Developer, Advocate!  🔗 **Source:** [Developer, Advocate!]() ## Highlights - A third set of concerns I've had for years, and that I've bothered many with over beers at conferences around the world, relate to the ethical dilemmas of the developer advocate role. Though every role inevitably has its own dilemmas, those connected to developer relations are particularly specific, since the role itself is not so clearly defined. Where does your allegiance lie? Clearly somewhere between a community and a company, but where exactly? - Somewhere underneath the conversations in this book, everyone appears to be asking themselves, in wonder, how it can be that they're being paid to have fun and to share that fun experience with others. - tinkering on the edges of new worlds, expanding them, documenting them, sharing them, and generally enthusing about them. - I prefer "advocacy" over "evangelism" because it implies a more measured, thoughtful, and nuanced discussion. - are you okay with me saying good things about the competition? Are you okay with me talking about rough spots in our API or our product?" - Not being able to speak honestly about a product would mean that I was failing as an advocate. - "This is a concept that really didn't make sense to me at first, but here was my breakthrough moment." - The term "evangelist" has always left a little bad taste in my mouth. So often we use the term in a negative fashion. An evangelist is seen as a zealot. Frankly, it's all of that connotation of religion. Personally, I don't evangelize anything. A company might come to me and say, "Hey, we've got this problem and we'd like to know if Smartsheet can help." - Developers spend all of their time writing code, except maybe for a small sliver of time doing meetings, but with developer advocates, it's much more of a split. You're coding, but you're typically coding samples. You're not actually writing production code; instead, you're writing prose and so forth. You're writing articles for the blog, if not articles for some publication. You're presenting at conferences or doing customer visits. You're helping the sales team to sell. - The other point, though, is the realization that we all need to recharge. We all need the opportunity to get away and work on other things. We all need hobbies. Exercise is one of the key things that helps to keep people sharp. When you're exercising, there's literally nothing you can do but think. Everybody needs an opportunity to disconnect and engage in some sort of meditative state. - "Look, if you don't let us speak to developers the way we need to speak to developers, then you're just not going to get the audience. You're going to spend all of this money, time, and effort, and you're going to be giving not necessarily a bad message, but a message to the wrong audience." - If you want to be an advocate towards developers, the first thing you have to do is be a developer. If you want to be accepted by developers, you have to be a person who they respect. You have to be someone who has put the miles in. You need to contribute, whether it's contributing to open source or not. - The second reason is that Microsoft, when I worked there, used to call the role "evangelist." Nowadays, the role is called "advocate" at Microsoft. One of the things that I did at Microsoft was I trained and equipped what we called "field evangelists." I was based in the headquarters in Seattle, but we had different people in different parts of the world who were evangelists for Microsoft. There was one young man in Southern Asia who I was helping to train as an evangelist and he traveled to a Muslim country. When asked at the border what his job was, he said he was an evangelist and he got detained! I got a call from the border security at this country asking to verify that he really meant he talked about tech and not religion. I think that was one of the signals to maybe change the title! - "Evangelical" has a religious aspect for some people and "advocacy" can relate to politics. - You should look at what's really essential and peel away all the extra things because, as an advocate especially, you can be tempted to say yes to everyone. In reality, you just can't do that. Be conscious of how much you can actually do as one person. Part of being in a community is asking people for help. - "Don't use evangelist." Many other people in the room agreed because it has religious connotations. That doesn't work in some countries. You won't be allowed to speak if you say you're an evangelist. They immediately advised that I change my title, and I did. We call our group "developer relations" but we don't say we are evangelists—we say we are advocates. - Developer relations is just an extension of marketing, but it's different when you market to developers because they don't like being marketed to. - "If a developer advocate walks into a room, they should be known already." —Tracy Lee - Developer relations is being able to say, "I was able to walk into a conference room and everybody recognized my brand, and everybody knew who I was already." That's the real impact that I feel developer advocates should have when they attend conferences. - "Tech evangelist" seems to have fallen from favor as a title in the last few years. People don't call themselves "evangelists" now: they're all called "developer advocates." That's fine; it's the same job, just a different name. - Contribute to open-source projects and get involved. It's a fantastic way of showing a prospective employer, or a prospective conference, that you know what you're talking about. If there's a subject you're interested in and you want to present on it, get involved in some open-source project. Contributing to that project, and becoming known in that project, will help when people look at your background after you apply to a conference. - you should praise people publicly and critique them privately. - never give unsolicited advice to another speaker. - "Having a story to tell comes from critical thinking." —Venkat Subramaniam - You need to be an insider if you're going to have credibility in front of people. - developer advocacy is where engineering meets marketing. - "Much of your job will be saying no to marketing people." The marketing team wanted to fill all our social media channels with things that weren't relevant to our audience. They were just trying to broadcast everywhere. What we needed to be doing was building trust with our users.