November 2, 2019, in Mozilla Tech Speaker Singapore - This is the talk I gave for engineers who consider shifting their careers to technical advocacy.

1. Engineering Career Is
Not A Single Ladder
Stepping into Alternative Path to
Developer Relations
November, 2019 | Singapore
Tomomi Imura
@girlie_mac

2. @girlie_mac
Hello 👋
Tomomi is:
● Developer advocate
● Software engineer
● Tech Speaker
● Tech Writer
● Doodler
● Advisor
● Cat lady of The InterWeb

3. Rising engineer
Junior engineer
Senior engineer
Super-duper engineer

4. Engineering
Developer Relations

5. This is probably going
to be a very interesting
journey...

6. @girlie_mac
Technical advocate (in Developer Relations)
Roles & Requirements
● Requires engineering skills and/or knowledge
○ Technical advocacy
○ Open-source engineering
○ Technical writing
● Other skills & soft skills
○ Event management
○ Community engagement
○ Interpersonal skills

7. @girlie_mac
Who are good candidates?
People who
● loves coding / open-source
● loves teaching
● loves writing / blogging
● loves interacting with humans
● loves giving technical talks
● loves to get involved in tech (programming lang,
open-source, etc.) communities
etc...

8. @girlie_mac
Who are better candidates?
Ideally, people who
● have been actively coding
● good at teaching
● Have proven skills of writing / blogging
● excellent at interacting with humans
● have spoken at conferences/meetups
● already have involved in tech communities
etc...

9. @girlie_mac
#DevRelLife

10. Globetrotting
(ooh yeah!)

11. @girlie_mac

12. @girlie_mac
Oops, I am guilty for creating the
illusion too...

13. @girlie_mac
#RealDevRelLife

14. @girlie_mac
DevRel Long-term Goals
● Create & cultivate developer ecosystem
● Offer the best experiences to developers
● ...and Profit
(maybe not directly, but you know, this is business!)

15. Awareness

16. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Generate awareness
Letting people know we do exist!
● Meetups and conferences
○ Speaking
○ Sponsoring & staffing booth
● Swags with logo
● Promo & advertising (Typically, work with
marketing team)
● Newsletters

17. Outreach

18. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Developer outreach
Meet and greet developers!
● Meetups & conferences
● Hackathons
● Workshops
● Partner & developer meetings
Can be online
● Social media
● Forums & Slack

19. Engineering &
Dev Product Feedback

20. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Engineerings
● Code samples & tutorials
● Tools
● SDKs
● Open source
○ Source code & readme
○ Maintenance
○ Community CoC & legal
○ Code review & approve pull requests from
community

21. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Developer feedback
Listening to devs to understand their pain points!
● Give developer feedback to the team
(Engineering & PM)
● Reflect them on the future release

22. Strategic Partnership &
App Ecosystem

23. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Strategic partnership
● Establish partnerships with the 3rd party
companies
● Support their engineers
● Enlarge [ app | platform | service ] ecosystem for
better business

24. Developer Experience

25. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Offer better developer experience
Make it easy for developers to use your offerings
● Write good docs
● Create learning materials
● Provide good APIs
○ Clean
○ Consistent
○ Verbose
● Offer SDKs & tools

26. Support

27. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Offer developer support
● Online support forms or email
● Bug ticketing
● Forum & Slack
● Stackoverflow
● Social media
● Office hours

28. Developer Education

29. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Developer education
Support all kinds of learning styles for developers!
● Documentation
● API references
● Code samples
● Tutorials - Written & video
● Webinars
● Workshops

30. Inspiration

31. @girlie_mac
What do we do?
Giving inspiration & empowerment
● Public speaking
● Blogging
● Educate & empower people to boost confidence

32. @girlie_mac
Extrovert or Introvert?

33. @girlie_mac
Public-facing Activities
I love attentions 😍
● Meetups and conferences
○ Speaking
○ Sponsoring & staffing booth
● Workshops
● Webinars
● Hackathons

34. @girlie_mac
Behind the Scene
DevRel is not about being famous
● Writing docs & tutorials
● Coding - sample, tools & SDK
● Developer & Community support
● Helping partners
● Collaborating w/ other teams (Engineering, Product
management, Business development, sales, support,
legal, etc…)

38. Thank you!
Tomomi Imura (@girlie_mac)