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I've worked with Developer Advocates and have been one myself! Developer Advocates usually work in organizations where reaching developers, data scientists, et
by skadamat 3y ago
I've worked with Developer Advocates and have been one myself!
Developer Advocates usually work in organizations where reaching developers, data scientists, etc is crucial. Some high level categories with examples include:
- developer tooling: Hashicorp (Terraform, Vagrant, etc), Docker (Docker), CI tools at large
- business ops, but you may need a developer to incorporate: Stripe, Cal.com, FiveTran, Segment
- open source software: Apache Superset, Apache Airflow, PyTorch, Bytewax.io, Apache Kafka, and hundreds others that have 1 or more commercial entities supporting adoption & success of those open source projects
The day to day:
Depending on the role and company, Developer Advocates (or Developer / Tech Evangelists) can help write blog posts that explain technical concepts (https://www.bytewax.io/blog/streaming-vs-batch-with-github https://www.bytewax.io/blog/streaming-vs-batch-with-github) or illustrate cool use cases of the tool (https://docs.databricks.com/getting-started/tutorials/index.html https://docs.databricks.com/getting-started/tutorials/index....), support the relevant communities for the tool or open source project (often these are in Slack, Discord, or Discourse), organize meetups and meetup talks, and / or give external conference talks (think AWS Summit, Snowflake Summit, etc).
Some Developer Advocates also help with documentation, writing SDK / partner integrations, or specific drivers to enable partnerships (e.g. a database driver).
Reporting:
DevRel usually reports into either Engineering, Product, Marketing, or sometimes a dedicated DevRel / Community team (JetBrains has a VP of DevRel for example). They can report to Sales or Operations too, but this is rarer.
Accountability:
Usually some type of growth or success metric. Swyx wrote about 'monthly active developers' as one possible metric (https://www.swyx.io/measuring-devrel https://www.swyx.io/measuring-devrel)