Developer Evangelism as a Profession in India
Yes there is lot of buzz that is around developers, bloggers who blog on latest technologies and also help to share their experiences as they work or learn such technology. Be it AI, Blockchain, Big Data, Data Science, Containerization, DevOps, Progressive Web App design or Cloud Computing. In all these spaces we Indian developers experiment and create value in form of white papers, blogs, open source contributions or even webinars and events.
But as a profession when we see at Developer Evangelism, it’s non existent in India. While more and more of the young developers are being polyglot learning a host of technologies to develop products and services. Yet to the big business, IT companies and corporates and even to the Startup community developer evangelism doesn’t seem to be a skill set. Despite different names many may not know what this career or concept entails and by looking for specialist which is the standard search criteria for the job we are killing some great opportunities which will not open doors to greater value addition to the bottom line of players in software industry but also usher in the much needed next wave of innovative in a very overcrowded software product and services sector.
Developer evangelism is not just a way of experiments on new technologies but also helping businesses tap new potential by exploring new avenues of technology previously unexplored. A developer just writes code but an evangelist envisions, learns, builds and then creates the whole story around the achievement so that it helps others.
The skills for an evangelist us not about being a specialist in one or two areas but being a generalist who learns various technologies and acquired various new skills previously unexplored unknown to him quickly and using them on building on the idea on which he is working.
West especially the US is quite open to the idea of evangelism and even takes their services to gain the much required buzz in social media and developer community which they would have not got otherwise. Yes there are handful of such corporates that offer good investment for such a role but in India its yet to pick up. The problem we do not value the importance of social presence of idea but rather are ready to spend money on traditional avenues like advertising or digital marketing but even engaging with developer evangelist and influencers is a very good way to reach today’s audience which is becoming more difficult by the traditional channels.
I hope more and more people who are already doing such evangelism understand the value of their work and start offering them as a service and businesses understand the potential of such offering for social marketing and creating awareness about their products and services and pay for it.
