In August of 2020, I wrote a Medium piece on the topic of developer advocacy — what I had learned about it, and how I was interested in pivoting into the role. With 2021, I want to provide so insights for those of us who may be interested in developer advocacy.
In 2020, I applied to twenty-three roles with the job title being “Developer Advocate” or “Developer Relations”. Of those roles, I interviewed for six of them. Two were small, but well established, start ups. The other four were enterprise level companies, and household names in the tech community. The kind that you mention to your cousin over Thanksgiving dinner and they raise their eyebrows at you, seemingly impressed. All of the interview experiences were similar, but also very different. Two of them were roles I was excited about but ended up finding out that actually, the company (or at least their hiring practices) are questionable. …
Over the last couple of months with extra time on my hands (re: currently unemployed) I’ve been looking at job posting and applying to web development jobs like crazy. I’ve been more active in some online dev communities, and browsing job boards multiple times a day. This led me to discover a role called a “developer advocate” or “developer relations”.
I initially had no idea what a developer advocate was, what their role meant, or what they contributed. Do they write code? Do they advocate for their team and push back on project managers or other teams that make scope creep the thing of nightmares? …
My Monday started like every other person living in America’s morning — still thinking about the events that transpired this past weekend. This weekend in particular, American faced horrific scenes of violence in the streets as protesters who support Black Lives Matter marched long into the hours of the night, and those peaceful protests often turned violent. Video and photographs of my current city, Austin, where police officers fired CS gas and rubber bullets at protesters, were the last things I saw before I put my phone down and stepped back from social media. The first thing I saw this morning while checking on all my friends and family was the announcement of George Floyd’s private autopsy results that directly contradict the Minnesota state coroner findings. …
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