I've been a Cloud Advocate within the Developer Relations team at Microsoft for nearly two years now, and over the time lots of people have asked me what it's like to be a Cloud Advocate and what does a typical day look like. And I thought I'd share what one of my days looks like.
What is Developer Relations?
For me Developer Relations is all about connecting the dots, helping people understand the Microsoft products and helping to provide the engineering teams with the feedback from the people using the products and lots more. It's about helping, it's not about sales or marketing.
One misconception I've seen is that Developer Relations is only for developers and for me that's definitely not the case. Developer Relations is the industry term but it doesn't mean it's only about talking to developers. It's about talking to the community, the audience. For each organisation that audience will be different.
For an organisation like Microsoft though, which is where I work, the audience is quite extensive, covering developers, IT Pros, business decision makers, database administrators, and well everyone else within the IT department. π
It's ultimately about helping those that need help, regardless of their job title.
Me as an Advocate
For me I do this role because I want to help people, make their lives easier if I can, even if that means taking hard feedback back to our engineering teams. My job isn't to sell, it's to help.
It can be a LOT of work to create content, people don't see the hours spent in meetings, Camtasia, PowerPoint, Word, Photoshop, Premiere Pro that are required to write that blog, create that video, or create that Twitter thread. Some weeks I do spend more time within PowerPoint than within Azure or doing anything "technical". But it's part and parcel of the job, and it's no less important than the technical parts.
If you are setting up a Developer Relations program, looking to make a career move, or need to do some research to achieve corporate buy-in for Developer Relations department inside your organization, pick up a copy of DevRel for Beginners: What to Know and How to get Started.
If you've got any questions please do reach out to me!
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