TL;DR: A developer advocate is a developer’s best friend!
For the past three years or so, I have been dedicating my professional time and a huge a...
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Awesome insight Wassim! From my experience, I can only add that my background in teaching courses has helped me a lot to be a better Developer Advocate. The expression and communication skills that you build by teaching in person is a huge advantage when you need to talk to the community. 😁
TL;DR: A developer advocate is an advertiser of the corporations technologies.
As a technical evangelist, part of my role is advocacy, but also to spread knowledge of the corporations tech. It has community building, but also community growth in mind. My role is one part product marketer, one part sales enablement, one part sounding board, and one part community manager/advocate.
Developer advocates are much more focused than that, which is why I do not use the title as it is only part of my role. We all sit inside an umbrella, generally referred to as Developer Relations, but almost all of us come to our work with the idea that we have some cool stuff that we want to share. How can we help?
You may want to take a look at some of the definitions of the different roles and what they do, and talk to some of us in the DevRel field. We honestly have a love for helping people and it excites us to work with communities and help them learn and do better.
Corporations support this because it does build brand trust, it builds up knowledge within their implementation community, and ultimately is about customer success and happy customers/developers. Usually, this helps with marketing efforts as well and getting brand awareness out.
I won't negate that an advocate indirectly supports the marketing needs of a corporation, but it is not their role focus.
That's used to be called an Evangelist. These are two different roles.
Really? Well, ok, I believe. But come on, how a man so committed to Google and MS can be "developer's best friend"???
It sounds simply as a cheap ad.
I can believe that you can be the best friend for some of the developers (also closely tied to the same corporative technologies) but definitely not to all of the developers.
Because some of the devs are working with other technologies, often competitive and sometimes superior.
Please, no need to be disrespectful!
I encourage you to read the whole post and also have a look at my background and my projects (on the Internet) before throwing false assumptions.
Have a good day.
Nice insight, I always got confused about this
Thank you for writing it 😊