by Ana Bahr | at MinneBar 14 | 2:50 – 3:35 in Nevada | View Schedule
In 2015 Target created a new role that would become the community hub and enable culture changes for our massively growing in-house team of software engineers. Our goal was to give awareness to Target’s tech brand and make Target engineers proud by supporting the things they care about. To achieve this, we gave Target engineer advocates a voice to reach the external tech community through our tech blog, support of local conferences, meetups, diverse groups, K-12 tech pipeline organizations, and opensource communities. We also focused on building up our culture with internal hackathons, conferences, lunch and learns, and demo days. Unknowingly, we had taken part in the growth of DevRel Industry. In this talk we’ll discuss the role of a DevRel and why it is valuable to Target and its tech team of approximately 4,000. We’ll also discuss what this means for the DevRel industry. There is a vast frontier of major retailers and other companies that are now realizing the truth that every company is a tech company and that technical community is the key to success.
Ana Bahr (soon to be Ana Dachel) is a former Target administrative professional who was onboarding 3 software engineers a week on average in 2014 when she saw a need for someone to take the lead on shaping and growing Target’s technical community. She officially became the “Tech@Target Community Advocate” in 2015 and has been busy fighting the good fight ever since. When she’s not attending meetups or conferences, Ana is home with her fiancé Jason and pups Jackson and Molly watching Star Trek
