Introduction to Developer Evangelism
This Developer Relations Evangelist Guide is a combined collection of experience from Christian Heilmann, Senior Program Manager Developer Experience and Evangelism at Microsoft (ex Mozilla and Yahoo!) and myself (ex Opera Software ASA and Google/Motorola Mobility). Christian is well known for his dedicated excellence and practice in the world of Developer Relations and Evangelism, while I contributed technical developer and product documentation to the developer relations teams where I worked. Frank M. Palinkas, Senior Technical Writer.
Purpose
This guide is intended for motivated individuals who aspire to become Developer Evangelists and understand their company's Developer Relations process. It will attempt to get you on your way to be a great developer evangelist for your company and its products. Your approach will need tweaking for different markets and audiences, but the main principles are the same for everybody, anywhere. Developer evangelism is a relatively young field of work and the first hurdle you will encounter is people asking what a developer evangelist is and why a company would need this role.
What is developer evangelism?
A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator, and translator between a company, its technical staff, and external developers who are using your products, are thinking of doing so, or who are completely ignorant of them.
Who should become a developer evangelist?
As a developer evangelist it is very important that you used to be a developer. The more projects the better. Your job will be to make your company's technical offerings attractive and interesting to a large variety of developers, and you can only do that when you know their pain. A developer evangelist is a role that is a change for developers, not for people coming from HR, PR or marketing. Your main job is still to code, but this time code examples, training materials, and explanatory demos rather than live products.
Your developer audience
Developers make Information Technology work. Ideas start a great product and UX Design makes it work for users, but to make it work technically you need developers. Sadly enough developers do not get much credit for their work and are generally considered "deliverers" rather than "thinkers", which is simply not true. What this also means is that telling something to developers as a company or getting them excited about your products is quite a task.
The trick is to understand that to be a developer (especially an app or web developer) you need to have a certain way of seeing the world. And this way of seeing the world makes you suspect things to fail in any which way. If your message means less work for the developers out there it is a great start for you. If it means extra work on top of what is already on their plate (and developers always get maxed out) then you may have a more difficult time.
Starting with the right mindset
The main thing never to forget as a developer evangelist is the technical part. It is very easy to get into the habit of just writing one presentation after another and re-use materials but this way you will not have much impact.
If a new product comes out of your company that should get out to developers, take it and access it like an outside developer would. Integrate it following its build instructions and document "what" you have built. Then write "how" you built it and you've got half an article or presentation already finished.
Find your role and use your strengths
Not everybody can and should be an all-around evangelist. It is enough if you find your place in the whole spectrum of evangelism. Think about what you love to do the most and then start creating something. The most common niches of the whole job to go into are:
- Writing code tutorials
- Blogging
- Public speaking
- Training
- Social web coverage
Study the rest of this guide and see what best suits you, then start evangelizing. You have nothing to lose and will most probably be very surprised how easy things become if you concentrate on one job at a time.