Thanx
She came to the office, took the dev team out to a local ice cream shop (hot summer day, greatly appreciated) and then seemed to hang around after for a little while talking to our PR person, and a little to the CEO who is non-technical and wasn't going to make a decision about which email service we used.
To me, that didn't seem particularly good evangelism for developers. Conversely, I have seen a Twilio developer do a 5 minute talk for other devs, and it was basically a short bit of code, and a really cool 'wow' moment that got us all interested. That evangelist was a developer.
Maybe Adria wasn't a good developer evangelist, maybe this was because she wasn't a developer, I don't know if the two are linked. It is possible that she didn't really come to see us to preach the virtues of SendGrid, but rather just to make sure they were on our radar, which the free ice cream certainly helped with.
He gave a very good presentation on Amazon Web Services. Not just technical content but enough marketing content to make you feel like AWS was something worth investing your technical learning time in. If someone had a question about S3/EC2 that he could answer, he answered it to the best of his ability. More importantly, if someone had a question he could not answer, he stated that he did not know the answer and he knew someone on the larger AWS team that he could (and would) get the person in contact with (if they gave them their business card after the meeting).
In his talk, Jeff threw in some entertaining anecdotal/behind the scenes stories about AWS. For example, Smugmug (at the time) was charging all of its AWS fees on a Corporate Amex card. Which qualified them for multiple round-trip airplane tickets to Europe or wherever every month.
For the developers in the audience who weren't using AWS, I felt like this was another positive push towards the tipping point to start using it - even if our current jobs were not cloud-oriented.
And, boy, he was passionate. Not in the sense of Steve Ballmer yelling at developers but evangelical in wanting to spread the good word of AWS.
I've interacted with tons of people in similar positions (though not Adria specifically), and I've never had the relationship get anywhere near any kind of button pushing, aside from some friendly competitive banter (oh, you use X? you really should try our Y...).
> Amanda Blum a female figure in the tech community shared her thoughts on the situation. She defined the entire fiasco as a loss for everyone and pointed out that Richards, "is not an easy person [to work with]". Blum suggests that Richards doesn't have a positive track record in the tech community.
http://www.businessinsider.com/female-tech-community-adria-r...
I don't claim to know anything she possesses, only what I have read. Still I'm left wondering, is the role of "developer evangelist" mainly not one of community interaction? And if it is, is it not outside the realm of possibility that she will encounter things that "push her buttons"? Geez, I would feel awkward being in the same room as this lady knowing this is one step away.
...a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology, in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects.
Essentially, a PR person for the company who works by interacting with developers. They attend conferences, respond to developer concerns regarding the product, etc.
A Dev Evangelist needs to talk to developers and get them interested in their product/service and convey its efficiency to them, only a fellow developer would be able to do that.
1.) "Describe Polymorphism" and 2.) "What are the differences between Inheritance and Composition"
The other questions were very head-in-the-clouds, like "What is the biggest problem in existence today that can be solved by software? If you had a budget and a team, how would you solve it?"
So weird.
Anyways, I was dumbfounded at the simplicity as this was in the middle of other hard-core technical screens from Amazon, Google, Facebook, and eBay for software dev. positions and the interviewer claimed over and over again that this was a programming position and your ability to code was #1. Why didn't they ask me questions to help determine that?
I've since been onsite at MSFT for other reasons and sat down with Technical Evangelists talking about different MSFT platforms. They seemed skilled at programming, and had the background to seem legitimate as engineers. This is what I think Microsoft and other companies really want. The job isn't technical but you need to look credible to the people you are working/speaking with. And above all I think you need to be diehard believers in the product/company.
It's a clever position for a company selling to other technology companies. First they send a person who cares about your time, who speaks your language, who advocates for you - no, who evangelizes you. This person is trying to unite the developer community, bring in fresh faces, embrace unrecognized communities... this person cares about developers. Next they tell you that, although the industry really needs to change, product x can ease your life in the meantime.
My last position was at a education startup. They used the same tactic, only instead of "evangelists", we sent former professors and teachers who were simply consultants. Their ability to gain traction in schools depended on their importance in the community -- hence, they give talks, blog about the educational issues, etc.
The main role of a developer evangelist though is as a translator. By translator, I mean that they have to explain their product/technology to different audiences in order to get their support. A good developer evangelist gets people/developers excited about a product/technology by pointing out the benefits to the developers who are going to be the ones actually using the product. Thus, developer evangelist's need to be technical because, there is some coding involved in their role and they need to express/find the story in a technical message to get people/developers excited about a product/technology.
I put "Vim Wielder / Cat Herder" on my business card. Turns out the cats I herd tend more often to be executives than developers. Developers are great: you show them a great product and help them to use it and they're on your side. Helping executives understand how tech community works can be difficult at times.
I can't comment on what particular brand of developer evangelist Adria Richards was, but there are many kinds. I'd hope that she was one who writes code and who contributes to thte community rather than just selling to it.
Where "Christian" you can put whichever company grows along with it's API/code/lib usage and utilization by others.
As I see it it's a purely "hype" role and it's essentially a tech-aware marketeer seeking to attract fellow developers and engineers to work and experiment with his company's platform and products.
By the way, sorry for my bad english.