Creating a 10 million visits a month community at DZone

**Kellet Atkinson** (0:00)
A meta discussion around how to effectively build software, not like the nitty gritty of how you do this or that, but in the code, but how do you, as an organization, move forward? So it's not a good idea to make decisions without involving the community. The blowback is huge.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
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**Dan Lines** (0:34)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Kellet Atkinson, Director of Product for DZone. We're honored to have DZone as one of our two premier partners for our upcoming Engineering Leadership Conference, Interact, on September 30th.
Find out more at devinterrupted.com/interact. Kellet, thanks so much for joining the pod today.

**Kellet Atkinson** (1:01)
Yeah, Dan, thanks for having me. I'm honored to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:05)
Yeah, totally stoked to have you here. I wanna start by giving the audience a chance to get to know you a little bit more.
Can you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a bit about your career journey?

**Kellet Atkinson** (1:18)
Sure, so I am the Director of Product at dzone.com and my purview is really content and community. So dzone.com is a community-led website where we publish content for professional software developers. We help writers who write about the topic to publish and get in front of an audience. And so a big part of what I do today is focused on helping those writers and the people in our community get their experience out into the world and connect with audiences. How I got here, really, I spent most of my professional career working at DZone. I started at DZone almost a decade ago now. And when I started, I don't think I knew anything about software development. Over the last decade or so of working in a number of capacities at DZone, I've gotten to be exposed to every facet of software development, from the programmers to people who are managing teams to big companies to small startups. I've had exposure to all those and seen what they're doing in the space.
Over that time, it's really stoked a passion for me in the space.
I've always loved building stuff. Before I was at DZone, I spent running my own company where I was building analog guitar pedals. Building stuff has always been my big passion. Software ties in nicely with that.

**Dan Lines** (2:32)
How did you get the idea to start doing the guitar pedals? That's amazing. Very entrepreneurial of you.

**Kellet Atkinson** (2:40)
Actually, it's one of those things where it was a hobby at first, and I realized that it could make me some money too, and I just loved doing it. I play guitar, and I got tired of dropping like $200 or $300 on guitar pedals. So I said, I'm going to go just start building my own. And I started doing that, and then I had friends asking me like, hey, man, that thing sounds awesome. Can I get one of those? And then I build one for them. And then over time, I was building like probably a few hundred a year and selling them. And it's one of those things though where when you take a hobby and then you turn it into a job, it sucks all the fun out of it.

**Dan Lines** (3:10)
You got to protect your hobbies. I have seen people that work on side projects, or if you have a lot of interesting side projects going, there is some type of correlation to building a career. I found that entrepreneurial spirit. Does that resonate for you? Did you use any of that when you came into DZone? You probably came in as a lower end person and now a director of products.

**Kellet Atkinson** (3:33)
Yeah, actually when I joined DZone, this was 2013 The co-founders were still part of the company. Rick Ross, who probably some of your listeners would be familiar with. And we were only a 12 person company at that point. And I think I was probably one of the first people they hired that had any experience that wasn't coming straight out of college. And yeah, I think the reason I joined DZone is because the co-founders were engineers and they loved to build stuff. And so we had that shared passion and that desire to do that. So I think that's what drew us together.