The Developer Advocate ToolKit: Software Tools You Need To Move Fast

Marc Andreessen famously said, "Software is eating the world" ten years ago. Over the past decade, the software industry has exploded hundreds of times over! The more you're aware of better developer tools out there, the faster you're at shipping quality software.

Over the past few weeks, I talked to a few developer advocates who work at some of the world's top companies: Amazon, Ambassador Labs, Netlify, Cloudflare, and Platform.sh.

The Big Question: What are some of the software tools that make you move fast in your work as a Developer Advocate?

Get yourself a cup of coffee, and get ready to learn about new & excellent software tools!

The Answers - Developer Advocate ToolKit

- Chris Nwamba, Senior Developer Advocate, Amazon @codebeast

1. Buffer: Great for scheduling content to post on different social media platforms.
2. Screenflow: Great for recording and screencasting content on your machine. Record talks, workshops, and presentations.
3. Carbon.now.sh: Create and share beautiful images of code snippets.
4. Cleanshot: Screenshot with wings. Great for screenshots and recording screens.
5. Figma: As a developer advocate, I use this for prototypes and slides. I know designers use this a lot, but I use this a lot for slides and demos at conferences. Each artboard is a slide. Once you enter the "present mode", you are good to go!
6. AWS Amplify: Provides auth tools, great for creating and deploying serverless functions. With AWS Amplify, you can deploy static web apps faster as well. Great support for frontend frameworks and mobile.

- Edidiong Asikpo, Developer Advocate, Ambassador Labs @didicodes

1. Loom: An excellent tool for recording and sharing videos.
2. iMovie app: A great tool for editing videos.
3. Grammarly: Helps with keeping my words in articles in check.
4. Trello: Developer Advocacy involves a lot of context switching. Trello helps me keep track of what I do in each context (videos, articles, writing sample code, etc.).
5. Telepresence: It's great for connecting their local development machine seamlessly to a remote cluster via a two-way proxying mechanism. Telepresence enables developers to code locally and runs the majority of their services within a remote Kubernetes cluster.

- Ekene Eze, Developer Experience Engineer, Netlify @kenny

1. Netlify: It's great for deploying and hosting SPAs, PWAs, serverless functions and JAMstack sites. All my demos and apps are deployed on Netlify.
2. Notion: I organize most of my thought processes here. Think of Notion as a think pad. I get to keep and track my priority list. Video courses, articles, conference talks, demos. Etc.
3. GitHub: Version control and code host for my demos. It's also great because of the automation benefits I get with the straightforward Netlify deployment.
4. Slides.com / Google Slides: These two are great for making and presenting slides. I use them interchangeably.
5. MacDown: An open-source Markdown editor for macOS. Great for writing markdown content.
6. Screenflow: Great recording and screencasting content for workshops, pre-recorded talks, and demos.
7. Descript: It is great for recording, transcribing, editing, mixing, and providing transcripts for audio and video content. Descript is awesome!

- Obinna Ekwuno, Developer Advocate, Cloudflare @obinnaspeaks

1. Cloudflare Workers: It is excellent for building serverless applications on top of Cloudflare's global network. With Cloudflare workers, my app is served to reduce the latency immensely for users wherever they are. Check out projects built with workers!
2. Cloudflare Pages: Great for shipping & hosting fast, secure JAMstack sites. Super awesome for frontend developers.
3. Notion: Helps me stay sane and organized. I use Notion to track the progress of everything I am working on at any time.
4. Supabase: Offers me a backend as a service plug-and-play platform. Auth, DB, and storage are all in the same place. As a frontend developer, I plug easily into Supabase.
5. Airtable: It's my go-to database for forms. For instance, I can create a form on a website and use a serverless function to connect the form with Airtable. Every form's data goes straight to Airtable. You can also make the HTTPS request to a Cloudflare worker to get lower latency!

- Shedrack Akintayo, Developer Experience Engineer, Platform.sh @coder_blvck

1. Obsidian: It's great for writing. It's very distraction-free. I just write, no fancy buttons to grab my attention. I have ADHD, so obsidian does it for me!
2. Commsor: It's great for community engagement and measurement. It's the community operating system.
3. Platform.sh: It's great for deploying and hosting all of my talks and tutorial app demos. Everything is in one place.
4. Slides.com: It's great for making and building slides for talks. Exciting and interactive. It's very appealing to the audience. It's just perfect for me.

- Erika Heidi, Senior Developer Advocate, Sourcegraph @erikaheidi

1. GitHub: I use GitHub as my go-to code platform, where I share all my open source work.
2. Google Keep: Keep is what I use to save ideas and all sorts of notes on my phone. I like it because it's lightweight and simple, and it synchronizes with my Google account so I can access my notes from anywhere.
3. Google Docs: I like GDocs for writing content and requesting feedback. It's straightforward and accessible to most people, making it an excellent content production and review tool.
4. Thesaurus: Sometimes, it can be tricky to explain complex concepts without repeating words. Thesaurus is a synonyms dictionary, with examples of words and expressions being used in a sentence. It can be helpful to polish your content and bring it to the next level.
5. SpeakerDeck: I like SpeakerDeck to share slides because it has a lightweight interface and provides nice embeds to use on your website.
6. Peek: Peek is a simple screen recording software that runs very well on Linux and allows me to quickly record my screen as an animated GIF or an MP4 video.
7. OBS Studio: For talks and live streaming, I use OBS Studio, which gives me the flexibility and advanced features for screen recording.

Move fast in your codebase with Sourcegraph

Now that you've learned to leverage various software tools to move fast in your work. Sourcegraph universal code search enables developers to search all their code more quickly, with contextual code intelligence to improve developer productivity and automate large-scale code change management.

An Advocate’s call - Show me your Toolkit

In conclusion, many developer advocates and I are eager to know the software tools you need, love or use daily in your advocacy duties.

Feel free to enlighten us in the comment section!