Content to inspire commitment in open source && cloud native
A big moment in startup maturity is feeling confident your messaging + copywriting resonate with your target audiences. You're finally ready to distribute your value propositions and innovative vision wide across the open source and cloud native ecosystems through content.
For these clients, I employ three styles of developer- and engineer-focused content— technical commentary, cornerstone resources, and how-to guides—across any asset that supports the KPIs of your developer marketing strategy and your organization's go-to-market motion. We can build a reliable pipeline for your product blog, stack up contributions to your industry's leading publications, or target leaders/CTOs with case studies, white papers, product briefs, and beyond.
Content is your path to:
- Build the required trust and authority to inspire readers to do difficult work, like reconfigure their production environment, just to finish a 'get started' guide
- Transform skeptical developers into product champions by solving their day-to-day technical concerns
- Play to the algorithm's demands while captivating developer/engineering readers into learning about novel approaches to big-picture technical and cultural decisions
- Stand out in crowded fields with developer- and engineer-focused content that feels less like a hard sell and more like a helpful friend
Technical commentary
Go beyond standard-issue “thought leadership” and truly stand out from the crowd with articles that merge your team's strongest-held opinions with their technical expertise. Through original research and interviews, I create authoritative content that simplifies complex processes or mental models, then leverage storytelling to help readers put leading ideas into action today.
It's your surest path to building trust, showcasing your internal expertise, and delivering on your content goals by inspiring commitment.
Testkube
When the product managers at Testkube wanted to spark controversy and establish a new paradigm in CI/CD pipelines, they tapped me to (ghost)write Are Monolith CI/CD Pipelines Killing Quality in Your Software?.
With an evidence-based breakdown of why the status quo isn't working, this article has generated tens of thousands of pageviews and a surge of signups for their Kubernetes-native testing platform.
CNCF & Argo
The open source Argo project was eager to reach Graduating status in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). To showcase their value to the cloud native community, they partnered with me on a comprehensive project journey report, which detailed community health, development velocity, and contributor diversity.
As part of the report's promotional push, I interviewed Argo's founders and synthesized their experiences into an educational piece, Four lessons that took Argo from first commit to GitOps darling, to spotlight their expertise as open source innovators.
Cornerstone resources
Ground your quarterly or semi-annual content marketing goals with the "big rocks" that pay long-term dividends by anchoring your content calendar and are infinitely repurposeable. Must-bookmark templates and checklists. Interactive content. How-tos that solve enormous problems with extraordinary depth. Reference documents your technical readers will carry with them as they grow in their careers. Independent research and story-driven reports they can't help but share.
I work with you to conceptualize assets that differentiate your product, then handle all research, engineering interviews, and coordination of technical assets to let you focus on making a splash.
Twice a year, the brightest CTOs and engineering leadership from the CNCF's End User community get together during KubeCon+CloudNativeCon for an intensive, no-holds-barred conversation about the state of cloud native.
My mission? Turn hours of vibrant conversation into an insightful, actionable report that helps other end users within the cloud native ecosystem better understand the current maturity of their Kubernetes provisioning platforms and chart a more precise course for improvement and innovation.
How-to guides
Your fastest path to winning over managers and leaders with purchasing power is by helping them solve a problem, right now, in as few steps as possible using your product. I can dive into your product and code to develop compelling how-to/tutorial content that spotlights your key value pillars or open up new co-marketing opportunities without it feeling like marketing at all.
Throw your most technical concepts and challenges my way—I'm comfortable in the CLI, spinning up Kubernetes clusters, and writing all the code necessary for readers to recreate each step locally. Precision how-tos with less work on your part.
Tracetest
To help DevRel leaders at Tracetest better position their cloud native testing product as a paradigm-shifter, I wrote The difference between test-driven & observability-driven development. I married thought leadership on testing culture with technical details on distributed tracing to showcase the product's value proposition.
But simply talking about features isn't enough for developers—I wrote real-world code in Node.js to validate every step and showcase in-product processes other back-end developers can follow.
Kubefirst
I plucked the idea behind Leveraging External Secrets Operator from an interview with a Kubefirst founder, then developed the danger of 'secret-scattering' in Kubernetes into a technical article that shows how platform engineers and GitOps teams could avoid the danger with cloud native tooling.
For Kubefirst, an article like this is the best of both worlds: They get to spotlight their opinions and expertise while demonstrating the value of choosing their platform over reinventing the wheel.
Abdallah Abedraba • Associate Product Manager, Testkube && Kubeshop
With most writers I had to adapt to the writer's technique, process, or their existing knowledge on the topic. Not with Joel. Joel enabled me to explore different ideas that fitted with various experiments I was running, and he adapted to achieve whatever the goal was. I would absolutely work with Joel again whenever I'm looking to create well researched technical content or have a content strategy I want to nail!
If you want to up your content game while having a content writer that adapts and supports your style/vision/knowledge depth/workflow, Joel is the perfect person for it.