Developer, Advocate!: Conversations on turning a passion for talking about tech into a career

784 Pages·2019·31.789 MB·English

by  Geertjan Wielenga

Developer, Advocate!
Conversations on turning a passion for talking
about tech into a career
Geertjan Wielenga
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Developer, Advocate!
Copyright © 2019 Packt Publishing
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First published: September 2019
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This book is provided compliments of Azul
www.azul.com/developer-advocate
"I dedicate this book to Bob Gembey and Rick Tersmette, who
started my journey in the technology industry, in 1996, when
I had no idea what I was getting into and no way of knowing
how interesting it was going to be."

Contents
Introduction ........................................................................1
Scott Davis ..........................................................................9
Ted Neward ......................................................................39
Sally Eaves ........................................................................65
Kirk Pepperdine .................................................................85
Rabea Gransberger ............................................................ 109
Laurence Moroney ............................................................ 143
Scott Hanselman ............................................................... 167
Heather VanCura ............................................................... 189
Matt Raible ..................................................................... 215
Tracy Lee ....................................................................... 243
Simon Ritter.................................................................... 261
Mark Heckler .................................................................. 287
Jennifer Reif .................................................................... 313
Venkat Subramaniam .......................................................... 339
Ivar Grimstad .................................................................. 367
Regine Gilbert ................................................................. 389
Tim Berglund .................................................................. 409
Ray Tsang ....................................................................... 441
Tori Wieldt ..................................................................... 463
Andres Almiray ................................................................ 483
Arun Gupta ..................................................................... 505
Josh Long ....................................................................... 527
Trisha Gee ...................................................................... 551
Bilal Kathrada .................................................................. 583
Baruch Sadogursky ............................................................ 595
Mary Thengvall................................................................. 613
Yakov Fain ...................................................................... 637
Patrick McFadin ............................................................... 661
Reza Rahman ................................................................... 683
Adam Bien ...................................................................... 705
Bruno Borges ................................................................... 725
Jono Bacon...................................................................... 741
Other Books You May Enjoy ................................................. 756
Index ............................................................................ 762

Geertjan Wielenga was born in the Netherlands and moved
with his family at an early age to South Africa. That was because,
ironically, his father was appointed by his church as an evange-
list in South Africa, just as his son was to become an evangelist,
though of a very different kind, over the course of his career
in the software industry.
After completing his university studies, which were focused
on political science and legal studies, Geertjan left South Africa
in 1996 with the intention to travel for a year before resuming
his direction in the legal domain. However, he soon found that
he needed financial resources to sustain his travels and found
himself editing and proofreading technical software manuals
in the Netherlands from May 1996 onwards. A series of tech-
nical writing stints followed, in a variety of software organiza-
tions in the Netherlands, followed by several years in the same
domain in Austria and the Czech Republic.
In Prague, he worked for Sun Microsystems from 2004 until
its acquisition in 2010 by Oracle. He wrote documentation for
NetBeans IDE, while writing and delivering training courses
on the NetBeans APIs. He traveled all over the world introduc-
ing large organizations to the benefits of building their enter-
prise software on top of the NetBeans Platform. With the take-
over by Oracle, he became a product manager focused on the
enterprise JavaScript ecosystem and increasingly specialized
in Oracle JET, which is Oracle’s free and open-source JavaS-
cript toolkit for frontend user interface development.
His enthusiasms in the software domain have concentrated
themselves around the open-source ecosystem and in unlock-
ing the resources that large vendors have for supporting educa-
tion and open-source ecosystems.
Developer, Advocate!
Over the years, he’s also informally engaged a number of
developer advocates around the world in conversations around
their profession, which has led to this book, which he hopes you,
the reader, will benefit from and that it will inspire new devel-
opers to broaden their perspective on interesting and fulfilling
ways of working in the information technology industry.
Introduction: how to become and how to be
For years, I've been walking around with a growing set of ques-
tions to ask the many friends I keep running into on the stages
of tech conferences around the world. An example is "How did
you get started on the journey that brought you here?"
Inevitably, that journey can only have been uniquely inspir-
ing, since the people you see on the stages of tech conferences,
or hear about working behind the scenes to create content
to share technical knowledge of various kinds, can't have taken
a degree or followed a developer advocate course, because those
degrees and courses don't exist or to the extent to which they
exist today, they didn't exist at the time these journeys began.
Developer advocacy, broadly referred to as "developer relations"
today, is new. Those who practice it have fallen into it in one
way or another. And, just as the processes and theories in
the world of programming have evolved over several years as
programming itself has become a more generally accessible
profession, so too the ideas underpinning developer advocacy
have come to the surface gradually over time.
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