It’s no secret that I love Go and every year the Go community comes together for an event known as GopherCon — Making it’s debut in 2014 it was an instant success! It drew a sellout crowd of 700 attendees and has more than doubled in size since then.

Not only is there an exceptional line up of pre-conference workshops taught by some of the best in the industry, but they also put a lot of care into selecting the best speakers for the event. Plus the hours upon hours of networking — it’s really worth the trip!

This year GopherCon celebrates it’s five-year anniversary which is kind of a big deal, but as a single mother I fully understand that attending a conference is a luxury that not everyone has, so this year I am making it my mission to bring as many people to GopherCon as I can.

I’ll be doing a series of fundraisers starting now and ending on July 1st. The goal is to raise money for GoBridge and WomenWhoGo — two organizations who make it their mission to educate & empower underrepresented communities.

Daniela Petruzalek is one of the many Women Who Go Diversity Scholarship reciepents from 2017 and she wrote about her experience in a post titled; The Impact of Women Who Go in my Life — I highly reccommend taking the time to read it.

In the last 3 days we’ve sold 413 shirts, raising $4,345.42 which is just incredible! You Gophers make me so proud. Remember, these donations don’t just buy someone a ticket to the event, it’s a FULL-RIDE so the more money we raise the better!

I’ll continue to update this post as I add designs, but feel free to browse the Threadless shop HERE

Gophers Hugging

Inclusion Gophers

Mic Drop Gopher

This is Fine Gopher

Women Who Go

New Additions:

Lazy Gopher

Space Gopher

Facepalm Gopher

Gopher and Docker

Father & Daughter Gophers

Mother & Child Gopher

The NEW Doctor!

Go bug or feature?

GoBuild

When it’s broken and you don’t know why…

Fly Away with me Gopher

Fly Away with Me Gopher (Blue)

Gaming Gopher

Wonder Woman Gopher

Gopher Unicorn

Gopher Pride (Gaypher)

Gopher Link

The Doctor

BatGopher

Belgium Gopher

Denver Gopher

Chicago Gopher

GopherCon Iceland

GoBuffalo

Safari Gophers

Edward

Music Producer (Splice)

Nerdy Gopher

Rick and Gopher

Gopher Moto

Gopher Lion

Gopher Strange

Go Mentor

Gopher Snacks

Go Packages

Gophers in France

Gopher Band

Go Race

Kubernetes Gophers

Vintage Gopher

Viking Gopher

StayPuft Gopher

Go Community

Gopher Cowboy

Gopher Academy

Original Go Buffalo

CNCF Gophers

Star Gophers

Gopher Wars

MSFT Gophers

Thank you again from the bottom of my heart and keep checking back!

Have a favorite Gopher? Leave a comment and I’ll try to work it into a future campaign.

If you don’t want a shirt you can donate directly to Women Who Go or if you would like to purchase shirts for us to give away then you can send money directly to me and I’ll order the shirts in your name, but please leave your email in the notes.

Based on original artwork from the amazing Renee French.

Since joining Microsoft I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Developer Advocacy so I’d like to take a moment to explain what it is and why it’s important.

Developer Advocacy in a nutshell

Developer Advocacy has many names. You may have heard it referred to as Developer Relations or Evangelism, and while these roles vary company to company, we all essentially do the same thing — We represent software developers. I like to say that it’s my job to ask dumb questions so you don’t have to, but the real goal of a Developer Advocate is to become the voice of the user. We gather feedback in a way developers can’t (since they know the codebase too well), then use that feedback to shape the product to become what it needs to be.

One of the most common misconceptions about this job is that we’re not developers ourselves.

Most Developer Advocates have backgrounds in software development, most of us contribute to Open Source, and many of us are even maintainers, meaning that we know when a product is or isn’t easy to use and we also know how to fix it. This involves all of the usual development activities like architecture, design, implementation, testing, and debugging. Resulting in tools that make it easier to use your product like SDKs, code examples, CLI’s, and IDE plugins because making your products easy to use is the most important thing you can do to help your fellow developers.

We’re perpetual learners

Developer Advocates can spend anywhere from 20–50% of their time learning new things. Not only is it our job to learn at the conferences we attend, but we take experimentation seriously: from the obscure to the popular. We’re not only leveraging our network for answers, but we’re also learning right alongside you.

We love documentation

Developer Advocates not only love the docs, we also help write them.

Documentation can make or break your product. When a developer is using your product for the first time, they’re going to start with the docs. If your “Getting Started” guides are not clear, then you’ll likely lose that user. Remember that this is one of the first experiences a developer will have with your product and, if you want them to stick around, on-boarding needs to be painless. In order to ease that pain, we produce things like getting started guides, reference documentation, and detailed API docs.

We tend to offer a much needed fresh perspective, because when you’re building docs it’s easy to hyper focus on the details of the tech and lose sight of the very developers you’re building these products for in the first place. It’s our job to make sure the needs of the developer are kept in mind..

We’re not afraid of public speaking

“A Developer Advocate is just a professional conference goer.”

The above statement isn’t completely incorrect, it’s just kind of rude. As a Developer Advocate, public speaking is something you have to be comfortable with. There’s an art to explaining highly technical concepts in a way that anyone can understand and you need to be able to articulate why your product and its ecosystem are the best place for them to invest their time and energy. Personally, I like giving workshops because the best way to demonstrate a product’s ability is by getting your hands dirty and writing code, but they also enable me to squash bugs in real time.

We care deeply about community

Developer Advocates are always on — we engage with developer communities outside of conferences and do so by writing blog posts, leaving comments, videos, podcasts, participating in slack channels, google groups, or tweets. Then, of course, there are updates to GitHub, LinkedIn, and StackOverflow. However you choose to broadcast information, you need to have a reliable feedback loop. We need to be able to get feedback from developers on a consistent basis.

Developer Advocates often host/sponsor/attend community events like meet-ups, user groups, and hackathons, not to be confused with community management. This includes but is not limited to conferences, as smaller groups are much more intimate and you can deliver highly relevant information tailored to that group.

All of these activities help build a community around your product or platform. This is crucial because having an active community means there will be far more help to go around than you or your team could possibly provide. This will help you scale as your community achieves autonomy.

We help developers

Of course, making a product easy to use comes with challenges. There are going to be times when you don’t get it right the first time. One of the first indications of a problem will be users asking for help about some aspect of your product. You need to be subscribed to the right issue trackers, forums, and Q&A sites like StackOverflow to catch these questions. You don’t necessarily need to answer the question right away, give the community some space to help itself, but be sure to listen because questions often point to underlying issues.

When you’re stuck, truly stuck on something, where do you turn? To be a Developer Advocate means lending a helping hand when people need it most, or meeting someone halfway when a product is missing the mark. To be put in a position where you can facilitate this dialogue takes trust. A Developer Advocate’s job is to cultivate trust from both the product and the developers they represent by reaching across the table, listening, trying things for themselves, and understanding context and roadmaps. A Developer Advocate’s job is to enbolden this trust by being clear, highlighting things that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, and paving roads where there are none, this means being a true advocate for your community and sometimes that means you may have to upset people inside your own organization, and you can’t be afraid of that — because in the end, we’re on your side.

I could write about this all day because in truth a Developer Advocate touches every part of a business and at some point i’ll write a follow up post regarding metrics, reporting structures, etc…but hopefully, this 5 minute read gives you a better understanding of what it means to be a Developer Advocate. Have questions? Feel free to leave a comment or tweet at me.

Are you a Developer Advocate? We have a Slack channel for you!

Last year, I was grappled with one of my darkest periods of depression. I felt isolated until conversations with a few trusted friends revealed that I wasn’t alone — many were battling their own silent struggles. I yearned to put this all out there for you, but shame held me back.

Just yesterday, my friend EricaJoy courageously took to Twitter to discuss her own challenges and to champion self-love. Her openness has given me the push I needed to finally share my experience. My hope is that, in turn, it might encourage you to share your own journey.

On the surface, my social media life might give you a specific narrative — that I’m always on, always confident. But like most stories, what you see is just the tip of the iceberg.

You might see a person who uses humor as a coping mechanism, but behind closed doors, I’m a mom struggling to balance all the responsibilities that come with it, feeling like I constantly fall short.

You’ll see posts where I appear fearless and in control. What you won’t see are the pills on my nightstand that help me manage a relentless anxiety and mood shifts.

It might seem like I’m great at connecting communities, yet what’s not so obvious is how hard it is for me to build my own meaningful connections.

You’ll see a lot of selfies, but those are far from self-love. Every morning, I dissect my reflection, fighting a battle against an image I think needs improvement.

Online, you’ll find me advocating for coding and collaboration. Offline, I face self-doubt questioning the worthiness of my own contributions.

You may think I’ve got thick skin because I express strong opinions. However, sleepless nights suggest otherwise; I do worry about how I’m perceived.

So, what’s the point of all this? It’s simple: Social media is not a mirror reflecting the complexities of our lives. Each one of us has challenges, and while it’s easy to measure self-worth in likes and retweets, the real value is in facing our vulnerabilities.

The saying ‘Failure is not an option’ never sat well with me. It’s through failures that we truly grow. And it’s okay not to have it all figured out.

At the end of the day, the most honest thing I can say is this: I’m still learning, still growing, and that’s okay. We’re all a work in progress, and there’s a certain beauty in that.

The best career advice I’ve received so far is, “Never turn down an interview.” I generally follow this advice because you only have so much time in life to make an impact. Recently, I realized taking your own advice is much harder than I imagined… which is how I *almost* turned down one of the biggest opportunities of my career.

What you’re about to read are first world problems.

Before I started working at Pivotal, I had the opportunity to interview with some amazing companies, one of which was Microsoft. I interviewed for two roles at Microsoft, both were DevEx roles, but for different business units; I turned down both roles.

You see… I love what I do. I love developer advocacy, but most companies don’t know what that means.

If your Developer Advocate rolls up under marketing, you’re doing it wrong.

If your Developer Advocate doesn’t have a direct line to product managers and the ability to suggest changes based on developer/customer feedback, you’re doing it wrong.

If your Developer Advocate is being used as a sales resource, you’re doing it wrong. (That’s called Sales Engineering).

The job of a Developer Advocate isn’t a one-to-one job, it’s a one-to-many job. As a Developer Advocate, you’re spreading awareness and enabling developers to do what they love; write, code, and learn. I turned down the jobs at Microsoft because they were NOT Developer Advocacy jobs and Microsoft doesn’t care about Open Source developers anyways… right?

Fast forward: I accept an amazing job at Pivotal on an awesome team with the best boss ever. I was having a blast, though I was getting daily emails from Microsoft recruiters, I was ignoring them because I had no intentions on leaving Pivotal.

So, there I was, working from home and minding my own damn business when I get a Twitter DM from Bryan Liston inviting me to ChefConf, which was being held in my hometown. See, both Bryan and his boss Jeff Sandquist had been taking turns trying to get me to entertain yet another role at Microsoft, but I’d already interviewed and knew that Microsoft didn’t know how to do Developer Advocacy. I continued to decline the role, but at the end of the day, I won’t let where someone works come between me and beers. I went to ChefConf and spent the day hanging out with Bryan, who did his best to convince me that this team was different, but I knew it wasn’t so I continued to decline.

Later on that day Bryan had booth duty, so I went and had lunch with a friend. I explained the opportunity at Microsoft and explained that I felt guilty for even talking about it, I had only been at Pivotal for 10 weeks. What kind of person leaves after 10 weeks? My friend said something to me, something that I’ll never forget, “There is no loyalty in business, Ashley. You’re a single mom. You have a family and you owe it to them to see this Microsoft interview through.” Some of you are probably thinking, “That’s just common sense, Ashley.” I know, but sometimes the feelings of disappointing your community or co-workers outweighs the obvious and I was so worried about disappointing Pivotal I was sick over it. Like, literally sick.

So, I sucked it up and told Bryan I would move forward with the interview process and within a week I was in Redmond. I’ll be honest — I was not at all excited about working at Microsoft. I’m an Open Source nerd, why would they even want me? Hell, I don’t even have a Windows machine… oh no, they’re not going to make me use a windows machine, are they?

I show up at 9am for my first scheduled interview with Jeff Sandquist. I’ve admired Jeff for a long time–Jeff ran Developer Relations at Microsoft from 2005–2013 (back when Microsoft did Developer Advocacy well) before leaving and joining Twitter as their Global Director of Developer & Platform Relations. Now he’s back as the General Manager in Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, and he’s very focused on rebuilding Developer Advocacy at Microsoft. He’s even created a new team that rolls up under engineering, and that’s the team he wanted me to join. Jeff and I spoke for an hour about his plans and what he thinks success looks like and I realized that I was wrong about Microsoft, but not without reason. Back in the days of Bill Gates and early Steve Ballmer, Open Source was a dirty word. In fact, Ballmer compared Linux and the GNU General Public License to a “cancer”, a stance he later went back on, but at the time Microsoft felt Open Source to be a major threat. And to some extent, Microsoft is still fighting off the lingering perception they’re not big fans of Open Source.

By now it’s 11am and I’m off to my second interview, I’m feeling better about the role, but I’m still not convinced. My second interview was with Rimma Nehme, Architect on Azure Cosmos DB and Open Source Analytics. I was most excited about this interview because Rimma is a woman in a highly technical role and I was curious about her experiences at Microsoft. Rimma and I sat and chatted about everything from kids to women in tech, then I asked her what she’d been working on lately. Her eyes widened and she told me about Cosmos DB. She spent the next 30 minutes whiteboarding as I sat there with my jaw on the floor–for those of you who don’t know what Cosmos DB is, it’s the first globally distributed, multi-model database service for building planet scale apps. Designed as a globally distributed database system, Cosmos DB automatically replicates all of your data to any number of regions of your choice, and it supports transparent multi-homing and guarantees 99.99% high availability. Sounds like magic, right? I left that interview inspired. Cool things were happening at Microsoft, this was a new Microsoft and I wanted to be a part of it, but first I wanted to do some research.

Was Microsoft really a new Microsoft? Here’s what I learned…

It turns out that Microsoft has the largest number of the top 500 Open Source projects for any one entity. Microsoft has 24 projects, way ahead of Google and Pivotal (each having seven) and Red Hat, which has six.

Not to mention their own open source projects like .Net Core, Visual Studio Code and TypeScript, Microsoft is getting a ton of help from the open source community. Over 60 percent of the contributions in CoreFX .Net core libraries and CoreCLR .Net core runtimes are coming from outside Microsoft, and they’re contributing significantly to external outside Open Source projects, such as Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes.

Open Source is all about community and ecosystem. No company can survive without a healthy ecosystem and Microsoft knows it very well, which is another reason they’re investing in Developer Advocacy again.

Microsoft has over 15,000 contributors on GitHub and over 6,000 employees contribute to Open Source projects, and have released over 3,000 Open Source projects. Microsoft’s Open Source programs office tracks nearly 10,000 Open Source components, everything from NPM packages to Linux distros used by Microsoft teams.

Yes, Microsoft is using Linux in it’s own infrastructure. The company also recently moved Windows development to Git.

The culture within Microsoft is changing as we speak. Linux expertise is spreading across the company and Open Source is no longer a dirty word at Microsoft.

With the interviews from that day and all the new knowledge I’d gained from doing my own research, I was now convinced that Microsoft was changing for the better, but was it enough to get me to leave Pivotal just 12 weeks after joining?

I made a list of pros and cons, Microsoft won hands down. The impact I can have at a company like Microsoft could be huge and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, right? All that was left was the question of Windows or Mac. I’m happy to report that Microsoft does, in fact, give their employees Macs. See? A new Microsoft.

I feel like I just did a lot of rambling with stats and whatnot and you’re probably thinking, “That’s all good and great, but really, I just want to know what happened at Pivotal? Who wronged you?” The answer is nothing and no one. Pivotal is a great place to work and I feel so fortunate to have been there, even if just for a short time. I’ll miss my team terribly and anyone reading this would be lucky to call Pivotal their 9–5 home.

That being said, I’m excited about starting my new chapter at Microsoft as a Principal Developer Advocate and as a bonus I’ll continue working with my Pivotal friends because Pivotal just announced a partnership with Microsoft!

So, two lessons here:

1) Never turn down an interview.

2) Companies CAN change.

[MSFT has made huge strides, but there’s still so much more that needs to be done]

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Why I joined Microsoft was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The people on my team are incredible. Most of you will recognize their names because of their somewhat prolific community contributions. I work with people like Bridget Kromhout, Josh Long, Casey West, James Weaver, Kenny Bastani, and Michael Coté. That’s just part of the list, since I also get to work with people like James Watters, Joshua McKenty, Onsi Fakhouri, Zachary Gershman, Pieter Humphrey, and Matt Stine.

Working on this team is a dream and I instantly felt like part of the family. In our first team meeting we talked about quantum computing and I’m embarrassed by how much I had to google to keep up, but at the same time, I’m thankful because I have an opportunity to learn from these awesome folks.

At Pivotal, more than any other company I’ve worked for, I feel like a person rather than a cog.

I’ll start with what Pivotal does at a really high level — Pivotal’s mission is to transform how the world builds software and they mean business. Pivotal is responsible for some of the most popular open source projects in use today, including Pivotal Tracker, Spring, RabbitMQ, and Cloud Foundry and they employ some of the best and brightest in the industry.

Now a little backstory…

I started seeking new opportunities just a few weeks ago and was fortunate enough to have some really amazing companies reach out (I considered listing them here, which felt pretentious, so if you’re curious, send me a message) but Zachary Gershman who works as a Go developer at Pivotal was the one that snagged me. Pivotal wasn’t even top of mind for me, because remember, they’re out of my league so I kind of brushed it off. But, I felt compelled to tweet something snarky to James Watters about hiring new advocates, because when in doubt you go with snark. That turned into a DM exchange and then into a scheduled interview with Andrew Clay Shafer — from the moment I got off of the phone with Shafer I knew that I needed to work at Pivotal and not just at Pivotal, but on his team specifically — Shafer hired me because he saw potential in me combined with a willingness to learn, and that’s not something I take lightly.

Today marks my first full week as a Pivotal employee and I couldn’t be more thrilled. On-boarding was a breeze — The week prior I had a meeting with my boss to set expectations and on my first day, I just got online and logged into all of the things. That’s all. I didn’t have to go anywhere for training or to any kind of office. I get an on-boarding issue in Pivotal Tracker that gave me some tasks that must be done. Everything is done via the internet, which is definitely a different experience, but I really enjoyed having the opportunity to explore on my own and at my own pace.

What are some of the cool things I got to do in my first week?

I’ve spent time:

• Getting to know my co-workers
• Learning the company and team goals
• Defining my work objectives and goals for the year
• Identifying action items to own as part of the team
• Raising awareness of my new role at Pivotal within my network
• Getting access to the tools I need to use
• Reading documentation, release notes and roadmaps
• Connecting with other developer evangelists in Austin
• Identifying conferences and events to attend
• Getting to know the other team’s objectives and goals
• Competitive analysis of the market space
• Appearing on GoTime podcast

This was just the end of my first week, but there’s so much more ahead. I have scheduled meetings with various people on my team so we can get to know each other and I can learn more about what I’ll be working on.

Now you’re probably wondering, what I do at Pivotal?

I am a Principal Technologist, which is the coolest title ever. Essentially, I act as a bridge between third party developers and Pivotal, driving platform adoption through the developer community and driving change into products based on real world customer/developer feedback. I also help with developer support, building applications that consume our services, teaching workshops, hackathons, and any other opportunities to interact with developers to understand their needs. Basically, I deliver solutions and my focus will be on Go and the Go community, which, as many of you know is near and dear to my heart.

Pivotal uses Go in a number of projects, like Ginkgo, Gomega, and Agouti. Then you’ve got the interesting projects from the Cloud Foundry side like container scheduling/ lifecycle management in terms of Diego and let’s not forget Concourse, which is their own CD tool (with support for modern pipelining).

Now you’re probably saying, I thought Pivotal/Cloud Foundry was a Ruby/Rails shop? And you’re right, Pivotal’s expertise didn’t start out with Go and most of Cloud Foundry was Ruby — Since then Cloud Foundry has transitioned most of their projects and built a wealth of Go knowledge in the process.

Many teams/engineers use Go almost like a scripting language. They write a lot of small tools/light CLIs to do things that they might have once done in Ruby or bash — This is especially handy when you want to be able to, say, write a little diagnostic test on macOS and then run it in an arbitrary Linux container without futzing with dependencies or worrying about bash mysteries.

The real takeaway here is that they have a ton of really passionate Gophers at Pivotal that are doing all sorts of interesting things, interesting things I intend to share with all of you.

As sad as I was to leave my coworkers at Rackspace, I am really excited about this opportunity at Pivotal. What better way to break in my Medium account than to start with a new chapter in my career?

Wanna chat more? Catch me at Dockercon this week!