Typically advocates keep documentation up to date, keep contact with the community, do demos and blog about the product, pass feedback on questions, and basically help facilitate a good developer experience with the company. It's a semi-technical role with high soft skills requirements.
You can think of them as public relation persons representing some software or dev methodology (SaFE agile comes to mind). You can see a lot of them giving speeches at conferences.
Well, not exactly 😄Dev advocates are more of salesman persons than developers, at least I got that impression. I don't have a good example, but what came up to my mind at first is Peggy Rayzis from the Apollo graphql, if I understood correctly her main job is to go from conference to conference and talk about Apollo. She does have some knowledge about programming, but she doesn't actively contribute to Apollo development. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I guess this really is one of those roles where you can't pin and say this is what they do. It really does differ from company to company and person to person. I wonder how they measure their growth.
I'm Jake Cahill. Lifetime Pythonista, web scraping and automation expert. Enjoy books. Love my wife, dog, and cat, and think AI and Julia are pretty nifty
Location
Maine, USA
Education
A Master's patient mentorship and insatiable curiosity
It's always seemed to me that a developer advocate is a new-ish title that has the same spectrum of meaning that "software engineer" does in that it can and usually does mean different things depending on where you work. It also can go by different names. To some, it's software engineer, others is software developer, or programmer. Dev advocates can be called engineering advocates or technical relation specialist and the like. From what I've gathered, they are kind of the externally facing version of a scrum master. Where a scrum master runs deflection for the developers and serves as the middle man between whiny executives, sales people, or other developer teams, a developer advocates seem to do the same thing, but with the customers, clients, and partners outside the company that have a vested interest in the product being done right. Not sure if this is accurate, but that's what it seems anyway.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
So it is really more of an umbrella term for a wide range of roles. Would saying
"Product Evangelist who knows the ins and outs of the how the product is built and works"
be more of a generic description?
Typically advocates keep documentation up to date, keep contact with the community, do demos and blog about the product, pass feedback on questions, and basically help facilitate a good developer experience with the company. It's a semi-technical role with high soft skills requirements.
You can think of them as public relation persons representing some software or dev methodology (SaFE agile comes to mind). You can see a lot of them giving speeches at conferences.
Source: medium.com/@ashleymcnamara/what-is...
This clarifies a lot of things. One person that immediately came to my mind after reading this desription is Dan Abramov from the React team.
Well, not exactly 😄Dev advocates are more of salesman persons than developers, at least I got that impression. I don't have a good example, but what came up to my mind at first is Peggy Rayzis from the Apollo graphql, if I understood correctly her main job is to go from conference to conference and talk about Apollo. She does have some knowledge about programming, but she doesn't actively contribute to Apollo development. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I guess this really is one of those roles where you can't pin and say this is what they do. It really does differ from company to company and person to person. I wonder how they measure their growth.
It's always seemed to me that a developer advocate is a new-ish title that has the same spectrum of meaning that "software engineer" does in that it can and usually does mean different things depending on where you work. It also can go by different names. To some, it's software engineer, others is software developer, or programmer. Dev advocates can be called engineering advocates or technical relation specialist and the like. From what I've gathered, they are kind of the externally facing version of a scrum master. Where a scrum master runs deflection for the developers and serves as the middle man between whiny executives, sales people, or other developer teams, a developer advocates seem to do the same thing, but with the customers, clients, and partners outside the company that have a vested interest in the product being done right. Not sure if this is accurate, but that's what it seems anyway.