What is a developer advocate ?

🎯 Developer advocates — advocate a subject, concept, product, company etc to the developers in the community. Then they take the feedback from the community back to the teams at their companies to improve the respective things e.g. a product.

🤔You can think of it as a form of marketing. Developers can spot marketers a mile away. They don't like being sold on things with all those fake salsey lingo. They want someone who they respect to tell them what is good, what is bad, what works and what doesn't.

🎩 E.g. I have spent over five years in open source and produced over 100 developer tooling projects all of which are free and open source software. In doing so, I have built an audience around my work. Over 100,000 devs use my open source software and over 700,000 sites have been built on top or with them.

🧐This also means that there are a number of engineers/developers who use my open source software and work for companies like Netflix, Google, Facebook, HP, Intel, etc.

👀 Having this common thing with all these engineers/devs — also the fact that I like to give talks + write detailed research-based or technical articles — and that most of my work has been around Developer experience tooling — all of this puts me in a position to be able to advocate good open source work.

🤞So, then a company that believes in open source, reaches out to me, we discuss their product, I write/talk about it with the community of developers and then I take feedback back to the company that paid for my time, travel and bills.

📯In doing so, the companies get real actionable feedback and as a healthy side effect developers now know about their product. That's developer marketing. Developers since they already trust my work and have faith in the fact that a person who has built 100+ open source software himself — probably knows a thing or two about other open source software. So, they listen to me more willingly and sometimes even passionately as compared to a BBA/MBA marketer that has no idea about the technical mumbo-jumbo.

P.S. This is a pretty weird summary — only trying to help you understand Dev Advocacy from my point of view at 3 AM. Must be a few typos in there, gotta go hit the bed.

Peace! ✌️