The Road To Advocacy - Jet Set Go!

Back in July 2022, I created a personal website and wrote this article The Road To Advocacy - Or How To Effectively Manage Your Quarter Life Crisis.

On Tuesday, I started my first role as a Developer Advocate @Jetbrains.

Woo!

However, this is step one of a mountainous stepladder. There is still a fair amount of work to do before I have a fuller understanding of the role, as well as how to perform it effectively. That's why I wanted to look back, before heading forward to review what’s happened since I started.

So, You Wanna Go Over The Last 4 Months?

References to my first article aside, yes. To a degree. Let’s begin!

Writing

In total I’ve written 17 articles and have stuck to my once a week timeline. Most of the readers on my website come from LinkedIn/Twitter which means they’re mostly my friends and people I know.

Once I started cross-posting to Dev.to I could see the reactions of people who don’t know me personally, but as I have not yet written anything that has gained significant traction, I don’t have a clear idea on how my writing is being received. Still, I’ve found it incredibly cathartic to have an outlet to write about the things I’ve encountered in life.

I need to keep working on figuring out my niche and the content the Go/Tech Community may find useful and engaging to read, as well as the content I find fun to write, but that will come with time. As my workload increases, the once a week target may end, but I’ve found writing enjoyable so far.

Video Production

It was quite time-consuming as a novice. I made three videos in the first couple months. One was personal, the others were for interviews and my portfolio. I love it as an art-form, but I wish I could make a perfectly edited video without spending multiple hours/days putting it together.

I’ve been able to use these skills to produce the London Gopher speaker recordings and thankfully those aren’t as time-consuming.

With an exciting enough idea I could go back into personal video production, but it’s definitely not my primary focus at this point in time.

Community Organization

I am enjoying helping to organize London Gophers. It's interesting trying to resurrect something that hadn’t been around for two years. We have to ask ourselves so many questions. What worked before? Is there anything we want to remove? Do we need to change things? What don’t we currently know that we should know?

It’s a peculiar type of problem solving and trying to rebuild a welcoming social space differs a fair amount from completing another JIRA ticket.

Social Media

I still don’t understand how to use it to engage with the community. I don’t mind reading through threads and seeing the ideas that people are sharing, but on my side I kind of just post articles and return to what I was doing, which I know isn’t the best way to do it.

Growing up, I never developed the urge to want to post about what I was doing so it’s a weird space to enter this late in the game, especially as it’s changed a lot over the years. (and the past two weeks).

I only started using Instagram and Facebook last year, for open-mic comedy purposes and I joined Twitter when I made that first article and now Mastodon may or may not be a thing, so I’m tip-toeing into there as well.

Perhaps switching my mindset to focus on using these tools to keep in touch with the people I’ve met and to understand the community I’m in may be the better way to go.

So, You Looking Forward to Being a Developer Advocate?

Well, it’s been two days. Seems good so far.

If you’d prefer a longer answer. Yes, I am. But, I know it won’t be easy and I know there are several things I don’t know and some things I know may be things I shouldn't know. You know?

First things first, I am going to buy some cake.

Thanks for reading!