On developer evangelism
I learned about Chris Heilmann’s Developer Evangelism site today. He has approached O’Reilly publishing to see if it could be published in dead tree form. It’s a great guide for developer evangelists and the companies who employ them. It’s got some real gems in there…
The trick is to understand that to be a developer - especially a 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.
The real power of removing your brand goggles is that you will be able to work with rather than against the competition.
If you don’t time-stamp your publications they will be considered great forever - even if they are harmful by the technical standards of the future.
This last point is something I think can be expanded upon. If you are putting code out to promote something commercial, write some tests to go with them. There are testing libraries for all major languages now. That way, when your code is being read in a few years time, and stuff has changed, people can run the tests to figure out what’s broken and what the code was expecting.
I think developer evangelism can be boiled down quite simply: helping developers see what the company is doing in a non-shitty way, and vice versa. The difference between a geek conference and a business/entrepreneurship conference is as follows: at a business conference, the conference is a distraction from the networking. The conference therefore ends up with either speculation and rumour or case studies. At the end of it, you go home and say “Gee, CompanyX is doing a great job at all this Internet stuff”. At the end of a geek conference, you go home - hopefully - with a stack of new bookmarks, notes and ideas of stuff you can download and implement.
A developer evangelist is someone who comes to me and says “Oh, you are doing stuff with X - did you know that we are doing stuff that’s quite similar - perhaps we can get together and work on it”. It’s productive, not spammy. Christian Heilmann is brilliant at it. Sadly, there are plenty of companies who don’t engage with their developer communities. Google don’t as much as they should. They toss something out every so often, but don’t really engage with the community in the same way the guys at Yahoo! do. Apple? Absolute joke. There’s WWDC, but why isn’t there developer events in London and Bangalore and Vancouver and Boston and… well, wherever. One event in SF is not enough. Microsoft are doing much better: they’ve got things like MIX, but they also seem to be supporting .NET user groups around the world.
If you work for any commercial (or even community or non-commercial) software producer, you need to read Chris’ handbook.
