Ehuchie Divine-Peace .C.

Tomorrow is my last day at Clerk. After three and a half years in Developer Relations, I’m leaving to become a software engineer again. The short answer is that DevRel really isn’t for me. This role was always an experiment. An opportunity opened up at the right time, and I took it. I’m genuinely glad I did, because I no longer have that lingering “what if?” in the back of my mind. I tried it, I learned a lot, and I’m confident about what I want next. I also want to be clear about something up front: I think DevRel can be an incredible career for the right person. This post isn’t meant to discourage anyone. It’s just an honest reflection on my experience, how the role felt over time, and why I’ve decided to move on. Life Before DevRel To explain why DevRel didn’t stick, it helps to understand where I was coming from. I usually joke that my journey into programming started back in the MySpace days. I learned just enough HTML and CSS to customize my profile, and seeing the way I could use code to customize things lit a fire in me. My professional career didn’t start as a software engineer though. I dropped out of college and spent nearly four years doing independent IT consulting. From there, I moved into managed services and eventually internal IT roles. I genuinely enjoy IT work, which explains why I have a large iron server running in my basement for “fun”. Even then, I was always looking for ways to keep learning development and applying it. I automated internal processes, built small tools, and even helped a few external customers along the way. At one of those IT jobs, an opportunity came up to help manage an API. I loved it, and I was good at it. That role became the jumping-off point into full-time software engineering, and once I made that transition, I never looked back. I’m drawn to highly technical challenges. Whether that means digging deep into systems to track down the root cause of an issue or architecting something from the ground up to extend an existing application, that kind of work energizes me. I’m self-taught, which means imposter syndrome has always been part of the deal. But engineering gave me something concrete to hold onto. The code either worked or it didn’t. Performance improved or it didn’t. There was clarity in that. How I Landed in DevRel During the pandemic lockdown, I started creating more content. Blog posts, tweets, the occasional video. I wasn’t perfectly consistent, but I kept coming back to it. In early 2022, my good friend @jamesqquick told me there was an opening at PlanetScale. I figured, why not? I’d always wanted to work with James, and DevRel felt like a chance to explore a different side of the industry. I joined PlanetScale as a Developer Educator in June 2022, primarily focused on documentation. I was upfront about wanting to do more, blogs, videos, broader content, and I ended up doing a lot of that work too. One week after I joined, James got laid off. That part sucked. A lot. But I stuck it out. I genuinely enjoyed parts of the job. The team was great, the product was interesting, and I learned a lot about teaching and communicating technical ideas. Still, something felt off. The work never quite scratched the same itch engineering did. By mid-2023, I was already exploring other options, including a conversation with Clerk, which is funny in hindsight. I ultimately decided to stay and see if I could take on more technical work at PlanetScale, but that never really panned out. Moving to Clerk In March 2024, I was laid off. Because I’d already been thinking about going back to engineering, my plan was to prep for that transition. Instead, I was immediately picked up by Clerk, largely thanks to Derek Briggs, who had left PlanetScale the year before. I also got to work again with people I loved working with before, @ceciliorz, @skullface, @savannahlong, Savannah, and others. It turned out @nickparsons, the hiring manager, was already familiar with my work. That was a good reminder that putting yourself out there really does matter, even when it doesn’t feel like it’s paying off in the moment. I told myself maybe PlanetScale was the issue, not DevRel. So I gave it another shot. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. The layoff affected me more than I expected. Being self-taught, imposter syndrome has always been there, but getting laid off cranked it up significantly. I joined Clerk feeling like I had something to prove. I went harder out the gate than I probably should have, and I think that eventually set unrealistic expectations for myself. Clerk did give me more opportunities to build. It’s a very product-focused company, and I appreciated that. The tradeoff was that the work leaned heavily frontend. Anyone who knows me knows I prefer backend work. Remember that server in my basement? Yeah there’s a Kubernetes cluster running on it if thats any indication on where my preference is. That mismatch mattered more than I expected. Takeaways After doing DevRel at two different companies, a few things became very clear to me. Content has a long feedback loop. When I write code, I can usually measure impact quickly. Performance, reliability, user behavior. Content doesn’t work that way. It can take weeks or months to know if something resonated, and even then the signal is fuzzy. I didn’t enjoy that reality. Content creation isn’t technical enough for me. I enjoy sharing knowledge that comes from real projects. But when content is the primary output, you start with the lesson and then build a solution to support it. To teach effectively, you have to remove variability and complexity so the audience can follow along. I understand why that’s necessary, but I personally enjoy complex, messy environments, sometimes to a fault. DevRel is marketing first, technical second. This seems obvious in hindsight, but I was naive when I switched roles. I thought I’d mostly create content for developers I wanted to reach and naturally weave the company in. Think “build a Discord bot, powered by PlanetScale.” In reality, the company’s needs come first. The goal isn’t purely education, it’s positioning, adoption, and feature promotion. There is creative freedom, but it’s bounded. Over time, I felt boxed in and, at moments, more like a glorified salesperson than an engineer. The people are incredible. This part can’t be overstated. DevRel folks are some of the most thoughtful, generous people I’ve met in tech. I made lifelong friends and got to travel the world. I’m deeply grateful for that, and I wouldn’t trade those experiences away. What’s Next I’m joining Homerun Presales as a Senior Software Engineer. Will I ever do DevRel again? Probably not. I feel pretty jaded right now, and I don’t think it’s a role I’d seek out again. That said, I won’t pretend I know the future. I’m open to the right opportunity if one ever shows up. Will I stop creating content? Absolutely not. If anything, knowing I’m done with DevRel has me excited to create again. I get to make what I want, explore the problems I care about, and go deep without worrying about glorifying a specific product. That creative freedom is what I was missing. And it finally feels good to have it back.