Developer Adoption

Getting developers to try a product, use it, and stick with it.

• 3/31/26 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  National Parks × Chalk: A DevRel Take-Home, Built and Launched

  As a DevRel, you're expected to do it all: build the thing, write about it, and get it in front of the right people. So I treated a take-home project like a real content launch.

• 3/9/26 • Developer Adoption, Things I've Built

  QuickRiver: Selling Bait Without the App Store

  A retro fishing-game storefront that shows how game publishers can sell directly, using FastSpring's embedded checkout instead of app-store fees.

• 6/15/25 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  When Engineers Stop Trusting an AI Agent

  After an AI coding agent launched, developers started reporting answers they couldn't rely on. The fix wasn't more marketing. It was a product change I helped get onto the roadmap.

• 5/15/25 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  Installed Isn't Adopted: Rolling Out an AI Coding Assistant to Amazon's Engineers

  Getting engineers to install an AI coding tool was the easy part. Getting them to keep using it took hands-on workshops, a churn dashboard and a four-layer way of measuring adoption.

• 10/15/24 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  Making Software Health a Habit Across a Huge Engineering Org

  Coding standards, merge practices and CI/CD hygiene varied from team to team. Turning 'better software health' into a company-wide habit took research, real case studies and a repeatable review rhythm.

• 8/15/24 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  Finding the Developer Bottleneck Worth Fixing

  With limited bandwidth and no playbook, I built a way to combine usage data with what developers were actually saying. It pointed straight at code upgrades.

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  3/15/21 • Developer Adoption

  Building XD Plugins for Precision and Polish at Adobe With Growth Designer Kenny Krosky

  Kenny found ways to accelerate a highly collaborative workflow by building his own XD plugins. Learn how you can too.

• 3/15/21 • Developer Adoption

  Extensibility in Action: How a Bespoke XD Plugin Transformed the Premiere Rush Design Process

  How an Adobe designer transformed a product team’s design workflow using the power of custom plugins.

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  12/18/20 • Developer Adoption

  Building XD Plugins: A Designer’s Story

  How Designer Valentin De Bruyn Learned JavaScript to Publish a Plugin for Adobe XD. The Result: New API Skills and a Streamlined Workflow.

• 4/14/20 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  I Built a Plugin to Find Out Where Developers Got Stuck

  To grow Adobe XD's plugin ecosystem, I went through onboarding exactly as a new developer would, and wrote down every place it hurt.

• 2/28/20 • Developer Adoption

  Building XD Plugins: A Designer’s Journey in JavaScript