Being a Developer Advocate: Week 15. Last Post this year!

No worries, I won't reflect on the past year in this post as I save it for another (longer) one 😉

This last week was filled with excitement, nervousness, success, and some mistakes. But we are human and as long as AI will not take our jobs, that is beautiful.

Releasing My First Video-Tutorial

I was able to release my first Video-Tutorial about 2-Factor Authentication with askui and an Android tablet on Youtube 🥳

It is not perfect (at least not by my high standards), but Done is better than perfect, is it?

A colleague of mine also created a very cool thumbnail for it!

I learned a ton from the process. Here are my main takeaways:

• Take your time and plan for it: It took way longer to record, edit and do a final polish with the YouTube upload than I thought. Producing video is the most time-consuming way to get out content in my opinion, but also the most engaging and rewarding.
• Going for perfection is hard. Speaking clearly and concisely in front of a camera is impossible. Accept that there will be passages that could be done better. Or you will never finish 🤣
• Having someone to review is key, so you can catch obvious mistakes. This goes for every piece of content.
• If you have someone to do graphics like thumbnails: Let them do it! It adds so much value and usually looks professional 🤘🏻

Documentation Progress

With the help of our Head of Engineering I managed to get a major improvement to our docs shipped before my Christmas holidays.

I am so happy about this, but it is still a long way to go, to make our onboarding as smooth as possible. I plan to do a talk about that next year, so expect some content about it, as it is such a topic close to my heart. And many products struggle with it from my personal experience as a developer.

Key learnings here:

• Be upfront with the shortcomings of your product. Nothing is more frustrating than unsolvable installation problems stemming from your Operating System or local setup.
• Define clearly what steps will be taken during the onboarding process.
• Define the prerequisites. Repeat them if necessary.
• Provide gifs of how something should behave or how something should look like: Show don't tell!
• Onboarding ideally should make your user go Wow, how cool is that!. With our product that is difficult. So providing a section on where to go next after onboarding is especially important. Depending on your specific user we provide use cases for inspiration or general guidance pages to tinker with our product.

Running Our First Remote Workshop

Our community manager came up with the idea of a workshop to raise more awareness for our product. And of course, I volunteered instantly to host it with her. It is exciting, new, and completely out of my comfort zone to do this. In other words, an opportunity to grow personally!

The key learning from day 1 where:

• You have to guide participants through every step. Even the ones that may seem obvious to you. Expect someone will struggle with it!
• Plan time for questions, but do not ask for questions as this will create an awkward silence. Encourage questions in the chat and just go on if no question comes up.
• Expect your setup to fail you, even if you tried it 100 times. Somehow the setup in Gitpod failed for one participant. Shit happens!
• Be authentic and honest. Laugh if something unforeseen happens as it is a chance for learning.

On Day 2 I was even more nervous as I wanted to do live coding. What did I even think (Yeah just add another layer of failure possibilities if you are already so nervous! 😝)

Nearly everything I showed had some form of unexpected behavior and funnily enough, I managed to shoot myself in the foot several times. But overall it was a positive experience as we managed to improve on our day one learnings:

• Do a retrospective to identify improvement possibilities and make sure to improve on them.
• Test your use cases on the environment you will use in the workshop. And repeat it as often as you possibly can to see failure modes.
• Let someone else bulletproof your presentation by doing a test run.
• Make sure everything works. I managed to disable the clipboard somehow by clicking the wrong button. It was so much fun to type in the prepared solution, not!
• I also accidentally closed the meeting by closing the browser window. But I did not notice it 😖 Make sure you use a tool, that asks you before it disconnects from a meeting. And also get familiar with the meeting tool you use (I was not).