Kevin Montalbo

Welcome to episode 73 of the Coding Over Cocktails Podcast. My name is Kevin Montalbo. Our guest for today is an open source enthusiast with a long developer advocacy history in and around Java, having worked at Sun Microsystems and Oracle and now at Azul, he interviewed developer relations folks around the world for his book developer advocate, which we'll talk about today. And he currently works at Fuji dot IO, a place for friends of open JDK. Joining us today for a round of cocktails is here, Geertjan Wielenga. Hi GJ. Great to have you on the show and I'm sorry if I butchered your name. So, thank you.

Geertjan Wielenga

It's perfect. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Kevin Montalbo

All right, great. So now before we get started, we'd like to remind our viewers and our listeners that you can get into a deep dive of today's episode by visiting our page Toro cloud.com/podcast where we'll have a full transcript of this podcast episode. Show notes as well. As links to resources to be mentioned. The show, you can also download our iPaaS Martini for free. Martini is a Toro cloud integration platform without limits, taking charge of your business using a single solution to manage all of your data across applications, databases and business processes. Try it out and discover why it's the highest rated iPaaS on G2 visit Toro cloud.com/martini to learn more. All right GJ. So I'm just gonna refer to you as GJ from now on. We're going to talk about your book, developer advocate, where you had conversations with 32 of the industry's most prominent developer advocates from various companies. So before we dive into the book, can you tell me exactly what a developer advocate is?

Geertjan Wielenga

Yes. Now this is a very interesting question and is really what the focus of the book is all about. Um But maybe one way to look at this question is to think about engineers or developers, programmers. However, you want to term that group of people who um do all the coding. Now, those people increasingly are the ones who have a big influence on the technologies that a particular company chooses. Um And that's more and more the case um with open source technologies. So engineers adopt particular technologies that start using them at home in their hobby projects and so on and then they bring them to work and then um in the work context, the company buys that particular product or the enterprise version of it and so on. So now the question is how best to approach that target group? If you are an organization of some kind trying to sell some technology to other companies, and you're aware that engineers, developers, programmers, coders play a big role in the choice of a particular technology. Then how do you reach those people? Do you reach them by means of a marketing talk with power point slides and people in the suit? No, you don't. Um That doesn't come across as very authentic. And also engineers spend their time coding and they're not at presentations and so on. So then it becomes more challenging. The question of how do you reach this group of people that have an increasing influence over which technologies are acquired in organizations and developer advocacy is the response to that the developer advocates via a number of different ways um manage to interact with engineers and developers and coders and programmers and so on. Um And bring across the message of a particular technology or from a particular company or the open source projects they work on and they work alongside developers and programmers and coders and so on. Through a process of, of empathy and, and authentic um interactions um and enthusiasm, they bring these technologies into the place where the coders can um try them out, pick them up, start playing with them and introduce them into their organizations.

Kevin Montalbo

Yeah, that's interesting. And what made you decide to do this book and put developer advocates into the spotlight because I would imagine that these are engineers. And we, we often have this bad um stereotype of engineers who they just, you know, want to code and they're just in the background. So I guess this is a way for you to put that, put this, put this up front that there are people in our community, in our industry who have this capability to be like voice boxes to be like to be like amplifiers of if you know of our technologies of our, of our processes. Yeah. So what made you decide to do this?

Geertjan Wielenga

Well, I mean, I had been a developer advocate for many years and had been traveling to many different conferences around the world and I came across all these other people who were also developer advocates. And the interesting thing is that there isn't really a degree or a course um that you can take to become a developer advocate. So the stories of the people who are doing this in different organizations are always very unique and very interesting. Um So personally, in the nineties, I was a technical writer, writing very thick books that nobody read. And um I remember that um you know, the first time I wrote a blog post and I got a response from somebody from the other side of the world, leaving a comment at the end of that blog was a major breakthrough for me. And in thinking, wow, you know, um with, with the internet, with the web, etc, with, with all the technologies that they're increasing, the connections between people are much shorter. Um And different. Um People have been discovering the same thing coming from technical writing, coming from training, coming from all kinds of other disciplines. Um They found that this authentic interaction and approaching people um working with them um um finding the right influences within organizations. Um and so, I wanted to, to find out more about these people and put their stories together and um and also make the case for this being a real discipline with, with real practices at an early stage clearly. But over time, I'm sure there's going to be a development towards there being, you know, courses and, and you know, train, train the developer advocate and um and and so on.

Kevin Montalbo4

Yeah, because there's currently no clear career path towards getting a developer advocate job, right? But since you've talked to 32 of these prominent developer advocates, did you see like a commonality or a common denominator? Where did they come from? And what was their common pathway towards becoming developer advocates?

Geertjan Wielenga

I think there's a couple of common aspects. Um One is about the personality of these people. Um So empathetic people, um kind of people, people, um but not necessarily all people who want to stand on stages and travel the world and so on. You know, a lot of people um enjoy writing blogs and, and articles and, and things like that and some people enjoy editing. There's a whole range of different places for people of all personality types, whether you're introverted or extroverted or whatever. But if, if you want to engage people directly in one way or another, whether that's in person or, if you want to cut through all the marketing stories and, and all the product pitches and get down to what really the technology is about and what is really interesting about it and bring that message across to the people who are really going to use it rather than the CFO S and the CEO S and the marketing people and the, etc. If you want to work directly with the people who are using the technology and bring across your enthusiasm, um You know, those people in an organization tend to become developer advocates, whether they're called developer advocates or not, whether they're called technical writers or trainers or whatever, they, they're called all kinds of things typically. Um But those people are the advocates um towards the developer. Um and for the company bringing the technology across um in an authentic way.

Kevin Montalbo

That's interesting that you brought that up since you would think that a developer advocate would be great at sales, but also a good engineer and something like that. So there's that common misconception that I'm glad that we're addressing that right now. Speaking of that, you've already touched on this a bit when you answer the question. But how about the common skills, what, what, what would be the common skills that you find developer advocates need to have? If say, for example, someone from the other end of this podcast who would be listening in, they want that developer to advocate a career path. So what do they have to be able to do? Well, we don't you just said,, you don't need to speak. Well, do they need to write? Well, do they need to know a bit of marketing sales and public relations perhaps?

Geertjan Wielenga

I think it's, it's mostly about her personality. Um Are you independent minded? Are you self motivated? Are you curious? Um, are you enthusiastic? Um, just those particular things as a starting point? Um If you're that kind of person um who doesn't necessarily fit perfectly well into a particular group within an organization, you're not, you're kind of marketing but you, you want to talk direct to, to, to developers, you kind of sales, but you kind of think, well, there's also the process before sales. Um You want to speak to people before they get to the point of buying or selling the, the kind of pre pipeline discussion. Um you're kind of in the products organization. Um But you also want to get directly involved with what people are really, you know, you, you're somewhere in the middle and you're kind of the, the linking person between these different organizations, you find yourself not fitting anywhere perfectly. Um Then this may be what you've actually been doing all along. Maybe you've been a developer advocate without even realizing it.

Kevin Montalbo

Yeah. So the label, you know, it doesn't really matter when it comes to, you know, um what you're doing. I think I see a lot of parallels with developer advocate and community manager as well. So I think that

Geertjan Wielenga

It's basically the same thing. I mean, I see community managers as maybe being slightly less technical than what developer advocates typically are and um a lot involved with, you know, setting up events and bringing people together. But whether you call yourself developer advocate or community manager or developer relations or technology evangelist, you're all basically doing the same thing and there isn't, you know, one title that covers everything but you know, you, you, you, you're doing community work um whether it's for an organization or for an an open source project or for something that you're working on yourself, um You're enthusiastic, you're authentic about something you want to get the message out there um He wants to be honest as well. So it's, it's also about um um saying, look, this product isn't perfect. Um This, this, this it's, it's in, in progress, you know, it's not about spinning um a product. It's about being real about it and saying, hey, come along, join me on my journey as I learn this product. Um it's, it's about sharing. Um It's not about um really preaching which, which kind of is, is the, is the question around technology evangelism versus developer, advocacy, developer advocacy is about um coming alongside somebody and learning from each other. Whereas technology evangelism um um it, it is a very similar thing. It comes down to the same thing. But if you see yourself as an evangelist and typically, you know, you have the truth and you're bringing the truth somewhere. Whereas increasingly what this is about is more about. Um Hey, um you know, I have a technology, you have a technology, let's see how they work together. How does um Kafka work together with Java really? Well, you know, let's take one project and combine it with another project. How does Neo four J combine with Vaden? How does javascript work really well on the back end or on the front end and Java on the back end or Java effects on the front end, let's combine our technologies and, and see what, what works. It's, it's kind of an experimental thing as mu as much as anything else,

Kevin Montalbo

right? So let's dive into your book. Um You were able to interview 32. Wow, that's how, how long did that take you?

Geertjan Wielenga

Well, it, it was a, it was a process. A lot of the people that I initially started with were people that I found personally interesting just in my circle of friends and developer advocates. So people I personally had run into and kept running into. So, for example, Josh Long um from, from pivotal um and Matt rel from a a um were two examples of these, you know, these are really enthusiastic, really great speakers. Um You know, always with great presentations, always with great practical content. Um You know, it's, it's never a marketing pitch. It's always about, hey, look what I discovered last week. You know, even though I've been working on this particular technology for 10 years, here's something I learned last week. Um That kind of enthusiasm is really, really great and inspiring and it's what brings people to conferences. So I wanted to find out what their stories were, and how they ended up there. And so on. And so I had a list of people who I wanted to interview anyway. And, and, and, and the book was a happy coincidence where I met Dominic Shakes Shaft from um from, from Pact who was looking for different topics to do interviews around. And he said, you know, would you like to do a book of interviews around something? And I said, yes, I've been collecting a long list of names of people who I've wanted to talk to about how they ended up being what they are and what their daily life looks like and what the pitfalls are of developer advocacy. You know, what, what they've enjoyed, you know, what, what are the ethical dilemmas? There's a lot of interesting ethical aspects. And so, um so I had a list and then the publisher Dominic came up with a list because he had other names because we wanted to have a bit of a mixture of people that I knew and people that I didn't know and people from different technology backgrounds. And so we ended up with quite a wide range of different people. And, and that's how the, how the selection of the book came about and

Kevin Montalbo

how long was the process of, you know, getting them to sit down with you or talk to you, getting on a call, writing down all of these notes and then publishing it on the book and collating it. How long did that take you?

Geertjan Wielenga

Um It took about, I don't know about a year or two, I think. Um it was a process of having an initial conversation with a list of prepared questions. And there were definitely points that I wanted to touch on in each interview, but I also wanted to leave space for, for, for spontaneous directions to be um to be started. Um And then, um we had a lot of recordings and the publisher then there was a fantastic person over there, Joanne who took all those recordings and worked them out into nice um flowing interviews. Um The what ended up in print was very different to the conversations that we had and tried to piece that together into a coherent conversation and then went back and, and checked back with the, with the interviewed person and went back and forth quite a bit. Um And so we ended up with the, with the finished product. Yeah.

Kevin Montalbo

And um you, you told us a while ago that developer advocates, they would focus a lot with talking to, you know, their, their, their, their co architects, they co engineers, they co developers. But a lot of the movement now in it is going into this local do code space where we have terms such as citizen developers, right? So what strategies would advocates take when they advocate their technologies to non technical or non IT people, I would imagine that a lot of them right now, a lot of the people that you've talked to, they would also have, you know, conversations with people in the business side of things. Not necessarily, you know developers, they, they, they may be in sales or in marketing. So how do they talk to these people?

Geertjan Wielenga

It's a very difficult challenge. Definitely. Um it's always complicated even for non technical people in an organization to understand what developer advocacy is because there is a long road from developer advocacy to a, to a funnel or a pipeline or a revenue stream. And this is the problem of developer advocacy in an organization, especially as it typically happens that you find yourself in the marketing organization. So you are a developer advocate with, with your team or on your own and you're reporting to the marketing person, the CMO um it often happens. Um what also happens is that you report to the engineering manager, which, which can be, which can have advantages and disadvantages too. And the engineering manager understands what you're doing but doesn't have a budget for conferences and so on. Well, the marketing manager has a budget but doesn't really understand what you do. So it's, it's, it's always a bit of a complicated situation. Um And so one way to explain to non technical people who have a budget um and who want everything to be connected to a pipeline and to a funnel is to talk about pre pipeline. I think this is the magic word to say yes, we have a pipeline but there's also the pre pipeline. I mean, how do we get people into the pipeline? What's the process of before the pipeline? And the, the, the engineers who are making decisions in companies about which technologies are used? Those are, that's, that's the focus of the pre pipeline. You want to get people very early. Um You want those people in an organization to be championing your technology to the people with the budget in that organization to, to their marketing person, to their CFO and so on. So how do you reach those people and, and the marketing person in your organization that has a budget that doesn't really understand developer advocacy understands that there is that particular um need to, to speak to that, to that pre pipeline um concept and, and that, that can work, but it becomes difficult because in a lot of organizations, the revenue is created directly from reaching out to the people with the money in those organizations. So it's like they go straight to the CFO, they go straight to the CTO. Um But then the argument is, look, the CFO and the CTEO in that organization, they speak to their engineers. And don't you want those engineers to be carrying across a positive message about our technology? So, isn't it in our interest to speak to those engineers? it's a long path but, there is an argument to be made to, to non technical people for the value of what we do as developer advocates.

Kevin Montalbo

Yeah, that's a lot of work there. And speaking of work, you, you've, you've you've touched on this one of the hardest aspects of the job that you said, and that you mentioned is ethics. So a rather common dilemma is about defining where a developer's allegiance lies, right. So, is it with the company that they work for or the community that they're working with? How do you find developer advocates successfully straddle this line?

Geertjan Wielenga

It depends and this is only one of the ethical aspects. And it, and in the book, in each interview, I, I talk about these um and I ask questions about this because I, I've had so many of these myself, you know, it's really the whole book is about me ever having a conversation with myself. Um You know, asking the questions that I would like answered, but this is one of those aspects. But another aspect is, you know, what, what if you know that there are all kinds of bugs in your product or the technology that you're advocating and you're up on the stage? Um And, and you, you, and you, and you're giving this wonderful speech, presentation slides, demos, whatever. And you know, there are all kinds of problems. Do you, do you skirt those problems? Are you open about them? Um You know, on the other hand, you don't want to, you know, have a long list of bugs in your, in your presentation either. So that's 11 of these ethical aspects. But this point that you make is another one on, on whose side are you? Are you? Do you represent the company? Do you represent the community? Do you represent yourself? Um If you do work, I mean, many developer advocates don't work for a particular company. They just work for themselves independently and they pick up particular technologies and they like them or they don't like them and particular ones that they start advocating for. And probably those are the ones that you can trust most because they don't have any agenda. It's just, you know, they're promoting this technology because they find it interesting. Um if the advocate comes from a particular organization, of course, you should ask yourself or, you know, you know, what is that organization doing? Why is that particular developer advocating these particular things? Um you know, it's never going to be a neutral story. It's gonna be, if you're paid by a particular organization, you, you're always going to be um you know, it's always going to be a slanted story. So yeah, it, it depends and, and you have to be careful about who the person is that you're listening to or reading from, etc.

Kevin Montalbo

So it becomes the task now of the engineers to really, you know, to really investigate is that the right word on who and,, and what to read., speaking of who and what to read,, GJ, you've got a lot of good points, for this spot. Yes., unfortunately, we just ran out of time but,, I know our listeners who are mostly their, their, their architects, you know, they'd love to learn more about developer advocacy, especially who to listen to and whom to read. So I guess your book would be a great start. So how can our listeners find out more about your book and get in touch with you?

Geertjan Wielenga

Well, the book you can get on amazon.com or on Back Pub. Um and it's available as a, as an ebook as, as PDF or a hard copy book, hard copy book really thick. It's about 6, 700 pages, and makes a wonderful doorstep. Um And, but it's full of authentic conversations. I really,  if you page through that book, especially if you have it in your hand and you're paging through this book and, and you pick it up and you, and you read a few of the interviews and a few of the questions and answers. There's just so much enthusiasm. That's the main thing you get from this book. All these people were really enthusiastic. So I would recommend it just, just if you, if you're ever in a dip in your um engineering career and you're wondering what the next take a look at this book, take a look at all this enthusiasm around technology that all these people have from, from different industries, from all kinds of companies in, independent from people from Amazon, from Google, you name it um and you can reach me on, on Twitter. So um it's Hejian Lei. So ge er TJ A new my first name with my last name, first page of my last name um on LinkedIn. Um um And also I've been very involved in a project called FJ which stands for friends of Open JDKFJ dot IO. It's a community platform for anyone using the Open JDK in any way. So if you're a Java developer, a clan developer, it's a site with plugs and articles and release notes and events, calendar and those kinds of things. So, and the Slack channel, of course. So you can join in and find me there too.

Kevin Montalbo

All right, we also love the enthusiasm that we got from you on this podcast DJ. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. All right. That was great. Thank you so much. We'll be sending you some of the assets probably in a week. We'll be sending you some audio grams that you can share on LinkedIn because LinkedIn has stories now and um some images as well that you can share on your Twitter or Facebook or what have you? So thank you so much for, yeah, for, for a comment dating us. And I hope even though I'm leaving to cloud that we keep in touch on LinkedIn.

Geertjan Wielenga

Thank you so much for your questions. These are really good questions. Thank you so much. I hope it turns out, I hope it turns out really well, the end result, this was a really good discussion, I think. Yeah,

Kevin Montalbo

I'm pretty sure and I'm very happy with the way it actually turned out actually. So, Thank you. Hope you have a great day. Thank you. You too. Bye bye. Cheers. Bye bye.