DEV Community: Sidney Maestre

7 tips to launch a career as a developer advocate

Sidney Maestre — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:39:36 +0000

Looking to take your career in a new direction? Perhaps you’ve considered a role as a developer advocate, but wonder what type of experience you’ll need. In this post, I’ll discuss 7 things you can do to prepare you for a career as a developer advocate.

I’m mindful that your current job might not provide the opportunity to obtain this experience. That’s alright, you can do all of these things on your own. What better way to demonstrate passion than to do developer relations activities without a paycheck attached.

1: Coding

I believe programming experience is a prerequisite for a developer advocate. I hope this isn’t a controversial opinion, but feel free to disagree in the comments below. How you gain the coding experience can range from a 4 year computer science degree from a university to a 12 week coding bootcamp or even online courses. I recommend going beyond your studies and applying what you’ve learned building products. You will grow so much solving real problems with code.

What programming language should you learn as you pursue a career as a developer advocate? You can’t predict what specific programming experience is required for your future role(s), so I recommend NodeJS, Java, .Net, Python, Ruby or PHP. These six languages have large developer communities but if you have a passion for GoLang, Swift, Kotlin or others that’s fine too. The main point is that programming concepts can be learned through any language, and being able to apply what you’ve learned in one language to others is key.

As a developer advocate, you’ll be called upon to write code to support blog posts, tutorials, and speak in front of hundreds of developers. You’ll want the confidence that comes from programming. We all suffer “imposter syndrome” from time to time, but looking back at past accomplishments can bolster any doubts you may feel.

Empathy is a key aspect of developer relations. Having lived the life of a developer you’ll understand the joys and frustrations of coding. You’ll know the struggle and offer advice without judgement because you’ve been there yourself.

2: Public Speaking

Developer advocates may be best known for speaking at conferences in front of hundreds of developers. During an interview you’ll want to share your public speaking experience. Let’s look at a few places you can hone your skills as a presenter.

Of course technology conferences are an obvious choice. Responding to an open “call for paper” by organizers is one option. If you go this route, find events with topics and themes you can speak to based on your experience. Landing a speaking slot won’t be easy. You’ll be competing with experienced speakers and organizers may not be willing to take a chance on you.

Another route would be a local meetup that aligns with your interests. Attend a few meetings to get a feel for the topics they cover and get to know the organizers. Once you are established you can find out how speakers are selected. Then follow up with the organizer and inquire about speaking at a future event.

For those with little or no public speaking skills, you can join a local Toastmasters group to practice your public speaking in a support environment.

3: Blogging

You know the old saying “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”, practice, practice, practice. Writing like any other skill requires deliberate practice. Anyone can write about their experiences with technology. Whether you’ve been coding for 6 months or 6 years, you have a perspective to share that is all your own.

You’ve got several options for hosting your writings. For a free option, I recommend Dev.to, they don’t have paywalls for readers like Medium. Do you want to have a bit more control over the design of your blog and a custom domain name? There are many paid services like WordPress.com which starts at $4 a month. For this blog, I chose Ghost an open source blogging product deployed on DigitalOcean. It took a little more patience and costs $5 a month. Why did I choose to self host with Ghost? Purely for the experience and maximum control of my blog should I want to customize it.

4: Tweeting

Chances are future employers will expect you to engage with developers through social media. A strong social media following may be a prerequisite for some developer advocate roles. Personally, I don’t believe you need to be an “influencer” to be a good developer advocate but you should be social media savvy and you can start today.

I’m recommending Twitter because it is widely used by companies who have their own branded account. Twitter is designed for public conversation and developers use it to ask technical questions. Like email it’s become one more way to engage in conversation.

Start by signing up and learning the basics of Twitter. Here are some good tips on setting up your account, while this post had good information on the basics of how to use Twitter. You can build your profile as a technologist, share interesting content and follow others in the industry. Most importantly, stay active and put in the time to build a modest following that will grow once you’ve secured that developer advocate role.

What about LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok? It’s fine to have a presence on other platforms. If you find ways to connect with other technologists through these platforms, then go for it. My reason for focusing on Twitter is it's pervasive use by tech companies.

5: GitHub(ing)

GitHub is where most of our favorite open source projects live. If you’ve been coding for a while you’ve probably found yourself at a GitHub repository with code you can include in your project. Anyone can share code with the world through GitHub and invite other developers to comment and contribute to your codebase. It is an amazingly powerful tool for developers.

Start by signing up for a GitHub account - it’s free. I think it’s important to take a few minutes and personalize your profile. Nothing screams n00b than a profile with the default picture. Next, you should learn the basics. There are tons of resources for learning GitHub, here is a nice 10min “hello world” for GitHub. Looking for an opportunity to get your feet wet? Check out the Hacktoberfest event hosted by Digital Ocean.

Once you’ve got the basics under your belt, you can create your own repositories and share your code with others. Go a setup further and find opportunities to help other developers by contributing to their projects. It can be tough to put yourself out there, but make the effort. You will learn a ton by collaborating with developers around code and most importantly how to communicate with developers.

Why is a GitHub presence important when pursuing a developer advocate role? Most of us work for private companies and sharing our code is impossible. GitHub allows you to showcase your talent through personal projects you write. By contributing to other developer repositories, you demonstrate the desire to engage with developers - an important quality in developer advocates.

6: Community Building

Community building is a pretty broad term, but in its simplest form it’s about bringing people together. You’ll need to decide what community building means to you and how you can participate. Developers can come together online or in person with various objectives. Seek out those opportunities to get involved in activities that you are excited about.

My path to developer relations started by volunteering to assist a user group organizer. We met monthly and I helped coordinate sponsors for pizza each month and swag to give away at events. I eventually stepped up to lead the group and then left to start a new meetup for mobile developers. I am not saying go start a meetup, unless that’s what you really want to do, but start by participating at a level you are comfortable with and pursue your passion. Be authentic and it will come through when you talk about your community building work.

7: Preparing

You’ve put in the work to score an interview as a developer advocate, now what? The interview process will vary from company to company, but here are a few tips for developer advocates.

Like any interview, you should research the company, product and sector they occupy. Speaking to the challenges developers face and how the company’s product solves those problems is key. Knowing the key players in the sector, you can ask relevant questions about how their product differs from others.

Most importantly, take their technology for a spin (if you can). Evaluate the developer experience for yourself and note any ways you’d make it better. Sign up for a developer account, download an SDK (Software Developer Kit), try their getting started and explore their documentation. This will prepare you to ask questions about their product and demonstrate interest in how developers experience their product.

Final Thoughts

It can be competitive landing a developer advocate job at top tier tech companies. You may be going up against experienced developer advocates, but don’t be disheartened. Breaking into a new career can be tough, but I hope this post helps you on your journey towards a role as a developer advocate.

What do developer evangelists do?

Sidney Maestre — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 18:58:27 +0000

In a previous post, I shared my thoughts on what is developer evangelism. Now I’d like to delve into the work of developer evangelists and developer advocates.

Let’s address one question you might have. Is there a difference between an evangelist and an advocate? There has been some debate in the devrel community about the titles developer evangelist vs. developer advocate. Some folks don’t like the religious connotation of “evangelist”, but it’s never bothered me. I think the title matters a lot less than what we do day to day. So, call yourself an evangelist, advocate, or avocado. For this post, I’ll use the titles interchangeably.

What your devrel team does, starts with your company mission. From there, you determine the goals to support the mission. This means developer evangelism will vary greatly from company to company. Your product may be a technology who’s end user is developers, and driving awareness of your solution is a goal. Perhaps your product is a platform play with end users who may or may not be developers and the goal is fostering an ecosystem of developers who innovate on and extend your product. Your goal may be engaging the developer community around open source software that in itself is not sold, but your company offers services to those using the open source software.

This isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of activities developer evangelists engage in and as I said above, what you do is informed by your team’s goals.

Awareness

Notorious criminal Willie Sutton when asked why he robbed banks responded “Because that's where the money is.“ If you want to raise awareness, you need to go where the developers are.

Conferences

All conferences are not created equal. Your product may appeal to a large audience or a narrow segment. By understanding the persona of the developer(s) you wish to reach, you can identify conferences and events that attract your ideal developer audience.

Speaking at a conference is a great way to share information with a large number of developers. Many conferences have open calls for papers that can be found on sites like papercall.io. Alternatively, you could sponsor and potentially get a booth, your logo plastered everywhere and even an opportunity to speak.

Developer evangelists create and deliver talks at conferences. They are tasked with responding to open “call for proposals” with abstracts for talks that will appeal to conference organizers and steering committees in charge of speaker selection.

Once selected, developer evangelists spend a good deal of time creating slide decks, demo code and other supporting materials for their talk. Hours are spent practicing and refining a talk in preparation for the conference. Beyond speaking, you’ll find evangelists chatting with developers during breaks and after parties.

Meetups

Meetup.com is the juggernaut for organizing like-minded developers for monthly events to network, learn from each other and often share a beverage. These events vary in topic, frequency and format determined by the organizer.

Developer advocates can build an engagement strategy that includes speaking at meetups. This would involve identifying the right meetups and contacting organizers about speaking at an upcoming event. Developer advocates sometimes run their own meetups or get involved coordinating with developers who want to start meetups that focus on their company’s technology.

Hackathons

Hackathons are time bound events, often 36 to 48 hours long, where developers form teams and build creative projects together. While there is a competitive element often with judging at the end and prizes awarded, these are an opportunity for developers to have fun, explore new technology and learn.

Companies can organize their own hackathon or join forces with other companies to create a larger event. Another way to participate in hackathons is through sponsorship and prizes. There are both community hackathons and ones run by for profit companies, like Major League Hacking or AngelHack. Large sponsorships can increase your visibility and include opportunities to run workshops or pitch your technology during the event.

Evangelists are the front line at hackathons. They might spend a few minutes explaining their technology and the associated prizes, conduct workshops and will definitely spend time sitting with teams helping them get up to speed with their technology.

Webinars

You can reach a global audience of developers without leaving your desk. Offering beginner or getting started content can attract developers who are new to your technology and want to spend 45 minutes with an expert.

Developer advocates might create and present content at webinars targeting a developer audience. At the conclusion of the presentation, a question and answer time is a great way to engage with developers and capture common questions they have about your product.

Social Media

Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook are common platforms to communicate with developers. Developer evangelists teams can use a company or their own personal accounts to evangelize technology.

Social media channels are how evangelists share developer-centric content from blogs and tutorials or news of upcoming events. Live tweeting other speakers key points at a conference and sharing pictures with followers.

Content

Content for developers includes API documentation, quickstart guides, online courses, and more. These might originate from engineering, education or dedicated developer content teams. Developer evangelists also contribute to content creation as well. Here are a few types of content an evangelists might create.

Code

I’m starting with “code” as the first type of content developer advocates create because it is the language of developers. I find through code you can establish credibility with developers and communicate in meaningful ways. Code can come in many forms. Developer advocates might create snippets, a few lines of code, to illustrate a concept or full blown apps that can be downloaded and run by developers to demonstrate complex use cases. Also, code can be the foundation for tutorials, blogs, presentations, webinars and videos.

Tutorials

Through their connection with developers, evangelists can identify common uses for a technology. Armed with this knowledge, they can code examples and break them down into a step by step tutorial. This can be highly effective in communicating complex concepts beyond “hello world”.

Blogging

Posts written by developer evangelists can be technical in nature and include code samples. The topic is often about their company's product but can be about other technology their developer audience would find valuable. Evangelists also blog about product releases, industry trends, and event recaps.

Videos

Videos can have some production behind it, like Xero’s DevTV, or as simple as screencast and a microphone. Video can show developers how to use a technology and is a very effective medium in helping developers to connect the dots. Evangelists can turn sample code, blog posts and presentations into screencasts to get more mileage out of existing content.

Community

Many companies have a role of community manager who engage with groups of developers with the goal of building a community around their technology . Developer evangelists might be called upon to support the company community building activities or engage with existing developer communities through different platforms.

GitHub

GitHub is one of the largest communities of developers building software together. You’ll find owners, maintainers, contributors and users of open source software on the platform. Developer evangelists often share code they’ve written as repositories on GitHub. These are typically packages developers can download, configure, and either run or include in their codebase.

Engineering teams within companies can also open source code through GitHub. If these are SDKs or other tools for using the company’s technology, then developer evangelists might contribute code, respond to issues or review and merge pull requests from developers.

Stackoverflow

Stackoverflow is where developers go looking for answers. Plugging error codes into Google often leads to a stackoverflow page with developers discussing the same issue and ways to solve it.

Through tagging you can find all the questions being asked about your company’s products and join the conversation. At Xero, new stackoverflow questions about our APIs are pulled into a Slack channel dedicated to supporting the community. Developer advocates can jump in and answer questions alongside dedicated support teams.

Forums

Support forums hosted by your company are very similar to stackoverflow where developers can ask questions and the community can engage in conversation. Unlike stackoverflow, you have more control over forums you own. Going beyond questions and issues to offer developers a place to share feedback and feature requests. Developer advocates can contribute to frequently asked questions and knowledge base articles explaining how to solve more complex issues.

Partnerships

Partnerships can have a technology component. Conversations might start with a business development or partnerships team but when engineers join the conversation a developer evangelists might be called up to share their expertise.

Strategic Partners

Your company might engage in hundreds of partnerships that include some level of technical integration. Even with a scalable partner program and solid documentation, select partners may be deemed strategic. Going above and beyond for these partners may involve the developer evangelists meeting with their engineering team to field questions. Developer evangelists may be the technical point of contact for these relationships so strategic partners have an escalation path if standard support channels are not sufficient.

Certification

Reviewing partner integrations is something the developer evangelists team does at Xero. Knowledge of Xero API capability and how our customers use Xero is used to verify the quality of the integration. Xero may be outliers by including this among the things developer evangelists do, but they see app partners is an extension of their brand. Advising developers on how to build a best in class integration is key to Xero’s developer evangelist strategy.

Account Management

It may be potentially controversial to include account management but what I’m referring to is the relationship with a partner. As the number of partnerships grow, developer evangelists may become the point of contact for dozens of smaller partners. The demands don’t tend to be very high from these partnerships and having a personal contact at your company is can be important to partners.

Is that all?

I’m being facetious when I say “is that all”? The above list is not inclusive of everything that a developer evangelists may be asked to do. Also, I’m not advocating they do everything listed above. From personal experience, when you pile on competing priorities teams will end up prioritizing some work over others. If you find your developer evangelist teams in this situation, it might be time to develop specializations within the team or split the team into groups like developer evangelists, solution engineers and community managers.

Did I miss anything? Let me know if there is work you do as a developer evangelist that I did not include in this post.

What is developer evangelism?

Sidney Maestre — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:07:10 +0000

What is developer evangelism? I’m here to say it has nothing to do with church, prayer or miracles. I’ve heard developer evangelism described as “marketing to developers”, but I find this limits the definition of evangelism to the language of marketeers like messaging, top of the funnel, leads and conversions. Evangelism has an impact, but it’s not always immediate, direct or easily measured. For me, the work of developer evangelism is accomplished through connections, empathy and advocacy.

Connections

Evangelism is about building authentic connections. It’s primary purpose is not selling, but helping developers. This starts with understanding the problem a developer is facing and offering the best advice even if the solution does not include your product. In this way, you are authentically helping and not pushing your agenda. The trust and respect that is earned becomes an extension of your company and it’s brand. This is my philosophy and is at the heart of how I do developer evangelism.

Sales is often a straight line as you track prospects through a funnel to paying customers. Don’t get me wrong, we want a sales process that is seamless for developers, but evangelism is much more than that. Developers may enter a credit card resulting in a transaction, but the time they invest learning about your technology is not transactional. As developers learn to use a technology, it becomes a tool in their toolbelt. A tool they can use in the future, share with others or even help make better. Instead of a funnel, picture concentric circles (credit to Josh Dzielak and Patrick Woods from orbit.love) around your product. The work of developer evangelism brings developers into your product’s orbit where connections are established and strengthened through the many touch points at your company.

What is a community, but people connected through a shared interest. We refer to groups of developers as “communities” and evangelism is one way you can engage with a community. Developer communities can sprout up around everything from programming languages (JavaScript, Ruby, Python) to type of work (devops, front-end, full stack). For this reason developer evangelism isn’t alway about your product but is often about lifting up the developer community. These efforts can establish your company as a leader in the community and a trusted technology brand.

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Developers come to us with a wide range of experiences and abilities. For this reason, how they experience technology can vary greatly. We may assume a level of experience they don’t possess, don’t support functionality they desire or do a poor job documenting how to use technology. Developer evangelism can bridge the gap with a developer by asking questions, listening and having empathy for how a developer is feeling at that moment.

Through empathy, we gain insights into how developers might get tripped up when learning about our technology. We can drive improvements through blog posts, tutorials, code samples and other educational materials. When speaking we strive to be inclusive of developers with varying levels of experience. In conversation, we don’t dismiss developers when they struggle to understand a concept or design pattern and look to connect the dots in other ways.

Over time, our empathy can influence the lense in which we view the world. We can look at a decision or new initiative from multiple angles and think through the possible impact on developers. Empathy enables the evangelism team to represent those developers not able to be in the room. This is where our role as advocates kicks in.

Advocacy

Developer evangelism might conjure the image of someone on stage sharing knowledge to the masses, which indeed we do. We must not forget advocating on behalf of developers with the people around us. Evangelism presents the unique opportunity to have knowledgeable technologists listening to developers' struggles and hopes for your technology. You can still send out surveys and ask developers for feedback en masse, but the results can be limited by the format and lack of interactivity. Evangelists have the advantage of engaging in a conversation over time with developers and the ability to evaluate feedback, see patterns and weigh its importance.

Establishing a forum for evangelists to discuss feedback with product teams is essential to advocacy. Without the ability to influence product roadmaps, your company will lose a valuable function of evangelism. The morale of your evangelism team can suffer if they don’t have a voice in product decisions.

Through advocacy we have an opportunity to learn from developers (our customers) how to improve our technology. More importantly, we discover pain points that we can solve through new products. Open source software takes advocacy to the next level and invites developers to contribute their ideas through code. The evangelism team can play a role working with developers at this level.

Help people

I think the greatest thing about developer evangelism are the people who make up the developer relations community. We come from varied backgrounds and have taken different paths to arrive where we are today. The definition of evangelism continues to evolve as the community grows and changes. We each bring our own perspective to the question “What is developer evangelism?”.

I’ve highlighted connections, empathy and advocacy as the attributes that underpin my evangelism work. A simpler way to say it ... “help people”, two words that describe many professions. I hope you found this helpful.