely on it (free)
• Dropbox – still be best way to store and share content amongst machines, both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive drive me nuts with their file permission nonsense (paid)
• VLC – plays everything, has excellent keyboard shortcuts and can in a pinch even record screens for you (free)
• VS Code – coders gotta edit (free)
• GitHub Desktop – much, much easier than installing and setting up Git yourself (free)
• ImageOptim – file resizing and optimising images, even on the command line (free)
• FFMPEG – converts anything to anything on the command line (free)
• Handbrake – batch conversion of videos made easy (free)
• Screenflow – my go-to screen recording and video editing tool (paid)

Other essentials are a VPN (I use Mullvad and ProtonVPN), but that’s about it.

Photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash

Logrocket recorded a podcast with me talking about the need for good UX of AI solutions . It is amazing how much opportunities we miss out on by simply trying to copy ChatGPT, not understanding that a faux human chat interaction often only is a flash in the pan success.

I will also cover the same topic at Halfstack Vienna on the 15th of September and you can use my 10% off discount if you still want a ticket.

I will also talk about this in the closing keynote at React Live on the 28-29 of September in Amsterdam. You can use my discount code “chris20” for an additional 20% off there.