Ask HN: I want to become an evangelist, how do I go about it?

"I'm 22 and I feel if I don't hit it big within the next 2 years I probably won't. "

I'm not sure what you want to achieve but in general the real world is not that strict. You are stuffing your ambitions into a tiny box and for no good reason. I would advice you figure out where you want to be in the next 20 years. This will give you a far larger scope for your thoughts.

Old people are not junk, if they keep their mental and physical faculties.

Name me one person older than 24 who's achieved great things. You can't, can you?

/s

EDIT: Someone replied with an interesting link but deleted the comment: http://fundersandfounders.com/too-late-to-start-life-crisis/

All depends on what you call a "great thing".

What a junk comment. Get yourself a culture. This is the kind of BS people say when they mistake marketing with reality. Scratching the surface of western propaganda will teach you that beyond the "Mark Zuckerberg" effect there is an army of bright professionals who have revolutionized their field or industry with hard work, uncommon skills and (most of all) a consistent attitude OVER THE YEARS. At 24, in most cases, you are barely mature enough to actually START having the kind of consistency required to make great things.

The "/s" means he's being sarcastic...

I tried to use sarcasm to point out how absurd the original statement was. I thought putting the "/s" was making it too obvious. Sometimes it backfires though. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Text is a very dangerous format.

If I recall, Jesus was about 33... sorry, not that sort of evangelism?

I don't think their plans involved being literally crucified.

Well, Einstein did bugger-all for a quarter century, and all he could come up with at 26 was four short inconsequential papers that together wouldn't have merited extra postage on the envelope.

I've been a tech evangelist. It's an interesting and stressful job. If you can cope with lots of (international) travel, repeating the same speech over and over and over, subsisting on pizza and cheap beer, and listening to over-confident neophytes explaining why their plan to beat Facebook is rock solid - it may be the job for you!

As with any role, the best way to demonstrate your worth is to develop a portfolio. Give talks at every meetup you can. Make sure they're video'd - watch them back and learn from your mistakes.

Get a name for yourself on StackOverflow (or whatever) as someone who can clearly and concisely explain a solution.

Write dozens of blog posts - and get them syndicated - showing how you can write tutorials, answer questions, and explain moderately difficult concepts to a lay audience.

Learn how to organise events. Start your own meetups / hackdays / whatever. Organising venues, catering, invites, sponsors, speakers, schwag etc is absolutely invaluable experience. Join the organising committee of your local events.

Finally, find a company (preferably with some funding) who you can see needs to get their message out there. Write up your plan on how you would help them succeed. Which meetups are they best to sponsor? Which merchandise has the best response among developers? What parts of their proposition need the most explaining. Pitch your experience.

A word of warning. I quit the evangelist game because I couldn't cope with frequent international travel. It's fun at first - but can play havoc with your personal relationships.

What did you trade evangelism for?

Could you order those (talks, Stackoverflow, blog posts, etc) in order of importance? I'm in a similar spot as OP; looking to become an evangelist. I've actually taken my first job internationally, and wouldn't mind the travel at all.

It depends. I'd put talks as 1st - especially if you can get people tweeting "OMG! Brilliant insight from @tylerpachal - I totally get COBOL now!"

Building up a reputation takes time - and it will depend on the company. A big organisation probably won't care about SO for example.

Given 90% of the time the clients were tech-handicap, but still.

Referring to people who aren't knowledgeable about a subject as 'tech-handicap' rules you out as a potential evangelist in my opinion. You need to be an expert, you need to be passionate about a product, but most of all you need to be a nice person who doesn't look down on people who know less than you.

Even the nicest people can be brutally honest it doesn't mean he was mean to the people. You yourself are assuming he is not based on 1 brutally honest opinion. No one is perfect and even the nicest people can generalize it's nothing to be ashamed of and definitely does not rule him out

The generalisation isn't the problem. It's entirely possible that 90% of the people he dealt with were complete beginners. The problem is referring to those people as "tech-handicap". That isn't 'brutally honest'; it's being mean.

A good product evangelist is someone who can talk about the people they've met in the same way regardless of whether or not those people are still in the room. That is the skill that makes you good at evangelising something - if people like you they'll listen to you. If people see you being nasty they won't, because they'll wonder if you're going to be nasty about them once they leave.

You make a valid point that the term he used is harsh and mean. But don't assume he is a bad person, you can't say he isn't evangelist material based on 1 wrong term he used.

If we're gonna hold words against people, well obama isn't president material, because you remember that one time he said the N-word. No president should use racial slurs. You see what I'm getting at.

He used it in a post on a major tech forum, specifically asking for advice about becoming an evangelist. It's not like Obama merely saying the N-word, it's like Obama saying the N-word in a speech about the proliferation of hate speech against the black community in America.

Well if we can't make mistakes...

Not so sure about the expert comment. What is an expert?

But I do agree about the 'tech-handicap'. If / when you do become an evangelist, these people are likely to be your customers.

If you can't relate to them (why are the handicapped?) you have bigger problems.

Who are the great evangelist you admire? What are they doing well?

Have a look below at WestCoastJustin[1] suggestions. He is bang on!

Have a look at his profile. He is super approachable.

That is a key difference - Evangelist go out of their way to be helpful. They often give you multiple ways of connecting with them. Compare that to your profile - what could you change / improve?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WestCoastJustin

> I'm 22 and I feel if I don't hit it big within the next 2 years I probably won't.

Two years is not long enough to become regarded as an expert at anything. You are potentially shutting yourself off from much with this attitude. I think many people have this fear of "never going to be as good as the others", but here's the thing -- many people think it, very few admit it, which makes it seem disproportionately scarier.

Stick with it. Learn from the 15 year olds until you beat them straight.

I guess you are right, but the thing is. It's not about becoming an expert. You have these geniuses doing things that blow my mind. And horrible coders that hit it big with things like snapchat, which grow to the point you hire other people to rewrite and maintain it.

How do you know snapchat is written by horrible coders?

Read some articles on it back in the day, most security leaks are fixed now. But you used to be able to send large data over bash to snapchat accounts, entire movies even. Bad coders is maybe a bad term. Their requirements were shaky for months.

Don't worry if you aren't as good as the guys who started at 15. I started at 8 and there are guys who are doing stuff that is blowing my mind. There is always someone smarter than you (unless you're Knuth).

Focus on what you want to do - not what others are doing. Be the best at what you are good at not what others are good at. Becoming an evangelist means that you will need to focus on your communication skills - getting the job might come down to quite a bit of social networking.

Thanks for your insight. I will definitely work on my communication and social networking skills.

And keeping in mind that there are more average programmers than extremely good ones or extremely bad ones.

Keynote - Jacob Kaplan-Moss - Pycon 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE

It was posted a few weeks ago, and gives some insight in how we judge the greatness of a programmer and that we draw the line at fantastic or shitty.

It doesn't follow up your reply as well as it should, but regardless it's good to know you can still become a 'genius'.

Firstly, good communication is very important to being an evangelist. So you should edit your post into separate paragraphs to make it easier to read.

I did lol, HN doesn't allow texts above 2000 characters I had 3500 and skimmed it down and had to remove paragraphs.

What you wrote hardly says anything about evangelism and why you'd want to do it. It's mostly about previous experiences, which are hardly related. "I'm a developer with experience in sales and customer support. I like both the technical side and the human contact and would like to combine them," would've sufficed.

He probably felt like sharing, paints a good picture as to why he wants to do it tho

To be honest, after reading that, I don't have a clue why he wants to be an evangelist, or whether he has any clue what it actually means. That description could perfectly describe the reason to become a product manager, or a support lead.

IMHO it should've been an elevator pitch, describing which parts of being an evangelist sound interesting to him. Communication is a key part of being an evangelist.

A blank line only requires 2 or 3 characters on HN. Surely you can shorten it enough to put some in? It really is harder to read without them.

Trisha Gee (Evangelist at JetBrains) wrote a recent piece about her experiences:

http://trishagee.github.io/post/becoming_an_evangelist/

There's a couple of things that could help you towards evangelism:

- Read, a lot. Also form an opinion about what you read.

- Blog. Write about the stuff you think about. Voice your opinion and make sure you write some original stuff, don't write the same stuff all tech blogs are writing.

- Network, both on- and offline. Get to know people who are doing what you want to do and figure out how they got where you want to be. Stay in touch afterwards.

- Take a philosophy course. It'll help you to start thinking outside of the box.

> But I do the google code-jams and what-not and 15 year olds can beat me straight.

There's this guy who won the Abel prize in 2012 called Endre Szemeredi. He said that throughout his career he always felt himself slow compared to the other guys around him. He started to do maths at 22 as his parents wanted him to go to medical school - that he left and went do do manual labour in some factory. His professor though he'll never be able to become a proper mathematician.

Anyone who made it big before 25 just got extremely lucky. That doesn't mean that they're not smart though.

You shouldn't give yourself such a short timeline for achieving your career goals - The odds are severely against you. Capitalism isn't optimised for fairness; it's optimised for making as many people work for as long and as hard as possible (and this effect is only going to get worse with time).

Financial success is actually an oddity - A flaw in the system. It goes against what it's optimised to do.

Think of capitalism like the carrot dangling in front of the horse to keep the horse moving.

If you've learned to enjoy watching the carrot dangling and wiggling around aimlessly at the end of that stick, then you're getting the most value out of the system.

Here's what worked for me. You could say I was an evangelist of sorts. I did not set out to be an evangelist, more to educate myself about devops, and https://sysadmincasts.com was the result. Ended up getting hired by one of the companies I created a video on (but not in an evangelist role).

Here's some things to think about:

  - you do not need to be an expert
  - you can teach yourself to be an evangelist (probably the best way)
  - 22 is *young* (I have 10 years on you)
  - almost better if you know nothing as you learn from the ground up
  - you will learn everything you need to know along the way
  - possible to brute force your way into it via consistent hard work

Here's my suggested strategy:

Start a blog or youtube channel where you review products around an eco-system. Boom, you now run your own evangelist company, congratulations! Keep at this consistently for a few years. Focus your reviews on a specific type of company or series of product lines. You will get on people's radar. This will bring in job offers as you have proved yourself as an evangelist. A few things that I can think of off the top of my head re: the journey.

  - pick an emerging tech eco-system (I chose devops)
  - something shiny and new (devops)
  - educate yourself about said eco-system
  - educate others about what you learned (brain dumps)
  - chunk these into small 1-2k word postings (blog or video)
  - was doing a weekly text/video release (hope to get back on a schedule)
  - it will be extremely painful in the beginning as you will suck (I did)
  - you will quickly become better and improve your craft
  - have a release cycle to keep you motivated with an end in sight
  - set clear goals for what each posting will be about
  - show examples (code, workflow, diagrams, etc)
  - weekly cycle will force you to keep things small and workable
  - just takes time and effort to research
  - it's easy to write simple brain dumps about what you learned
  - this could take years (it did in my case)
  - don't write crap postings or spam content
  - we are sick of corporate marketing/hype/vapor crap
  - an unpolished human-to-human conversation works very well!
  - show example use-cases (who, how, what, why, when, etc)
  - think unboxing video for tech products (what does the gui look like)
  - people will recognize you provide value
  - this will open doors beyond your wildest expectations
  - you will gradually become an expert
  - very rewarding to help people from around the world
  - can take over your life if you let it
  - force yourself to keep quality up over all else (don't be lazy)
  - you can do this alongside your day job
  - builds proof that you can be an evangelist
  - you will become much better at distilling concepts
  - this provides extreme value for time crunched people
  - you taught yourself how to learn & keep current!

The trick is to keep yourself motivated. If you look at many information products today (podcasts, youtube channels, magazines), most of them follow a model like this, just copy it. Just the reward of helping others alone makes this worth it, so you really cannot go wrong! In that, even if you do not become a full-time evangelist, you have educated yourself, educated others, built a public profile, and that will pay off big time when looking for work in the future.

What is "evangelist"? I see this term often, but don't really understand it.

I think it is better known as "Developer Evangelist" or "Developer Relations".

Yes. But what exactly does it mean? I thought maybe it is "very qualified developer" but I read comments here, and doubts grow, maybe I understood it wrong.

OK, i searched the internet, and found explanations.

It's just someone who sells a concept or technology to companies, really. Knowing how it works is a plus, but it's not like there haven't been very prominent tech evangelists who knew next to nothing about tech. If you can explain what people gain from using the tech in a good enough way you're pretty much done.

Yes. This reminds me of the Alan Perlis: "Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already."

So the evangelist would be in the marketing department?

you can idol another well-known evangelist of your choice, for example Richard Stallman. ; >

Can you grin like an idiot and sound super-excited about high tech dog shit?