Make videos devs love
How to create extraordinary dev videos by going against the grain
By Sarah Chieng + Matt Palmer
Most developer content sucks. It's generic, product-focused, and forgettable. We're here to change that 🙂.
Hi, I’m Sarah Chieng — Head of DevX at Cerebras. I regularly create developer content to launch products, showcase engineering projects, and promote events. Over the years, I’ve built content across channels like:
YouTube (112K subscribers, 8.1M views)
TikTok (35.8K subscribers, 45.5M views)
LinkedIn (28.6K subscribers, 9.5M views)
Twitter (13.7K followers)
And I’m Matt Palmer — I lead Developer Relations at Replit. Over the past year, I helped launch Replit Agent, run hackathons across three continents, and create content with 75M+ impressions. I’ve also taught courses to over 100K students. You can find me on X or YouTube.
PS: We are both building killer devrel teams right now. if you’re interested, just reach out to us :)
What is ‘good’ developer content?
The best developer content follows one principle: "Look what you can do" instead of "Look what we built."
Even when it's marketing, it should feel like education. Developers can smell a sales pitch from miles away.
Here are some examples of creators and content we like
All of these creators share a few key traits: they lead with value over promotion and they're not afraid to show their personality and hot takes.
What type of content should you film?
At a high-level, making video content yourself is one of the best low-cost, high-impact moves a GTM/DevRel/Founder can make. Video builds trust, demonstrates expertise, and scales your personal engagement with the developer community. It also shows a willingness to educate others and add value.
Here are the main types of content you might create (listed in order of high pri → nice to have):
Product launches
Step-by-step integration guides
Code walk throughs for popular use cases
Fun, viral hacks
Conceptual breakdowns or explainers of when to use a technology
General technical education & thought leadership.
How to ‘hook’ the developer?
Here are a few rules when it comes to filming developer content…
Rule #1: Ask yourself — Should I even make a video?
Rather than starting with the media, start with your idea and work backwards to the media. Instead of saying “I’m going to make a video” think “I’m going to help people learn about my topic, what would be the best way to do that?”
Different formats serve different purposes:
Video → best when you need to show something: a workflow in action, a live demo, or the end-to-end feel of using a tool. Perfect for launches, tutorials, or code walkthroughs.
Blog post → best when you need depth, reference-ability, or searchable detail. Great for conceptual explainers, architecture deep dives, or long-form guides that people will revisit.
Twitter/X thread → best for quick, digestible insights or announcing something new. Use it when you want reach, conversation, or fast feedback.
Live demo / workshop → best for interactive teaching and real-time Q&A. Use this when adoption depends on seeing (and trying) the product live.
Docs → best for precise instructions. Use when someone just wants the exact steps without fluff.
It’s also great to repurpose content.
Validate an idea with a low-lift medium (Twitter)
IF it gets traction turn it into a blog
IF you’re inspired make an app + video!
Edit from swyx: I have a practical example of this in Bottom-Up Idea Exploration.
With AI, you can also start with 3 and work backwards
Think of it as a decision tree:
If your audience needs to watch the process unfold, make a video.
If they need to return to it later, write a blog.
If they need to hear about it now, post a thread.
If they need to try it with you, run a demo.
Rule #2: Add value
There’s a book ‘Developer Marketing does not exist’. While most of the content is pretty generic, it does a great job of emphasizing that the best developer content follows one principle: adding value.
Examples of what adds value
Showing how something works — a real use case, tutorial, or pattern someone can apply immediately.
Sharing insights or hard-earned lessons (“Here’s what broke, here’s how we fixed it”).
Creating context — explaining why a developer might choose one approach, library, or tool over another.
What doesn’t add value
Saying “We just launched X!” without showing what it actually enables.
Copying viral trends with no substance or relevance to your product.
Creating content that only praises your own product instead of helping the reader build, learn, or think differently.
Again, even if it’s marketing, it should feel like education.
\** A note on copying others:* We see so many people get into this negative loop. They look at viral, low-quality top-performing content and then think, I need to emulate that. Start from what value you bring to the table, and then build your content up based off of that. That's how you create your unique voice and content that stands out amongst others.*
Rule #3: Earn your attention
Everything you create should be valuable. As educators and creators, we have to earn the attention of our audience.
As unfortunate as it is, audience attention is not our right. We have to prove that there is value or entertainment in whatever we're creating. That means the very first part of any piece of content should be devoted to capturing the attention of your audience, then backing that up with facts and education and useful things.
If it’s technical, save long-winded explanations, things that anchor on time “last week,” prefaces or qualifications. I'd even go so far as to say, do not introduce yourself. Just get right to it.
Think about what your audience needs in those first moments:
Credibility — Why should they trust you? Sometimes this means showing your track record up front. (We did that at the beginning of this post so you know we’re not random people yelling into the void.)
Certainty — Can they trust that if they follow along, they’ll succeed? If I’m reading a guide on deploying a static site with 11ty, I don’t want to wonder if I’ll get stuck halfway through. The content should give me confidence that I’ll walk away having achieved the goal.
Relevance — Does this matter to me right now? Even if your content is great, if the developer doesn’t immediately see why it’s useful to their current problem, they’ll bounce. Tie your hook to a real-world pain point or aspiration.
A few practical ways to earn attention:
Show the outcome first. Demo the finished app, run the final script, or display the working feature before you explain how it’s built. This builds confidence that the payoff is real.
Lead with the “why.” Don’t just say “Here’s a tool.” Say “Here’s how you can save 5 hours of manual debugging.”
Design for the scroll. Online, the first 10 seconds of video or the first 2 sentences of a blog decide if someone stays. Make those moments count.
Rule #4: It’s okay to be interesting.
It’s your content. Guess what, you can do whatever you want :)
Here are a few tricks we like to use.
Tell a story.
Stories stick — facts don’t. Instead of just saying “here’s a feature,” wrap it in a narrative: What problem does it solve? Where’s the friction? What’s the “aha” moment?
I like weaving in small personal details — something that shows my perspective and makes the content human.
Think about your audience’s headspace: what problem are they hitting, what tools are they already using, what would make them smile in recognition?
For example: Aaron Francis is brilliant at this. When he talks about databases, he doesn’t just explain SQL features — he shares the pain of debugging, the joy of something finally working, the human side of the work.
Be funny (or at least human).
A little levity makes technical content memorable. And, the more you can understand your audience, the more you can speak to the things that they truly care about and then have a good presence.
It could be as simple as a joke: maybe you’re at a conference and there are really long lines for coffee—you know because you stood in one. I bet other people stood in long lines too. A joke would probably land well.
Rule #5: It’s okay to ask…
One of my favorite tricks when I feel stuck: just ask.
Once I was doing an interview with someone at OpenAI, right after a bunch of model releases. I wasn’t sure what questions to ask so I literally JUST ASKED ON DISCORD AND GOT A BUNCH OF REALLY GREAT QUESTIONS.
The lesson: you don’t have to generate every idea in a vacuum.
Crowdsource ideas
Get feedback early (from team-mates and peers)
Ask your audience directly
Developers respect honesty. You don’t need to pretend you have all the answers. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is listen, then turn those questions into content.
How to have a good presence
This is a section we could talk about forever…but here’s a high-level of some of our top tips.
Speak quickly — faster than you would normally. People’s attention is extremely limited. BIG TIP: its better to speak quickly and long pause between sentences as you think, than speak slowly with short pauses between each word. This is because long pauses can be edited out but slow talking cannot be fixed.
Hello…..My…..Name….Is….Sarah (Bad, because how am I going to edit this to flow well?)
Hello my name is Sarah………..and I am currently building a semantic search API called Exa. (Good, I can just cut out that long pause) and the video will flow
NEVER speed up your talking, it’s high pitched and unprofessional.
Speak with A LOT OF EMOTION. Rule of thumb, you’re trying to entertain a baby. About 40% of emotion comes through the screen to your audience. This means dramatically vary your voice and speak extremely enthusiastically. Especially in the first few moments, you have to really, practically shout at your audience. Don’t be stiff either
One trick is to record a full run-through talking naturally — with halts, restarts, and filler words — then run that transcript through an LLM to rewrite it into a clean, conversational script. Then just read the script. It saves a ton of time and makes the final version sound effortless. (Shoutout Swyx for this tip: https://swyx.io/prerecording-talks)
Scaling your content
There’s a couple of things I love to do to produce more content across platforms. The trick is to make it easy to produce more without burning out. Here are a few strategies we use:
Film a series: Workshops, tutorials, or themed content are easier to scale when you can reuse slide decks, code templates, and formats. Series also build momentum — your audience knows to expect “part two” or “next week’s drop.”
Split it up: Most of the time, videos can be split up. You can film one interview or video, then split it up
Optimize workflows: If it’s hard to create content, you will not create content. Make your workflow as seamless as possible.
- That might mean having a dedicated space to record, having editor presets that let you save time, creating thumbnail templates, etc
BE CONSISTENT: It’s like flossing, it’s dumb to skip for a month then expect to floss for 4 hours. Floss every day, it’s much easier. That might mean carving out a day / time every week to record or finding people who share your passion.
Know your platform: The half life of content varies by platform, e.g. X is hours / days, YouTube is weeks months. Long form content on YouTube remains valuable for years!
Here’s a video that started accelerating in views around day 40
Does that mean you can only put super short form TikTok-style content on X and YouTube should only be for two-hour-long tutorials?
No, absolutely not. You should cater to your strength and do what works for you. For example, if you're developing highly technical developer-specific content, most of your audience has a longer attention span than the traditional consumer.
Furthermore, many decision makers or people that you really want to have your content in front of are willing to engage with the right content if it speaks to them.
So here's where I would say go against the grain: do not make TikTok-style content if that does not fit your audience. Do not feel constrained by what you can say or the depth that you can go into.
You can upload videos up to four hours in length on X, so I’ll often put some of my longest, most in-depth content on X, and it’s performed very well.
- Don't dilute yourself. Focus. It can feel incredibly overwhelming to have endless numbers of social media platforms. This is a huge source of stress as a content creator. Some advice for someone starting out, just pick one and execute. That might just mean making one YouTube video per week while you're working your full-time job, or trying to start your next blog post while you're handling everything else in your life.
Over time, you will find workflows and ways of automating things and ways of being efficient such that you can sustain several platforms at once. That, or you might earn the ability to spend more time creating content, which will allow you to maintain additional channels.
(BONUS) Filming Equipment + Setup
Here’s a guide to all the equipment you need to get started. https://x.com/mattppal/status/1944395397470044243