Life as a developer advocate

Take a look at the life of a developer advocate working at facebook's open-source team, taking a dive into a few tips, tips to be a great advocate and what does it take to be an advocate.

Life as a developer advocateMedium

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Summary

• A developer advocate is a mix of an evangelist, an engineer and a tech expert who loves creating content and also is an inclusive community builder.

• Qualities that make a great developer advocate

  • Enjoys learning

  • Embraces changes

  • Likes building

  • Empowers others

  • Are creative

  • Like to share their work

  • Embrace diversity

• A typical day of dev advocates usually/arguably revolves around two things

  • Content

  • Community

Scribbles

What/who is a developer advocate?

• They can go by many names -- the closest would be, evangelist, an engineer and a tech expert who loves creating content and also is an inclusive community builder.

• Developer advocates like the name suggest, advocate for/to developers.

• They help developers/users, use the product better and make it easier to understand the tech.

• Facilitator who empower you to engineer products with ease.

Great developer advocate

What exactly makes a developer advocate -- great?

Enjoy learning

• Learning never stops, especially in this job. There might be frequent switching of the tech stack.

• Always looking out for new tech and ways to solve problems.

Embrace change

• Dev advocates are engineers who are aware of how fast the tech advances.

• They are ready to embrace the change.

• Enthusiastic about ramping up each time a new tech is released.

Like building

• Developer advocates know what they are advocating for developers who use their products.

• They always find ways to build and improve the dev experience.

Empowering others

• Finding their success in other's is something that comes naturally for them.

• Empowering developers to create great products.

Are Creative

• Developer advocates look for creative ways to challenge the existing product to make it better.

• Try to deep-dive into how it works and learn the underlying technology so that they can answer the "why".

Like to share

• Sharing information is a great way to advocate, or let's just say it is necessary for an advocate. How else are they supposed to be connected with the users?

• Strongs communication is the key.

Embrace diversity

• Work with a large developer audience, which includes people from diverse backgrounds.

• Diversity brings various ideas due to the various backgrounds of different individuals.

Work cross-functionally

• Developer advocates need to work with various teams and need to communicate the needs of different teams.

• Working closely with the product teams as well as the community.

Typical day of dev advocate

• Now, this is something that can vary so much, especially based on the dev advocate's goals and choices. But, rest assured community and content are still the main part of their goal among a few others.

Community

Without a community, there is not product.

• Community is not just a group of users/developers/customers interested in your product but a group of like-minded individuals who believe in the product and its success.

• Building a community is all about-- a group of people with common passion, who share a sense to achieve together.

• Check the linked scribble below to know more about few well-known community builders out there and how they started building their communities.

• Being a part of the community helps in identifying who is contributing to the community, their passions.

• Helps in building trust and facilitating collaboration.

• Dev advocates need to make sure there is a constant engagement in the community and providing them with the content.

• Community engagement is continuous work.

Content

• A typical day of an advocate may go by in deciding the type of content that should be provided with the product.

• A large portion of the product's success boils down to the content that goes with it.

• Without the right content, it gets difficult to for developers to know what the product does, how does one get started with it, what can one build with it.

• What content to make? Should be among the first questions you ask.

• Who is the content for? Which users are we targeting?

• What do we want to achieve with this content? -- metrics attached with it.

• Once all the questions are answers, one can have a better understanding and a clear bias on what content their team wants to create.

• The story behind why the product is beneficial for the users, along with other similar products out there and giving an honest comparison.

What does it take?

What exactly does it take to become and developer advocate?

Always seeking to learn new and explore new things.