Community is immunity:

In my last few years on my DevRel journey, I felt isolated, which is counterintuitive as DevRels are a backbone of any community. But I felt like I couldn’t find organizations or individuals who were sharing my ideas. I felt like there is a glass wall between me, and DevRel community due to my geo location, nationality, and past experiences.

DevRelUni Cohort 5 provided me with a community of people who understand, willing to explore, empathetic, driven, loving souls who are looking for the same answers and don't particularly fit into the mold either. We're on the same hunt for the best sustainable practices of how to work together. DevRelUni folks bring the vibes.

Learning curve:

Assignments are spot on and are designed to get your head thinking. Very much focused on taking ownership of research, crafting your own strategy. And it helped me to rethink my strategy in DevRel. Again, bouncing off ideas from others and relying on other people’s strengths was something exciting, and best way for me to learn fast.

DevRels often feel lonely in their one woman show, so being in the room with only DevRels, and people aspire to be on-chain educators was a lot of fun.

Takeaways that shifted things for me:

For many years as an artist in the EU, I was relying on a small circle of colleagues and mentors sharing my PDF portfolio, and sharing work online was considered something inappropriate. As well as dressing for your own opening or something. The unspoken etiquette was focused on being very laid-back about attention and pretending you are too cool for school. Almost like having passion for what you do was something to be ashamed of.

I realized that those “rules” were still holding me back, at the core was: fear that my ideas will be stolen…

Don’t be afraid to be silly in public. Don’t be afraid to share your thoughts in public:

• ZK Space that I curated
• Advice from Nader
• Open Source Discussion w Phoenix Guild
• Why DevRel?
• DevRel 101 x Phoenix Guild
• How to Get Started in DevRel DevRelUni
• Meet DappaDan x invited to chat tech docu Icon DappaDan
• Content Creation Space. Tea on how to approach your DevRel content creation.
• Just being in public will attract right people into your sphere.
• Twitter is fun.
• Focus on what you love, but keep learning everyday. One of the reasons I’m working in tech is the community of smart people who are efficient.
• There is no way to find clients, friends, orgs, and just connect if you are “hiding” aka not having social media presence.
• Fuck what they think. Do it anyway.
• Ownership. Taking ownership in life and work, crafting your own career path, is very empowering. It's actually probably the only way to go for me because I will forever be this underground rebel, "fuck the system" kind of person. Learning how systems work and then rethinking the user journey around it.
• Be yourself.

I also learned a lot of applicable tools, program can be found here: and connected with awesome folks, that been shaping our space for a while now. Sessions felt pretty intimate, almost 101.

One thing they all have in common is that they kept going and they arrived at a place that they are happy with organically.

Web3 to me will forever be a cozy and person-focused space, where one person can initiate great ideas, and the community will step in and make the idea/vision happen. Despite the chatter of “we need real-life apps etc.”

I think we need visionary ideas that challenge our ways of seeing tech, improve how we work together, helping devs and creatives to collab in new ways.

We need more diversity, and we need to open pipelines for all folks. Tech is far, far, far away from inclusion, and it’s initiatives like DevRelUni that create change.

Right after DevRelUni I joined SheFi, under the slogan “Frontier is Feminine”.

Throughout the program, I kept thinking about the power of change that ladies like Bianca, and Maggie with a bit of help from Arbitrum bring to the world, that might be stuck on binary. How EVERYONE benefits from women-run spaces. My main takeaway from DevRelUni is that we are not alone, and gratitude for this space where it’s safe for everyone to be themselves, learn from each other, be proactive, and elevate each other.

I also want to shoutout Ovia, Derrek, Fabian, Katya and other folks that became close to me Ilyyy.