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Earlier quoted context omitted.
A humorous analogy based on something funny that a co-worker did seems like a joke to me. I'm not claiming I invented it, just saying that it doesn't stem from confusion.
Again this is not a joke. More information written by other Developer Advocates. https://blog.usejournal.com/the-birth-of-developer-avocados-...
Devrel here, (by the way it’s typically called a Developer Advocate or a Developer Evangelist, don’t get me started on how many questions I’ve gotten about the relation to religion lol) I think the article does a good job describing what devrel looks like at companies that are smart about selling to the new “tech business world” which is desperate for a way to measure the technical credibility of potential vendors. B…
> it’s typically called a Developer Advocate or a Developer Evangelist And a lot of the dev advocates I see on social media (most seem to have a strong presence there) also have an image of an avocado, since apparently a lot of people confuse "developer advocate" with "developer avocado". Just noting that in case you notice a number of people with avocados in their about text and wonder what that's about.
In my (somewhat cynical) opinion, formed from my experience as a business owner who has been targeted by countless "developer relations" types, the greatest value that they provide to their organizations is getting free/cheap developer labor for testing and implementing various API's/SDK's
Devrel here, (by the way it’s typically called a Developer Advocate or a Developer Evangelist, don’t get me started on how many questions I’ve gotten about the relation to religion lol) I think the article does a good job describing what devrel looks like at companies that are smart about selling to the new “tech business world” which is desperate for a way to measure the technical credibility of potential vendors. B…
As long as they keep handing out the swag people will put up with them, but noone likes being evangelized at. They are the modern day snake oil salesmen, err, people.
I have worked as a developer advocate at AWS for almost 4 years now. I think this article gets one half of the equation, the public facing part, but what they are missing is the second half, which is that developer advocates also serve as a bridge back from the end customers to the engineers inside your organization. My job is to be a credible technical voice to customers, but it is also to be an accurate representat…
This sounds like you sit closer to product. But what about those who sit in Marketing or Engineering Where do you think DevRel should sit ?
When DevRel sits in product it is easy to get carried away with whatever narrative the product managers are pushing. Part of being a good advocate for developers is being able to step back and look at something in the existing ecosystem. Does it actually solve problems that users have? Is it usable? Does it integrate well with existing workflows and tools?
When DevRel sits in marketing or sales it often feels like you are a prize hog being pulled into sales conversations to add credibility to something that probably shouldn't have credibility to begin with.
In my opinion, the primary role of DevRel is story telling and narrative. I use narratives to explain to product teams how users currently work and how their product fits into a larger ecosystem. I use stories to help them understand bugs and design issues in context. And I use story/narrative to help external developers see how a given product can solve problems or pain points they have.
Sometimes I tell that story with words but I'm just as likely to tell that story with code. It is much harder to dismiss a bug when you can see the horrible contortions it requires you to go through in the code.