Major League Hacking

What do a market signal, a technology nobody had heard of, and a subway map have in common? They're all ways into understanding developer ecosystems, and they're all showing up on stage at DevRelCon NYC this July. 🪗 Joey de Villa has spent 15+ years building developer communities and content that becomes the canonical reference. He currently leads Tampa Bay's largest developer communities (6,000+ combined members) while building hands-on with AI agents and MCP servers. His talk, "The Market is Trying to Tell You Something," breaks down what a recent job search across two dozen companies taught him about where DevRel is actually headed, no recycled frameworks included. ✨Lauren Lee built a developer ecosystem from zero at a privacy-focused blockchain company, with no legacy audience, no playbook, and a technology most developers had never heard of. As Director of Developer Relations at Midnight Foundation, she'll share "Zero to Ecosystem," an honest account of what worked, what got killed, and the one expensive mistake that changed how she thinks about developer trust. Dugald Morrow, of Atlassian, is bringing a different kind of map to the problem. Inspired by Harry Beck's 1933 London Underground map, his talk "The Ecosystem Tube Map" introduces a topological framework for visualizing developer ecosystems, treating workstreams as tube lines and milestones as stops, so teams can finally see where developers are disembarking. Three different paths into the same hard question: how do you actually understand and build a developer ecosystem? See them all speak at DevRelCon NYC, July 22-23. Register at nyc.devrelcon.dev

Bring your Solana questions!

Our brains don't work in straight lines, so why does our browsing history? 🧠🌐 Most browsers show your activity as a simple chronological list, making it easy to lose the context of a deep research session. Enter Mangrove, a hackathon project by Rut Mehta, Avi Patel, Deep Patel, and Roy Houwayek designed to align software with the divergent nature of human thought. Mangrove replaces the "linear list" history with a History Graph. Every search query and website visit becomes a node in a branching tree, letting you visually track your research path. They also integrated an aggregation feature that pulls key info from across the browser into a centralized "Notes" tab, making it an essential tool for students and researchers. It’s a perfect example of how builders are re-envisioning the tools we use every day to better fit how we actually function. We can’t wait to see their future plans for a full Rust-based browser come to life! Read more about the build here: https://lnkd.in/eKVNJ3ZR

Learning Solana isn’t that different from learning a new web framework. You get productive by learning the primitives, building a few small things, and working out which parts matter for what you want to make. We’re now two-thirds of the way through 100 Days of Solana, so we’ve put together a quick catch-up: 9 short challenges covering wallets, transactions, accounts, tokens, metadata, Token-2022, and Anchor. Do a few. Submit your work. Build some momentum. Start with our catch-up here: https://lnkd.in/ecWesQ8x 

Calling all startup folks in San Francisco! Major League Hacking and DigitalOcean are teaming up to host an AI hackathon right in SF, running the evening of Friday, July 10th through the afternoon of Saturday, July 11th. This one's beginner friendly: whether you've shipped a dozen products or you're curious about coding for the first time, you'll have a full day to build something real using tools like DigitalOcean's Gradient AI. Expect free food, mentorship from experienced builders and industry experts, cash prizes, and a community of founders, operators, and engineers who get it. Space is limited so don't wait to apply. RSVP: https://luma.com/MLHandDO Know someone at a startup in SF who'd love this? Send it their way!

Bring your 100 Days of Solana questions!

Say goodbye to "tab-bloat" from looking up unfamiliar terms while you read! Imagine an AI companion that knows exactly what you don't understand. Check out illume, an incredible hackathon project by Victor Jimenez, Matthew Tujague, Pablo Leyva, and Shruti Agarwal designed to illuminate learning through context-aware AI. illume allows you to highlight any phrase in an article to instantly generate a summary in a sidebar. But it doesn’t stop at definitions—the tool uses the Gemini API to build an adaptive learning experience. It identifies gaps in your knowledge and recursively prompts you with interactive quizzes and curated video content to ensure you actually master the material. Projects like this highlight the power of builder culture—taking the friction out of learning and making complex information accessible to everyone! Read more about their build here: https://lnkd.in/evucBDBm

Excited to be speaking at DevRelCon in New York next month July 22-23. My talk is titled “DevRel for a Developer You'll Never Hear From". I'll be speaking about what I learnt while running the MCP adoption program at HubSpot, specifically what changes about developer relations when AI agents are part of the onboarding experience and your usual signals for detecting friction stop working. Fifth year at DevRelCon, but honestly whose counting. Still one of my favorite rooms to be in. See you in Brooklyn!

Announcing three more speakers for DevRelCon NYC '26! Clement Hugbo designs the agents at CodeRabbit that review code and catch bugs before they ship, work grounded in a Master's in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and a deep interest in usability. At DevRelCon, the talk takes on a word that's taken over tech: taste, separating taste as judgment from taste as performance, and asking how to keep craft in service of the work instead of the other way around. Kourtney M. drives AI adoption at Amazon while trying to keep up with it personally. The lightning talk is a practical workflow for staying current without burning out: the current toolbox, how to decide when to lean on AI versus do the work to actually learn, and why this isn't about having all the answers. Andrew Sepic spent a month rebuilding how Mapbox serves all 2,000+ pages of its developer docs, making them readable as clean markdown for both humans and LLM agents. The talk covers the architectural decisions, the dead ends, and the patterns that apply whether you're running Docusaurus, a custom CMS, or something in between. See them all speak at DevRelCon NYC this July 22-23. Register at nyc.devrelcon.dev