{
  "id": 1417051,
  "title": "HOW TO DEVREL: The Most Un-Natural Act",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/17/how-to-devrel-the-most-un-natural-act",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-17T04:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/leonadato/how-to-devrel-the-most-un-natural-act-44oo"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In the un-natural act of convincing conference attendees to try your software, a DevRel practitioner employed a unique approach over 11 years. The key was to engage people with a game, make the back-end visible, and encourage player competition. This technique was tested at various events, resulting in a 10% sign-up rate. For larger events, this translated to hundreds of sign-ups.\n\nThe method involved turning the company's software into a side-scroller game, collecting various stats, and displaying them on a dashboard. Attendees were enticed by the game, which naturally led to discussions about real-world use cases. To make the experience accessible, the game and monitoring agent were bundled into a single downloadable file, with step-by-step instructions provided for easy setup.\n\nOnce the game was installed, attendees were offered a prize, such as Ember mugs or Raspberry Pis, which drew them back to the booth to showcase the game and dashboard. This \"most un-natural act\" proved successful, as 10% of attendees signed up for the software, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing interest and generating leads at tech conferences.",
  "summary": "DISCLAIMER: No, I don’t believe I’m the universe’s gift to DevRel. I don’t have all the answers, all the skills, or even all the Pokemon. What I have is my experiences, collected over the 11 years I’ve been doing this work. That – my experiences and observations – are what I’m sharing in this series . Before this blog gets de-listed for potentially purile content, let me explain up-front what…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}