Wow! That's the most succinct summary of my first year as a Developer Advocate with Vaadin. It truly has been an educational, exhilarating roller coaster, and I’d like to share a few highlights with you.
What is a Developer Advocate?
For those unfamiliar with the term, Developer Advocacy (sometimes called DevRel) is about bridging the gap between developers and the technologies they use. As a Developer Advocate, my focus shifted from solely building products as a developer, to understanding how they're received and used by the community. The role involves a lot of knowledge-sharing, community engagement, and helping developers succeed.
My journey so far
I transitioned into tech a little over six years ago after a two-decade career in hospitality and supply chain management roles. I’ve always loved helping people win, which eventually led me to Vaadin, where I get to share the latest solutions to app development challenges with Java developers. Over the past year, I've connected with countless developers, contributed to the Vaadin community, and learned a ton along the way.
One thing that both pleased and surprised me was the level of engineering talent on our team and in the company in general. These people are skilled! Whereas I’ve heard tales of DevRels “losing their touch” and perhaps not coding as much as a traditional SWE, Vaadin DevRels are builders in the craft who often produce impressive demos with the latest technologies and make meaningful contributions in our open-source software. The technical level of communication in the company Slack amongst our product and engineering teams is a classroom for engineering architecture, and I’ve seen my understanding of technical decision-making increase more as a DevRel than in my prior developer role. That’s truly been an unexpected level-up.
The values
Vaadin's core values - "Choose the Herd," "Own the Solution," and "Dare to Explore", mostly made sense to me from day one. Interestingly, while I was accustomed to being a team-first player and taking the initiative, the “Dare to Explore” challenged me to adjust my prior rigid boundaries regarding what I should or should not try in a corporate setting. I remember laughing at my boss’s reaction in one of my first weeks as I asked about installing social media on my company-issued phone. His “of course” was slightly humorous, slightly incredulous as if to say, “How else are you going to do your job?” Since then, I’ve been doing lots of “exploring” and have felt encouraged to push boundaries and seek better ways to do things, even down to embracing more of my own personality in our corporate social media posts.
The Vaadin way
Coming from a different tech background, I had to learn "The Vaadin Way" of building applications. Vaadin's full-stack build philosophy, which prioritizes integration between frontend and backend development using Java challenges traditional silo team and architecture paradigms, and my additional challenge in that regard has been in building those applications from scratch.
It was somewhat startling to realize that in years of prior professional programming, I had seldom taken a project from ideation to production. My most frequent tasks had typically been maintenance, updating, and refactoring.
Now I needed to build out small but complete programmatic solutions to be used in blogs, videos, and conferences. Fortunately, again relying on the team's strength, I’ve received guidance and feedback along the way to turn that weakness into a strength.
A few milestones
A key milestone for me was standing in for my manager at the Connect Tech Conference in October 2023. As he was double-booked that week, he appeared and spoke at the Vaadin Create Conference in Germany while I presented what was originally his talk in Atlanta. The interesting thing here is that the talk was an artificial intelligence-focused one leveraging Spring AI and LangChain4J, two technologies I had zero familiarity with. That was nerve-wracking! My first talk for the company and the first opportunity I had to make an impression on the larger developer community on behalf of Vaadin was on a set of subject matters I did not know well at all. Somehow, I killed it. The talk went well despite some challenges with the projector and microphone, and I received valuable feedback from representatives of Google and the Spring team who were in attendance.
Since that time, I’ve enjoyed numerous talks and podcast appearances. Just a few of those include speaking at the St. Louis and Houston Java User Groups, speaking at the Dallas Software Developers meetup, and appearing on podcasts with Gun.IO, Chris Sean, and livestreams with Dan Vega and DaShaun Carter. I’ve come to understand these appearances are their own form of content and often fun, creative ways to get out the company message above and beyond the traditional trifecta of blogs, videos, and public talks.
Ever-present AI
I was fortunate to attend my first Google IO conference this year at the headquarters in Mountain View and can certainly share “I drank the Kool-Aid.” I subsequently built projects that integrated Vertex AI/Gemini 1.5 on a Vaadin Flow application and used that in a company YouTube video and a talk at the Black Is Tech conference. When I’m not building with AI, I’m building with AI. Meaning I’m often leaning on chatbots for summarizing and ideation. Think of it like a rubber ducky that talks back.
When I want to quickly get the gist of more text than I’m willing to read in full at the time or perhaps have writer’s block, I keep Gemini Advanced in one tab almost at all times. I haven’t utilized it nearly as much for code generation as one mentor once said: “LLM chatbots for code are like relying on an overeager junior dev.” It’ll quickly give you an answer, but you had better check it thrice. All in all, I’ve found artificial intelligence to be super-helpful to build on and build with.
Challenges
Managing the context switch is an additional aha moment in my transition to becoming a good Developer Advocate. As a software developer for FedEx, in any given two-week sprint, I could expect to have a defined number of stories and tasks that were understood to be completed at the end of that two-week sequence and followed by additional stories and tasks assigned for the subsequent two. I never considered how that rigorous regular cadence was, in fact, mind-numbing. Coming into DevRel is like having your eyes opened for the first time. Our tasks don’t often fit in time boxes structured to that degree. At any given time, there may be social engagement needed for a day, content to be produced for a week, slides and talks to be worked on for weeks from now, and CFPs to be written for conferences months down the road.
.jpg?width=4032&height=3024&name=IMG_3398%20(3).jpg)
That difference was something of a blocker for me in my initial months in the role. Again, after speaking and ideating with my manager and experimenting with popular time and task management tools, I relied on my absolute favorite mode of organization system: analog. I now have a giant whiteboard in my home office and have organized it by columns to display what will be done today, this week, and in the long term. A quick 5-minute read orients my thinking to just where my progress is at any given time. As days progress, long-term entries move to “this week,” and this week's entries move to “today” to keep me on track. I additionally maintain columns for upcoming events and topics I’d like to learn to keep those categories of items in the front of my mind as well.
Connections
As a person who traditionally is both introverted and a bit shy, I’ve been more than pleased to realize in real-time just how much I enjoy connecting with other developers. As a DevRel, I’ve witnessed first-hand why many proclaim the hallway track is the best track in any conference. This refers to those non-scheduled interactions of chatting with super-talented engineers, architects, and everyone from luminaries in the field to collegiate aspirants. These chats give us the opportunity to really learn how similar so many of us are and how small the world is. These chats have helped so much in learning who the people behind the tech are, which is truly the most important thing.
An additional tangible benefit is meeting people in this way has a tendency to open doors to additional opportunities. For instance, the combined effect of “putting myself out there” in conference after-hours and heavily on social media resulted in multiple people submitting my name as one to attend the Web Dev Challenge, a reality-show-styled YouTube video series produced by Jason Lengstorf. I was happy to accept and participate in filming that challenge, which introduced me to yet more awesome developers to collaborate with while showing off the Flow framework from Vaadin.
Looking forward
My first year at Vaadin has been an incredible journey of growth, learning, and community engagement. I'm grateful for the opportunity and the support I've received and look forward to leveraging feedback from my annual review to produce even higher quality content in the future, and be a more consistent voice of the “developer in the field” back to our product and engineering teams.
If you're a Java developer looking for a powerful and rather intuitive platform to build modern web applications, I highly recommend checking out Vaadin. And if you're already building amazing things with Vaadin, why not share your expertise with the world? We're always looking for passionate community members to speak at conferences, create content, or contribute to open source projects. Your voice could inspire others and earn you recognition as a Vaadin Champion!
Feel free to reach out if you're interested in getting more involved. And if you happen to be at the All Things Open Conference in 2024 where I’m speaking, please come say hello! I'd love to connect with you and hear about your experiences.