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I lead the Developer Evangelism at Amazon and focus on engaging mobile app & game developers around the world. Previously, I built the developer relations programs at Stripe, Evernote, Roku, and served as the web developer of Harvard.edu.
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As a leader, it’s *your* job to keep Dev Relations relevant at your company.
Advice on how to get a head start in Tech with a few career prep steps
A look back at the windy paths leading towards Developer Relations
Summary: The displacement of in-person developer events has vaulted Developer Advocacy forward by years. The momentum of self-forming communities, better streaming capabilities, and the rise of scaled developer experiences are a peek into the direction of our field of work.
A quick google search for Developer Advocate will present over 42 million results with the top results clearly showing a trend:
At the end of this search, you will discover there's no singular answer. The shape of work depends on the organization's goals, the product offering, and existing expectations of the community. For many Advocates, the answer comes into focus through the context of an individual role.
Consider for a moment every available resource for developers, then map the value for developer advocacy:
From this mental model, the common characteristics of a developer advocate are:
After a decade in developer relations roles, I find these qualities worth contemplating:
Dev Advocacy is a perfect role for lifelong learners who remain adaptable to change.
In a vulnerable moment, fellow Developer Advocates will commiserate in the shifting nature of measuring the effectiveness of our craft. When public speaking on developer advocacy topics, there are common hurdles to overcome.
For example, say you have the opportunity to present a technical topic to ~1k attendees at a top-tier conference. You hope at least ~300 attendees connect with your topic in the first 5 minutes and possibly tweet about the talk if they are engaged. Throughout the talk, you provide shortened URLs for the audience to remember and ~150 folks follow through to the site. Afterwards, potentially ~50 attendees remember the link and check out your sample code. From evaluating the sample, almost 20 developers end up running the sample end-to-end.
Practically, you're lucky to have a 2% to 5% activation rate from the stage presentation.
On top of challenges when measuring a presentation's ROI, there's another factor which deserves acknowledgement: The need for equitable access to developer advocacy.
Specifically, if you're presenting a developer keynote to a paid Bay Area conference, there are inherent gate-keeping factors at play:
Since Developer Advocates tend to enjoy the perks that come with a travel-heavy lifestyle, the structural downsides of exclusive events are rarely discussed. It's time to rethink how we approach our jobs to better serve the primary consumers of our work: the developer community.
During the pandemic, our team at Stripe launched a developer-focused video channel (distinct from our company's main brand account) and began posting weekly how-to topics covering the fundamentals of our API, SDKs, and sample code. We put an emphasis on presenting as if we were directly talking with developers in person at a local meetup. Our team avoids the "Webinar"-style presentation and strives to maintain a Q&A dialog when teaching concepts through live streaming and YouTube Premiere.
Since last year, our community engagement now vastly exceeds our measurable goals:
You may ask "Why are you spouting these viewership stats?" and that is the central point:
As a developer advocate, the level of insights for who is consuming your technical content through video is a metrics goldmine.
More pointedly, these insights and feedback were previously impossible to fully gather from conference post-talk surveys. Beyond improved metrics, the increase in developer activity leads to an attributable rise in new product adoption. The more product launches we can support through developer livestreams and office hours, the more central our work is to the core business.
In addition, we're now connecting at scale directly with our subscribers: Developers with laptops following along as we step through code line-by-line. This new connection is lightyears beyond what we could ever expect at in-person conferences with multiple tracks.
Unless your product is exclusively geo-fenced to the Bay Area (😑), as a Developer Advocate you should fight to have your content made available to the widest addressable target audience of builders to benefit from the topics.
Some basic suggestions for repurposing technical talks include:
Main point: If you're making great developer content, don't limit who gets to consume and utilize your work.
What do YouTube influencers, Peloton fitness instructors, political commentators, and developer advocates have in common?
Our effectiveness correlates to our video fidelity. When we break down barriers to communicate clearly through broadcasting, we deliver the best version of ourselves and our work.
Developer Advocates are no longer disadvantaged when outside of US coastal cities. Prior requirements for an advocate's physical location are rapidly fading away. If you are an engineer looking to help thousands of developers at scale, it's time to join our field of work. As mentioned earlier, global developer programs have seen the reach that comes with scaling beyond the traditional keynotes and straight into developers computers.
Here are several globally-distributed Developer Advocacy programs hiring this year:
New ways to reach developers at scale, a growing audience of builders around the world, and a mission to measurably support builders makes this a perfect time to join our field of work. We are in the Golden Age of Developer Advocacy and it's just getting started.
If this vision for scaled Developer Advocacy is appealing and you're comfortable with integrating APIs in web and/or mobile applications, please choose our Dev Advocacy team!
In the next few months, our team is tripling in size across Latin America, Europe, Asia, and North America. We're excited to support the community and meet developers wherever they are based.
👉 For more details, check out our jobs site: Dev Advocacy roles at Stripe
What makes for great Developer Advocacy? You'll know when you see it.
