Ran into a dev marketing term you didn't know?

Adoption rate is the share of people who actually start using a product or feature after they get access to it.

An AI agent is software that takes a goal, decides what steps to take, and carries them out on its own.

An AI search engine answers your question directly in plain language instead of handing you a list of links to click.

AI search optimization is the work of getting your brand named and quoted inside the answers that AI search engines give.

An AI workflow is a set process where several AI steps run in order to finish a bigger task.

Alerting is how a system warns the right person the moment something goes wrong, so they can fix it fast.

Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, is the predictable subscription money a company expects to collect over a year.

Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of writing content so that AI and answer engines pick it as the direct answer to a question.

API documentation is the written guide that explains how to use an API, covering its endpoints, parameters, authentication, and example requests and responses.

API integration guides are step-by-step instructions that show developers how to connect a specific API to their own application and get it working end to end.

Architecture is the high-level design of a software system, describing how its major parts are organized and how they connect and work together.

Autonomous agents are AI programs that pursue a goal by deciding their own steps and acting on them without needing a human to guide each move.

B2B SaaS is software sold to other businesses over the internet by subscription, rather than to individual consumers or as a one-time download.

B2D marketing is marketing aimed directly at software developers as the buyers or users, focusing on technical value and proof rather than traditional sales pitches.

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your site, and search engines treat them as votes of credibility that can improve your ranking.

Blog as code is a practice where blog posts are written, versioned, and published using the same tools and workflows developers use for source code, like Git and pull requests.

Bottom-up adoption is when individual users or small teams start using a product on their own, and usage spreads upward to managers and company-wide buying.

Bottom-up GTM is a go-to-market strategy that wins individual users or teams first with a self-serve product, then expands into larger company-wide deals.

Bounce rate is the share of visitors who land on a page and leave without clicking anything or visiting a second page.

CAC is the total sales and marketing spend needed to win one new customer, calculated by dividing those costs by the number of customers gained.

Churn rate is the share of customers or revenue you lose over a given period because people cancel or stop paying for your product.

CLI documentation explains a command line tool's commands, options, and arguments, showing developers how to use it and what each command does.

Code examples are short, runnable pieces of sample code in documentation that show developers exactly how to use a feature or complete a task.

A code snippet is a small, reusable block of code that shows how to do one specific thing, often copied directly into your own project.

Community engagement is the work of actively interacting with users in forums, chats, and social channels to answer questions, gather feedback, and build relationships.

Community-led growth is a strategy where a company grows mainly through an active user community that shares knowledge, helps newcomers, and attracts new users.

A content audit is a systematic review of all your existing content to see what is performing, what is outdated, and what should be updated, kept, or removed.

A content cluster is a group of related pages linked around one central pillar page on a topic, which helps search engines understand your depth on that subject.

A content marketing funnel is the path content guides people along, from first becoming aware of a problem to finally deciding to buy your product.

Content ROI measures the return you get from content by comparing the revenue or leads it generates against what you spent to create and promote it.

A content strategy framework is a structured plan that defines who your content is for, what topics you cover, and how you create, publish, and measure it.

Content syndication is republishing your content on other websites or platforms to reach their audiences, usually with a link back to your original version.

Conversion rate optimization is the practice of improving a website or page so a larger share of visitors take the action you want, like signing up or buying.

A CTO, or chief technology officer, is the executive who leads a company's technology strategy, engineering teams, and decisions about the tools and systems it builds with.

Dev.to is a community platform where developers publish articles, share knowledge, and discuss technical ideas. It is a key channel for reaching developer audiences through genuine, useful content.

Developer activation is the moment a developer first reaches real value with your product, like making a successful API call or shipping their first integration.

Developer adoption is the share of developers who start using and keep relying on your tool, API, or platform in their actual work.

A developer advocate is a person who bridges a company and its developer community, creating content, giving talks, and bringing developer feedback back to the product team.

A developer community is a group of developers who gather around a product or technology to ask questions, share knowledge, and help each other build.

Developer education is the practice of teaching developers how to use a product through docs, tutorials, courses, and examples so they can build with it confidently.

Developer enablement is the work of giving developers the tools, docs, and resources they need to get productive with a product quickly and without friction.

Developer evangelism is the practice of advocating for a product to developers through talks, demos, and content so they understand and want to use it.

Developer experience is how easy, pleasant, and productive it feels for developers to discover, learn, and build with a product, from its docs to its APIs and tooling.

Developer journey mapping is the practice of charting every step a developer takes with a product, from first discovery to active use, to find and fix friction along the way.

Developer marketing is the practice of reaching and winning over developers as buyers and users, using honest, technical content instead of traditional sales pitches.

A developer persona is a profile of a typical developer you want to reach, covering their role, skills, goals, and frustrations, used to guide marketing and product decisions.

Developer relations is the function that builds trust between a company and developers through education, advocacy, community support, and feedback to the product team.

Developer-first describes a product or company that treats developers as its primary audience, designing the product, docs, and go-to-market around their needs.

DevRel strategy is the plan for how a company builds relationships with developers, setting goals, audiences, channels, and metrics for education, advocacy, and community work.

DevTools are the software products developers use to write, test, debug, deploy, and monitor their code, such as IDEs, libraries, and command-line tools.

Docs-as-Code is an approach where documentation is written, version-controlled, reviewed, and published using the same tools and workflows that engineers use for code.

Docs-as-Marketing is the practice of treating product documentation as a channel that attracts and convinces buyers, not just a reference for existing users.

Product documentation is the set of guides, references, and tutorials that explain how to install, use, and troubleshoot a product.

Domain Authority is a score that estimates how likely a website is to rank well in search results, based mostly on the quality and number of links pointing to it.

Dwell time is how long a visitor stays on a page after clicking through from search results before returning to the results list.

An editorial calendar is a schedule that lays out what content you plan to publish and when.

End-user adoption is the genuine, ongoing use of a product by the people who actually use it day to day, the end users.

Engagement rate measures how actively people interact with something, rather than just how many people saw it.

An engineering lead is the person who guides a technical team day to day, sitting between the hands-on developers and the senior leadership.

Enterprise marketing is marketing aimed at large organizations, the big companies whose deals are valuable but slow and complex to win.

A fractional CMO is an experienced marketing leader, a Chief Marketing Officer, who works for a company part-time rather than as a full-time employee.

A framework is a ready-made foundation for building software. Instead of starting from nothing, a developer builds on a framework that already provides structure and many of the common pieces every project of that kind needs.

The freemium model is a way of selling software where a basic version is free forever, and you pay for more: more features, more usage, or more capability.

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, is the practice of getting your content cited and used in the answers that AI tools generate.

GitHub documentation is documentation that lives on GitHub, the popular platform where developers store and collaborate on code, right alongside the code it describes.

A GitHub repository, often shortened to repo, is the home for a project's code on GitHub.

A go-to-market strategy, usually shortened to GTM, is the plan for how a product reaches its market and wins customers.

Growth engineering is the use of engineering skill to drive a product's growth. Where growth marketing focuses on the ideas and strategy for getting and keeping users, growth engineering builds the actual systems that make growth happen: the experiments, the tools to measure what works, the changes to the product that improve signup or adoption, and the automation behind it all.

Growth marketers are people whose job is to drive a product's growth, using experimentation and data across the entire customer journey.

Hacker News is a popular online community where developers, founders, and technically minded people share and discuss news, projects, and ideas.

A how-to guide is a piece of content that walks someone through accomplishing a specific task, step by step.

Inbound marketing is the practice of attracting customers by creating useful content and experiences they seek out, rather than interrupting them with ads or cold outreach.

Integration guides are documentation that shows developers how to connect your product with the other tools and systems they already use.

Interactive documentation is documentation that lets developers try things directly, right there in the docs, instead of just reading about them.

KPIs, short for key performance indicators, are the few most important metrics that show whether you are reaching your goals.

Technical lead generation is the practice of attracting and capturing interest from a technical audience, like developers and engineers, turning them into potential customers a company can build a relationship with.

A large language model, usually shortened to LLM, is a type of artificial intelligence trained on enormous amounts of text that can understand and generate human-like language.

LLM applications are products built on top of large language models to do something specific and useful.

LLM optimization is the practice of making your content and brand more likely to be surfaced, used, and recommended by AI language models.

LLM-based discovery is the growing way people find products, tools, and answers by asking AI language models instead of using a traditional search engine.

Long-form content is in-depth, lengthy content that covers a topic thoroughly, like a detailed guide, a comprehensive article, or a deep explainer.

Long-tail keywords are specific, longer search terms that fewer people search for individually, but which are valuable precisely because they are specific.

A marketing qualified lead, usually shortened to MQL, is a lead that marketing has judged to be interested enough to be worth more attention.

Monitoring is the practice of actively watching a system to catch known problems and be alerted when something goes wrong.

Monthly recurring revenue, usually shortened to MRR, is the predictable revenue a subscription business earns each month from its ongoing subscriptions.

Open source software, usually shortened to OSS, is software whose underlying code is openly available for anyone to view, use, change, and contribute to.

Organic traffic is the visitors who find your website through unpaid search results, rather than through ads.

OSS launch visibility is about getting attention and early traction when launching an open source project, so that developers actually discover it.

Pillar content is a comprehensive, central piece of content on a broad topic that acts as the cornerstone for a whole cluster of related content.

Product-led growth, usually shortened to PLG, is a go-to-market approach where the product itself drives adoption and growth, rather than relying mainly on sales teams to win customers.

A proof of concept, usually shortened to PoC, is a small, quick build created to test whether an idea actually works before committing real time and money to it.

Product adoption metrics are the measurements that show how people actually take up and use a product.

A technical product manager is the person who decides what a technical product should do and why, balancing what users need, what the business wants, and what engineering can realistically build.

A product qualified lead, usually shortened to PQL, is someone who has shown they are a strong prospect by actually using the product and getting value from it.

Programmatic SEO is the practice of creating many search-optimized pages at scale, using data and templates rather than writing each one by hand.

A quickstart guide is documentation designed to get a new user from nothing to a first working success as fast as possible.

A recipe library is a collection of focused, ready-made solutions to common tasks, each one showing how to accomplish a specific thing with a product.

Reddit marketing means reaching people through Reddit, a huge platform made up of thousands of communities, each focused on a specific topic.

Retention rate measures how well a business keeps its customers over a period of time.

ROI, short for return on investment, measures what you get back compared to what you put in.

SaaS, short for software as a service, is software you access over the internet by subscription, rather than buying, installing, and running it yourself.

SDK documentation explains how to use a software development kit, the toolkit a product provides for developers to build with.

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the practice of helping your content rank well in search results so that people searching for what you offer can find you.

Search intent is the real goal behind a search, what the person is actually trying to accomplish when they type a query.

Self-serve onboarding lets new users get started with a product and reach value on their own, without needing a salesperson, a setup call, or hands-on help.

A SERP, short for search engine results page, is the page of results a search engine shows in response to a query.

Subreddits are the individual topic-focused communities that make up Reddit. Reddit is not one big space but a collection of thousands of these communities, each dedicated to a specific subject, interest, or niche, from broad topics to very narrow ones.

Syndication means republishing your content on other platforms or sites to reach audiences beyond your own.

A technical blog post is a piece of writing that explains a technical topic, in depth and accurately, for a technical audience like developers and engineers.

Technical content marketing means using genuinely useful, in-depth technical content to reach, help, and earn the trust of a technical audience like developers and engineers.

Technical decision makers are the people who decide which technical products and tools a company adopts.

A technical lead, often called a tech lead, guides how a team builds software. They combine hands-on engineering with leadership of the team's technical direction, sitting close to the actual work while also steering how it is done.

Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes work that makes sure search engines can properly access, read, and understand your website.

Technical thought leadership means becoming a respected, influential voice on technical topics by consistently sharing genuine insight and expertise.

A technical tutorial teaches someone how to do something by guiding them through it step by step, so they learn by doing.

Technical video production is creating videos that explain or demonstrate technical topics for a technical audience.

Technical writing is the craft of explaining technical things clearly and accurately, so the reader can understand and use the information.

Time to Hello World measures how quickly a developer can get a first basic result from a product, that very first moment of seeing it work.

Time-to-value, usually shortened to TTV, measures how long it takes a new user to get real, meaningful value from a product after they start.

Top-of-funnel, often shortened to ToFu, is the earliest stage of the marketing journey, where people first become aware of you.

A topic cluster is a group of related content pieces organized around a central topic, all connected so they build authority and help each other perform in search.

Turnaround time, usually shortened to TAT, is how long it takes to complete something from start to finish.

UI and UX are two closely related ideas about how people experience a product. UI, short for user interface, is how a product looks and what you directly interact with: the screens, buttons, and layout.

A use case library is a collection of examples showing the different things people can do with a product.

A use case is a specific way a product is used to solve a real problem or achieve a real goal.

Vanity metrics are numbers that look impressive but do not actually reflect real success or help you make good decisions.

A whitepaper is an in-depth, authoritative document that explores a topic, problem, or solution in detail.

Y Combinator, usually shortened to YC, is a famous startup accelerator, and YC startups are the early-stage companies it invests in and helps get off the ground.