Can I be a Developer Advocate?

#devrel #developer #community #beginners

Of Course Yes !! 🤓

I am Sohini and I am a Developer Advocate 🥑 at Entando.

It has been 2 and a half months since I joined Entando. Before that, I was the Developer Advocate at Dabble Lab for a Year and 2 months. You can find more about me on my Linkedin.

Well, that was my intro. And now I'll share all the steps I took to be a Developer Advocate! 💡

Initially, when I began looking for this role, I was curious about how to start? 😱
And what is that one thing that I can do to tell people that I am fit for this role?

Hence, I started looking into some of the really cool tech evangelists. I started following them. I found out that there were some things that are really necessary to be one!

Be skilled or an expert on one or a few Languages and/or frameworks. (In my case it was Javascript, Node.js, Alexa Skill Development, and a few AWS Services) Well, it’s preferable to do one/more internships before this, so that you get a playground to learn more about how applications are built designed, and developed. You can also have some experience with full-time roles!
Have an Online Presence (will share below, how to create one).
Be very active on socials like Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube/Blog sites.

How would a beginner have all these?

Well, I guess when you’re pursuing tech, I’m sure you’d be skilled in a particular language/technology! Use that! 💪🏻

If you are a University/Engineering School student, start using your semesters, and all your 4 years to learn several languages, frameworks, libraries, or any tech stack of your choice. Trust me, this is the best time to start learning.

Start building applications to teach/help other people and push them to your Github (Another perfect place to keep your work organised and clean). Write Blogs on how you created them. Create Tutorials on how you built them. Finally, constantly share them on your Twitter and Linkedin.

When to know, that you’re prepared?

When you see, that you have developed a good number of people to follow you, your tutorials, blogs. You’re there! Your hard work created some good noise !! 🥳 (Well, write a blog that too 😉. About how you built your presence from scratch, and how you feel to have helped so many people learn!)

And this step is very important. I recommended this so that your job application gets weightage. As, when you apply for devocate 🥑 jobs, recruiters look for your work (The Youtube Tutorials, Written Tutorials/Blogs).

Finally, you can start applying by looking for:
Developer Advocate, Devrel Engineer, Developer Evangelist, etc. Jobs.

That’s it! So, the answer is YES! If you work hard, present content that is yours. You can definitely be a Developer Advocate, buddy :-)

If all this sounds interesting, and you wish to check my work. Find my Video Tutorials on these Links:

Dabble Lab Video Tutorials By Sohini and Entando Video Tutorials by Sohini

My blogs are available at Medium and here at Dev.to.

You can connect with me on Twitter for any help/suggestion! 🤓

Thank you for reading!

Happy Coding! 👩🏼‍💻👨‍💻🧑🏽‍💻

Latest comments (12)

Let's Code • Feb 20 '22 • Edited

Hi Sohini, thanks for the post. Followed you on Twitter as well.

I have a Youtube that have a decent subs and dev.to

Do you think that is enough to be a dev advocate? What do you do day to day as an advocate?

Sohini Pattanayak • Feb 20 '22

Hi! This looks great. I like the number of subscribers you have, along with the dev.to posts. I'd like to suggest, maybe you can add your own picture to your channel as well as the dev.to account, to make it look like it's really you. Apart from that, it all looks absolutely a good to go thingy! Only one thing is missing, maybe you could be socially more active with all the awesome stuff you're doing! I hope that helps :-)

Day to Day life adds to exploring content, creating content and finally evangelising them (Blogs+Video Tutorials). The exploring content is the hardest part as that involves finding unique and useful stuff, for people. And yes, tweeting too! 🙈

I really love to help people, and so i'm looking forward to writing more blogs to help people and make them aware of this role.

Let's Code • Feb 20 '22

thank you for the quick response. dev rel might be a good transitioning role for me down the role, not sure when is the time

Sohini Pattanayak • Feb 20 '22

Well i say, right now is the time! And confidence is the key. You know you have enough stuff to show and tell your recruiter when you apply for a role. So start applying! There are a lot of openings nowadays for dev advocacy! :-)