Why Developer Advocacy Matters in India: A Guide for Aspiring Advocates

Inception

In the rapidly evolving tech landscape of India, Developer Advocacy has emerged as a crucial role that bridges the gap between developers and technology companies. For students and budding developers, understanding the importance of Developer Advocacy can open new pathways for learning, growth, and community engagement.

What is Developer Advocacy?

Developer Advocacy is a role focused on building and nurturing relationships between a company and the developer community. Developer Advocates act as the voice of developers within organizations and the voice of the company within the developer ecosystem. They create content, organize events, provide feedback, and foster a collaborative environment that benefits both developers and businesses.

Why is Developer Advocacy Important in India?

• Bridging the Gap Between Developers and Companies: Many developers in India face challenges in accessing the latest tools, APIs, and platforms. Developer Advocates help bridge this gap by translating complex technical information into accessible knowledge, organizing workshops, webinars, and hackathons that bring developers closer to cutting-edge technology.

• Low visibility of roles: In terms of both ends _> students and C level executives aren't aware of the role and it's importance. Because there are very few use cases and lack of educational material to support the case. From students POV, this is a high risk role, and from companies perspective they don't know what would the ROI. Matching this is as simple as writing a small article about your experience (which is what I'm trying to do with my experience)

• Fostering collaboration between products: The easiest way to show impact is something I learnt from a Dev Advocate, to show how to integrate each other's tool and create complex yet very useful POCs. These would drive adoption rates to sky. Making integration for a platform or having another dev tool on your product. These kinds of colloborations would only be prioritized if there's a business need, but Dev Advocates make a space where these are already available and help drive the funnel for colloborations from get go.

How can you start contributing to the ecosystem of Developer Advocacy or become one?

Learning Pathways to Become a Developer Advocate

• Build Strong Technical Foundations: Pick a language, framework, OS or AI tool you're found of and try to make POCs where to showcase your skills. The more technical depth you bring the more you can contribute.

• Engage with Developer Communities: This is a given, the first step itself is to start posting in communities and IRCs to know more about the tech you're contributing to and showing visibility for yourself in the community.

• Communication Skills: The most important skills that you might want to develop would be communicating with fellow developers and driving value in your conversations about the topic you're talking about. Always remaining in community guidelines and have a helping nature in your tone.

• Seek Mentorship and Role Models: Developer Advocacy is relatively very new, if you want to learn and grow fast _> keep asking questions to the folks who're already doing well, but don't spam them with questions on the basics do your research, keep a tab of active questions and reach out to them with well directed questions which they can directly answer.

  • Not a good example❌ _> hey there, I'm xoxo reaching out. Just wanted to say hi and talk to you about your role and take guidance.
  • Good example ✅ _> Hey Nimit, I was reading about this article on Dev Advocacy (link) what do you think about the right approach to talk drive audience interaction and create the right messaging for a developer advocacy event, thank you.

• Contribute to Open Source: You would be already using something open source in your daily tech jobs/college projects which you would love to talk about or contribute back to. Find the #goodfirstissues in the open source repo and start contributing with docs, and slowly leaning on to some smaller tasks. This is not important to flex, but this is to build confidence in your own self the work you're doing is being used by millions/billions of developers out there; and your contribution has a wider impact.

Conclusion

Developer Advocacy is more than a job; it’s a mission to empower developers, foster innovation, and build vibrant communities. For students in India, stepping into this role offers a chance to grow technically, connect deeply with the tech ecosystem, and make a meaningful impact.
If you’re passionate about technology and community, Developer Advocacy might just be the perfect path for you.

Drop your questions in comment section, I would love to answer them 🥑