developer advocacy and the job search w/ ali spittel

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to, to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. So, Ali, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Cool, cool. So I am Ali. I lead developer advocacy at EWS Amplify, which is a service specifically for front-end web and mobile developers.

So I get to speak to a little bit of a different audience than the rest of AWS does, which I really appreciate. My background is in software engineering. I started out as a back-end engineer and then transitioned into the front-end space a little bit later. And then on top of that, I've also taught at a boot camp for a bunch of years. So you can also speak to teaching and learning and also getting your first job in tech as well, something that I have been able to see a lot of people do. And honestly, it's awesome now because I have former students on my team.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So cool. Or on other teams too. I have a couple others on in other organizations, but yeah, I hired developer advocates so I can speak to what I'm looking for there and also speak to what it looks like to go through a coding bootcamp and get your first coding job. I love it. I love it. So the first question I want to dive into is what is dev advocacy, dev rel, dev evangelist, whatever dev avocado, whatever, whatever you want to throw in there. What is it and then why do you think it's so important for organizations to consider a role like this in the age we're in right now?

Yeah. So I have our teams motto set as earn customer trust at scale. So there are a lot of people who maybe work on one-to-one relationships with customers, maybe a solutions architect. There are a lot of people who work on the product. There are a lot of people who work in engineering and people who work in community. And I think we kind of bridge a lot of those gaps of making sure that the product is something that we're proud to show to customers because we're not going to earn trust with them if it sucks, right? Something's broken. That's going to make users say, okay, this is not.

good. Like I don't want to do that. So we do a lot with product feedback and making sure that we're part of that product process, making sure that we're giving early feedback, but also pre-launch feedback like, Hey, this, this needs a little bit of work still. And then after that process, we get to teach those things to people and at scale. So instead of on a one to one relationship, more like creating content, like creating a blog post that might get thousands of people or a YouTube video or a conference talk or other people on our team run a discord channel as well. Having those different communities that we can reach out to a bunch of people at one time and really build relationships with them.

I think it's really valuable to have those people that are so involved in the developer community as it is because that's one of the big things that you you look for when you're looking at developer advocates is, is this person part of that community as it is? For me, that's like the JavaScript and React community. I'm a part of other people that might be the Flutter community or the Android community or something along those lines. Do they already have ties to that community? Because it's going to be easier to build those relationships if that community is already there and there's already some sort of building already have been done.

So, but Ali, you're saying like, well, then why do we need a dev? Why do we need a dev advocacy program? Because can't we just run like pre-roll YouTube banners and like, you know, marketing can take care of that. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what would be your argument? I think that's where a lot of like product focus. Yeah. Yeah. So I think marketing is a super, super important function and they can really support developer advocacy and vice versa. like I work a lot with our marketing department to talk about messaging and things like that. But developer advocacy, these are people who, everybody on my team was a software engineer before they were a developer advocate.

And so they really understand that space as somebody who has been there, who has written that code in production, who knows what it's like and the struggles that developers face and you can have that deep empathy for them. But also they can make that messaging really resonate with the people that they were in their fast jobs or that they still are today. And so I think that that's really powerful. I also think that having people with really deep product knowledge is really important too. So if you do like a sponsored YouTube video that's awesome, but usually that person is learning that product for that YouTube video instead of having worked with it for years and knowing all the ins and outs of it.

So I think that having that that long-standing relationship really does help. And I think marketing can do a really awesome job to amplify the stuff that developer advocacy is doing to like, we're cranking out content, like doing sponsorships or partnerships with that content, I think is really valuable too. So I see them as two things that you need to have if you're trying to reach out to a new audience. I love it. And of course, we're starting construction on my house. So if you hear drill bits in the background, I do apologize for that. So my next question is, is what do you, so I know you talk about what you look for, Dev Advocacy, but when it comes to hiring right now in general, what are you seeing from people that really separate themselves from the pack, right?

Because again, one of the parts of the show is to help people kind of level up their careers and their job search. So not only maybe with the Dev Advocacy, but what are some general tips and maybe we can go a little bit into the software community or the junior dev community, but how can people really set that separate themselves right now in this market. Yeah, to me, the biggest thing that you're going to have is a portfolio site and that's something that I always looked for. There's the primary thing that I looked at when I was hiring manager for software engineers as well. It's not your portfolio.

You have complete control over it, like LinkedIn that you can set your profile and all that, but it's not really like a creative outlet and it can't show all the facets of you. Whereas a portfolio site, you have complete control over. you can show exactly the things that you want to show your bio exactly how you want it to be. You can show the products that you're most or the projects that you're most proud of. Whether that be at work, which a lot of people are under NDAs, but also your side projects are the things that you're building while you're learning. And even if it's not visual, even if you don't have a thousand projects on there that's like completely fine, just showing what you're interested in and what you're doing, I think really sets people apart.

I also think that having some sort of outlet for teaching is really, really valuable, both as developer advocate and as a software engineer too, is if you can teach something to somebody else, it shows that you really understand that topic. And so as a hiring manager, if I see that somebody has a really strong blog post on X or Y, that shows me that they really understand that thing and are going to be able to distill that information for other people on our team to their strong communicators. I think that But there's been this history and software engineering, right, of people being these like geniuses, but individualized, and not really working well with a team, and not really communicating well.

But that's one of the first things that I look for when I'm hiring somebody is, is this person going to be a strong member of a team? Are they gonna be able to communicate? Are they gonna be able to write things that other people are gonna understand? Are they gonna be able to create buy-in and motivate other people? and do all of those important things as well, like hit deadlines because as a manager, it gets stressful. That's not happening. So I think that yes, the tech skills are super important, but also those like softer or whatever we've decided as an industry to call them, those non-non-coding skills are so important as well.

And you can really show that, you can actually show both types of skills if you are teaching in some sort of way, whether that's a YouTube channel or a blog or doing conference talks. What, I wanna go back to the dev advocacy role. Do you all code? I mean, this is kind of a question for me because like, you know, my, I'm not saying this is right, but like my thought is, is like, you take the developers who maybe can't hack it and put it in dev advocacy that maybe have good social skills. Obviously that's wrong. So I wanna set the record straight here with you.

Yeah, so most of the people on my team have been senior software engineers previously. So they're people that can definitely code. In fact, I think that I code more as the developer advocate than I did as a senior software engineer because I'm building demos, right? And so as a senior software engineer, a lot of times you're like fixing a bug or you're trying to work with another developer on mentorship or something like that. But as a developer advocate, you're building all these demos. like I normally build a sample app a week or so. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're building an app like end to end, and obviously it's not like in production, it's not like this, it's like amazing future-rich thing, but you write a lot of code in order to get there, and there's a lot of like dogfooding the product too of with Amplify, like building apps over and over and over again to make sure that things work the way that they're supposed to.

And almost being like a QA engineer sometimes before launches. So there's a ton of writing code. I would say that there's a lot of balance too between the communication and writing and all that. That's super, super important as well, but still definitely writing code before I was a manager, at least though definitely writing code every day. If someone's watching this now in the future and they're like, I maybe want to be in dev advocacy, what should I bring to the table? Like what would you distill that down? Or if someone's like they're like, man, I think something else is out there. I want to do more instead of just coding.

Why do you think dev advocacy could be that for them? So I really like it because my background is in teaching. I studied education in school. I went through my practice semester in a middle school teaching math and all that. I'm still actually a legal license teacher, which I think is funny too. That's awesome. I guess that's my fun fact. But I think that that's the part of developer advocacy that gets me excited is that I can really make impact on our product and also teach it to other people. And so I get to take all these different things that I'm interested in and button all them into one role And it allows me to be really cross functional Which I didn't get as much when I was a software engineer like at some point of being a software engineer I got a little bored of it to be honest Just because I felt like I was implementing similar things over and over again Even if they were slightly different I needed a new challenge And so I think that's where developer advocacy really comes in and as far as getting that job every job that I've forgotten gotten has been from doing that job before I got the job.

And so creating blog posts, creating YouTube videos, speaking at conferences, all those things where things that I was doing long before I had the job title developer advocate. I think that's true for software engineers too, is pretty much every software engineer gets their job by coding a ton first and that's really the honor to the job. And the same thing is true for developer advocacy. So looking for people with strong communication skills, people who are integrated with a community, people who are really take that earned trust to heart that they're not just marketing things because it's shiny or whatever, it's something that they really believe in and that they want to make better.

Good at giving feedback too, because so much of my job is giving feedback to other people about the product or about our marketing or any of those things as well. So those are all skills that I definitely look for in a developed advocate and think are really important. I love that. So let's pivot the conversation and kind of going more out of boot camp. Yes. And you know, because I know you have experience that. So talk about your background with teaching at boot camps and then obviously having a few more questions. Totally, totally. So I have a fun background in that. I started in coding in computer science and college, but I ended up dropping out and actually leaving college a couple of years early.

Like I got my degree, but I became a full-time software engineer when I was 20 or 19. And so I have that like self taught background as well, where I didn't know anything about web development. I only had a couple computer science classes. And then I transitioned into teaching at a coding boot camp. I started off with like guest lectures and then so again, like doing the job before I got the job. And then I moved to teaching full time. And And it was such an awesome experience to see a click for people, to go from Hello World to building full apps. And I have so many former students now who are senior software engineers that big companies and all that.

And it's just like, it's got to be so cool. It's so cool because I have so much power by myself to write code or whatever. But like think about the hundreds and hundreds of students that I've had, how much code they can write. I don't know. That blows my mind. Yeah. I think the portfolio thing is even more important for bootcamp grads is that boot camps have like a mixed reputation in the industry and just saying it how it is. I think that some boot camps are absolutely incredible and are able to teach the tangible job skills in a way that computer science programs are not.

Like I know that I was writing a Tennessee plus plus in college and that's not something that I've ever had to do professionally. Plus plus man. Thank you. See plus plus is something else. But a lot of the job, the skills are really, really tangible. And so showing that off on a portfolio is so important. And when you're doing that, make sure that it's an application that shows off your skills is something relatively different to like a to-do list app or a restaurant app. Those were the two that you saw most frequently as a bootcamp instructor. So just like add some sort of spin on it.

Yeah. Feel something that you would use yourself. I love that. Because that's going to be so much more interesting. And it's also going to keep you hooked too, because chances are there's going to be a little bit of time after the boot camp in between jobs. And so you're probably going to want to keep working on those projects in order to keep your skills up to date. Yeah. And if it's something that you care about working on, that's going to motivate you to work on it so much more than something that's just, you know, This shows off my skills, my coding bootcamp instructor told me interview X and Y, you know, it's another to do list app.

And that is good as the other to do list apps that are out there. I think that that's really important too. So I'm also glad to, by the way, so StreamYard must have a glitch there. I just, as you were talking, I went to my LinkedIn. We've had a ton of comments since, since we've been live. So I want to get them. So for those of you who are watching, thank you, I felt so bad. I was like, there's something wrong. There's a glitch. I finally have Ally and there's a technical glitch, but there's a lot of comments. I'm going to read these off. So someone gave you props.

Ally is a wonderful people, people person. Somebody's talked about I'm glad you mentioned that teaching is a great way to show off your expertise and communication skills. I think we don't realize that a lot of times. You know, and then someone goes human skills for the win. The best way you know, you show understand the concepts to teach someone else. Alec comes in and asks what was, what was, or were the biggest breakthroughs that you had that took you from where you're at to going to FANG? Oh, that's a good question. That's a great question again. Thank y'all for commenting. Literally, I haven't seen any of these comments.

So thank you so much. So yeah, and then, and there's a few more questions too. So go ahead and I'll let you know. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, so I honestly was really opposed to the idea of becoming a developer advocate. I'll be super honest about that. away. That I was doing this as a side job. So I was creating content, I was creating courses, I was creating videos, and it was actually my bigger income stream than my day job. And so I was like, I want to keep it that way. I want to keep it my little company and my little thing and have total control over it.

And so I was really scared about becoming a developer advocate and having to use that in part for a company. And you can, so you mentioned Natter with render ATL. He was actually my hiring manager. No way. That's all. Yeah, it was just super funny. And you can ask him the first conversation that we had. I was just like, I don't know if like being a developer advocate is for me. Like this is just something that I do on the side. And I think there is some something to be said for keeping your hobbies, your hobbies. But then there's also something to be said for making your day job, something that you're really passionate about.

And so I'm really I'm really glad that I tried it because I really, really enjoy it now. And I've only been a developer advocate. I've only had the job title for about a year and a half. So it's not something that I've been doing for years and years and years. Something that I'm relatively new to. So he talks me into it. He talks me into interviewing. But I think a lot of it is again, doing the job before I was doing the job of working with different companies. Yeah. I think that mindset. I think is an incredible mindset that a lot of people don't understand.

A lot of times you gotta do the job before you get the job. Yeah. And you gotta be humble enough, props to you, for being humble enough to not sit. I know a lot of guys and gals are like, you know what? I'm not until they, until they anoint me or they'll help me or, you know, they notice like, listen, that's not how it works. Like my podcast, like, they couldn't go, hey, we want you to have a podcast. I was like, you know what? Like, I just want to help tell stories and help people and now it's become a thing. And so again, props to you for having that mindset.

I'm sorry I interrupted you for that. Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. And I think it's worthwhile acknowledging that there's some privilege in that statement as well that having the time to do these things that aren't part of your job is something that I was able to do because, you know, I was in my early 20s at the time And I was able to spend that time. I was single and didn't have any kids. And so I think that that's a big piece of it as well, that I had a day job and was able to be flexible and try these things out without a huge risk as well.

So I wanna acknowledge that, but also I do think that the best way usually to get noticed by somebody, or if you really want something is to just do it and then see what happens and put that work in and try and see if you end up being successful with it. And also the things that you care about too, of teaching other people, and this was really my outlet for that, that's a really hard started, was not that I wanted to have a career in developer advocacy. At fact, at that point, I don't even think developer advocacy was really a thing. I think there was technical evangelism a little bit, but if it wasn't really as much of a thing as it is now.

And so when that wasn't my goal, my goal was literally just to teach the things that I was learning to other people. And then it started spiraling from there. And so I think having those other goals to those like personal goals is really valuable why you want to do something and having that underlying reason. That's something I tell beginner programmers to is like have your reason. It can be that you want a more successful career for your family, but it could also be that you really like building things and you like breaking things and you like putting things back together. You like trying to build logos, yeah.

Or adult legos, like that's a lot of what programming is. And so having that reason is so important because at some point the learning journey is going to get really tough. I think a lot of people think of learning as this like linear thing where you start somewhere and then you learn a little bit more and then you learn a little bit more. But it's not like that. There's a ton of ups and downs. You should be failing when you're learning. If you're not failing, then you're not being as effective as you could be at learning. And so there's going to be those hard points.

So having that reason to come back to is so critical whenever you're doing something new. I want to ask you this kind of follow up on Elliot's question with with Natter. Did you like because Elliot asked about the breakthrough was was that just like a was it did you mean about a conference like how did you get connected with him? Because I would say that would be a breakthrough right? It's like getting connected with him to get it. Totally. He had been following me on social media for years and he just like went in my DMs in Twitter. That's how I'm at Natter. That's how that's how that's how this happens.

So yeah, exactly. That worked with her or LinkedIn, but just network, please network. Yeah, having that like personal brand, a thing that you're associated with is really valuable as well and what leads to a lot of those opportunities. 100% Greg. And again, I wish I could throw I wish I could give shout outs. I give everyone shout outs when they say, Hey, but I can't because there's a glitch in a stream yard dang it stream yard. How does how does developer advocacy this comes from grad Bollinger. He was a former guest on the show. He's in Kansas City. How does developer advocacy time to recruiting hiring and retention?

Oh, that's a really good question as well. I know that having those connections to the community and the ability to have that audience that often develop or advocates build up and you don't need to have a large audience to be a developer advocate. You don't need to have a large audience to be an awesome developer advocate. There are those other pieces too of giving feedback and communicating well and all those things that make you an awesome developer advocate. But a lot of developer advocates do have larger audiences and it does really help in recruiting to be able to send out a tweet and get a bunch of eyes on it or have those relationships built up with other people who are content creators.

Like I know for developer advocacy, hearing it's so helpful to have friendships with a bunch of people that are also creating content out there. Because then you have an open position. It's like, hey, are you interested? Hey, let me be my friend. I mean, literally like that is what it is. And but you got to start somewhere. What about retention? Do you guys help on the retention side? I mean, I guess keeping people engaged and especially if you're on internal tooling teams, I'm sure that plays a huge part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen more often that there are now like internal developer advocate roles that some companies have advocating for certain tooling and making sure that the developer experience is really awesome internally for developers.

I think that would really help with that as well. That being said, I think something that we can help out with internally too is keeping the motivation up and making sure that we're passing on the positive feedback as well because I think that sometimes as teams, we focus on, hey, this customer isn't happy. Like, hey, this person found something broken. But as developer advocates, we get so much of that positive side of, hey, I just tried this and that's the coolest thing ever. Or like, this is the most awesome demo. And so sharing that with them, because we get to be the faces of these things, but the kind of scenes there are hundreds of people working on building these things.

And they've spent all those hours too. And so any feedback that I get that's positive was built by all of them, right? They're the ones that are responsible for that. And so I always want to share that love with them and that feedback. So something that I highly recommend for teams is to start like a customer love channel or something along those lines in your slide and just post all the positives in there because that keeps motivation up internally and make sure that you're not losing that morale of you only focusing on the negative. I love that, I love that. All right, so, Ali, we wrap it up here.

First off, thank you again for hanging out with me. I'm talking time flies when you're having fun. I wanted to, I always leave the last few minutes to the guests to just anything they want to rant on, say, encourage others. Is there anything you're super passionate about right now in the tech space? It doesn't even have to be around the topics we talked about. I just kind of want to leave this this this less a little bit for you. And again, thank you all for all who tuned in. Like I said, I'm paying attention to Alan. Just look at my iPad, everybody who's comments. So thank you all for tuning in.

But, Ali, any last comments? Yeah. Well, some people asked about like breaking into working at AWS. Yeah. I want to shout out that we're hiring like wild right now on Amplify. So if you're interested, send me a DM on here, LinkedIn, and I can connect you with hiring managers or I'm hiring myself too. So if you want to be a developer advocate, reach out. I love it. I love it. Well, y'all, thank you for hanging out with us this morning. On guidance counselor 2.0, Ali, stay on real quick as we wrap up as I end here. Tomorrow morning, unicorn finders, because a guy can't have too many podcasts.

930 a.m. Central tomorrow morning, we actually have a true unicorn. So it's one of the fastest growing startups in Nashville, built technologies, they just recently were valued over a billion dollars. And so we're having the VP of product on tomorrow, Chris Boyd, they are in the, it's not a super sexy space, it's the mortgage space and the construction lending. However, what they have done is incredible. So you won't want to miss it, 930 AM Central tomorrow. Can't wait to see y'all. Thanks for hanging out this morning. And again, I would give all y'all shout outs, but it will take too long. So thank y'all all for tuning in and we'll see you tomorrow.

Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful, because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com, or at Tdastin on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.