What developers can learn from Sales professionals?

Hello 👋🏽
Welcome to Dev Shorts. Issue #22 talks about Sales for Devs, improving text search, and an OSS secure credential project!
While chatting with my friend who leads a Sales team for an Open source startup, during the discussion, we spoke about developers, their usual disinterest, and hostility towards the Sales profession.
Developers are naturally averse to Sales roles for many reasons, starting with the thought that selling is easy and not so exciting part of work, lack of innovativeness, sales targets, etc.
For a long time, I used to think the same. Until one day, I realized how vital Sales function is for a company, just like engineering. Selling is hard; it is an art that includes science 😅
A developer might think I could build a simple solution to the most complex problem. So why can’t I sell it? Well, for starters, selling is not just demonstrating technical prowess. It includes many other traits like telling a story to customers, talking about why your solution never fails their business, how strong your customer support is, and the future roadmap.
There are many good videos on this topic. If you want to be an indie hacker (a developer building & selling his small idea), you can join the Indiehacker community, which offers great tips & resources on the topic.
Nevertheless, I also agree with developers disinterest in this profession. So many sales tactics irk them, like doing sales pitches at the wrong time, value-less campaigning, etc.
Lastly, if you want to deep dive into the subject of sales, here are some podcasts:
What I read in the last few weeks?
Lessons learned from improving full-text search at Snyk with Elasticsearch
We’re currently moving the “issues” tab of Snyk reports over to Elasticsearch. Read what we learned about in terms of analyzers, tokenizers, and search in the process.
42 things I learned from building a production database | mahesh’s blog
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). Delos is currently replacing all uses of ZooKeeper at Facebook.
Open source project
I build a lot of product demos, try various SDKs, in the course, I set a lot of ENV vars, envchain is really cool and helps secure the credentials.

Environment variables meet macOS Keychain and gnome-keyring <3
Upcoming Developer Conferences
1st edition of Nullcon Berlin is here.
Nullcon Berlin 2022 | Call for Papers
Nullcon is an annual security conference held in Goa, India. The focus of the conference is to showcase the next generation of offensive and defensive security technology. Submit CFP for Nullcon Berlin 2022
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Sincerely,
Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽
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