Advocate for the Developers – Jonas Rosland – Ep 72

How do you get developers interested in your product? This week we talk with Jonas Rosland, a developer advocate for EMC’s new CODE group.

• Listening vs Talking
• How does working with Developer differ from working with Sysadmins?
• Why are developers “weird” if you’ve been talking with Sysadmins?
• Emphasizing creativity – what you can make with this – over stability
• Unfinished things over finished things
• How does it work, not how much does it costs
• Where do developer relations go in the org chart?
• What kind of metrics do developer relations groups use to measure how successful they are?
• Making yourself uncomfortable – meeting new people
• IT admins are becoming more and more comfortable with code and scripting.
• Getting your code out there is critical – often on github, but it could be elsewhere
• Where are the developers located?
• They’re not at VMworld – you must go to their meetups
• Go to the metopes about things you are interested in – you may meet people who are interested in your stuff too <- This, to me,  was the biggest and most obvious in retrospect but practical tactic we talked about in the podcast. Of course there are no meetups on your product yet – go to other meetups and find people who might have mutual interests.
• But you never know – you have to go to different kinds of events and try and see and make mistakes.
• It’s about putting other people up on stage
• Using the word advocate vs evangelist – you advocate for someone else – the developer – vs evangelizing – tell them your message – this is the most important principle we talked about.

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