Developer Advocate
I have been interested in doing this for a long time, but I didn’t realize it was a job for a while. I started out as a programmer, then senior programmer, and finally, programmer/team leader. As a senior and a leader, I created content to help my team and speak at meetups.
I then went to work as a Sales / Solutions Engineer. This was a great combination of tech and some of the same things I was interested in. This role can overlap a lot with developer advocacy. I did talks, helped people, and wrote code; the main difference is that a Solutions Engineer tends to be trying to make a company's proposed solution the technology option for a potential customer. As a Dev Advocate, you may talk to an Open Source community and either potential customers or more. You are promoting a project or technology but maybe not selling it. There are a lot of grays around here. I was a Principal Field Engineer for a while and walked the line between Solutions Engineer, Consultant, Field CTO, and Developer Advocate.
I would recommend finding a defined Developer Advocate team and role. There should be some metrics to track and a clear list of deliverable goods. It would help if you also had a whole group of people to work with in marketing, sales, engineering, product development, and more.
Let’s look at resources from some of the top developer advocates.
What will you be doing? A lot. If you want to tell stories about technology and influence others to succeed at building cool things with a specific technology, this is the place.
Write articles, and make them extraordinary.
Write some cool demos and publish them to Git Hub.
Write conference abstracts, and talks and give them. You have to get them accepted.
ChatGPT maybe can help.
Talk at meetups. Maybe set up and run your own. If this is fun, you may be in the right place.
Let’s pick some of the best out there to look at.
My process is to find something people need to do, want to do, seem cool or have a dataset. Also, if you have a team or company that has things they need to show to the world, this can drive some great content.
Now that I have this seed, I plant some code, script, shell, and artifacts to make that possible. I put this in open source in Git Hub. Once it works, I start adding a long how-to readme in markup. This will usually lead to an article and a video of the demo. If it looks attractive and includes some good items, I can make this a conference and meetup talk. So one seed grows into articles, tutorials, demos, meetups, conference talks, videos, and podcasts.
It’s fun!
Also, see:
