# The Dev Family
Fractional developer relations · Lauren Lee and Aaron Bassett
We build developer ecosystems and the AI tooling that keeps them running, then hand both to your team.
Lauren Lee builds developer ecosystems, programs, and education, and the teams that run them. Aaron Bassett is a principal engineer who has shipped open source since 2007 and now builds developer tooling and agentic systems. Between us we've led developer relations at Parity, the Midnight Foundation, Pyth Network, Pod Network, New Relic, MongoDB, Vonage, and Puppet, and both taught smart contracts on the faculty of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy.
We take a small number of engagements at a time, scoped and billed by the day.
hello@thedevfamily.com## Start with a two-week audit
Fixed fee, quoted up front · 10 business days
We find where developers and their coding agents stall on your platform, then give you the plan to fix it.
- A cold run of your quickstart by an engineer and by an AI coding agent, with every failure point logged
- A friction report on docs, onboarding, and support channels, ranked by how many builders each issue stops
- A review of your hackathons, programs, and community against the numbers we've hit before
- A metrics baseline you can track every month after we leave
- A live readout with your team and a 90-day plan
From you: one technical contact, access to docs and repos, and two hours of founder time. The full fee credits toward any engagement booked within 30 days.
## Engagements
Ecosystem launch
Strategy, docs, developer programs, and the metrics to prove them, for a platform heading toward its first thousand builders.
Verified AI developer tooling
Coding agents get young stacks wrong. We build the plugins and skills that make them write code that compiles, executes, and runs end to end on your network.
Hackathons and programs
Event strategy, consistent judging, and build harnesses that raise the share of submissions that actually run.
Fractional DevRel leadership
Senior leadership two days a week while you hire, including scoping the team that sits behind your first DevRel hire.
## Selected work
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Midnight Foundation2024 to 2026
Built developer relations from zero for a privacy-first blockchain. In six months, tracked repos grew from 91 to 1,940 and deployments from 532 to 6,918. Hackathon compile rates went from 10% at the first event to 64% across an MLH series.
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Midnight Expertopen source, built by Aaron
16 Claude Code plugins and 102 skills that verify generated code five ways, reaching 17 AI environments. It cut the cost of building a reference application from about $30,000 to about $2,000.
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Parity TechnologiesPolkadot
Built technical education for the Polkadot ecosystem, including writing and teaching the smart contracts module at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy. Led twelve people across two developer relations teams.
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Accelerate Polkadotuntil November 2024
Our own Web3 Foundation-funded program for founders building on Polkadot.
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hackjudgelab project, built by Lauren
Ran 164 hackathon submissions in sandboxes. The 33 that broke at the build step went to AI coding agents, and 17 came back green with a median change of four lines. Total cost: under $16. The repo, two write-ups, and a video show what a content package from us looks like.
Repo · Post 1: the judge run · Post 2: the agent fixes · Video
## Where we've led developer relations
Midnight Foundation · Parity Technologies · Pyth Network · Pod Network · New Relic · MongoDB · Vonage · Puppet · Polkadot Blockchain Academy
## The people
Lauren Lee
Developer relations leader. Ecosystems, programs, curriculum, and the teams that run them.
Aaron Bassett
Principal engineer. Developer tooling and agentic systems, with open source shipping since 2007.
## Start a conversation
Tell us what you're launching, who it's for, and when it needs to work.
hello@thedevfamily.com