From Developer to DevRel

Frédéric Harper is the Developer Relations Manager at TinyMCE, part of the Tygo portfolio of developer tools. Based in Quebec, Canada, Fred leads a small but focused DevRel team responsible for building awareness, community, and trust across multiple products including TinyMCE, ScatterCMS, and CKEditor.

Fred is known for his authenticity-first approach to developer advocacy. Over a career spanning more than a decade in DevRel, he has worked at Microsoft, Mozilla, Fitbit, and several other technology companies, each time serving as a bridge between engineering teams and the developer communities they serve. At Microsoft, he was one of the early hires focused on open source outreach at a time when the company's relationship with that community was openly adversarial.

His philosophy centers on developer relations as a genuine two-way street: not just evangelizing products, but actively listening to developers, relaying their feedback to product teams, and protecting their interests internally. He measures success through developer sentiment, community engagement, and the quality of the product feedback loop rather than traditional sales metrics.

Before his career in developer relations, Fred was a software developer who fell into community building and public speaking as a passion project. That origin story, doing it for love before doing it for a living, continues to shape how he thinks about the role today.