Engaging India’s Developer Ecosystem: Strategies for Global DevRel Teams

With nearly 1.4B citizens, it’s not just the number of Indian citizens that makes their presence in the developer world more significant than other nations—it’s the diversity, growing adoption of the internet and the sheer number of engineering graduates.

Home to one of the biggest developer populations in the world, India has 6M+ software developers, 1M+ startups and 2M+ engineering students graduating every year. When it comes to open-source contributions, India is the third largest community of developers with over 1.8M new developers joining GitHub in just 1 year since it started its operations in India and the community in India now totals 5.8M developers.

In this talk I will be sharing helpful tips, insights and learnings from my personal experiences of more than 8 years (literally my entire career) in building, nurturing and scaling developer communities in India for the developer relations team sitting out of US/Europe to think of India as a critical market with a thriving startup and developer ecosystem.

From my experience of building India’s first developer community around Fintech/Embedded Finance and leading community programs like Google Developer Student Clubs, TensorFlow User Groups, Google Developer Experts, etc. I will be sharing what should be the developer ecosystem team’s vision for success and how to achieve the goal of enabling and empowering the vibrant Indian developer ecosystem which builds impactful solutions using open-source technologies that can change the lives of the next billion users.

I will be talking about what programs the developer relations team should introduce in India that will be touching the developer journey of awareness > adoption > advocate, easily accommodates people with diverse backgrounds/cultures and facilitates seamless community interactions.