Adrienne started as an intern writing VB.NET and Google API code to administer a university's email system. She fell into development and found she enjoyed it.
Adrienne became a developer advocate by accident
she gave conference talks on development topics and MongoDB recruited her. She loves teaching, travel and meeting developers.
Challenges of being a dev advocate include burnout risk from diverse responsibilities and extensive travel. Focusing on a few activities helps.
Adrienne mentors in schools to increase diversity, show development is an option beyond medicine for Filipinos, and change stereotypes about what developers look like.
For those looking to get into developer advocacy, hone sharing skills via blogging, videos, local meetups etc. Then share that content to demonstrate capabilities.
(00:02) hi everyone welcome to develop initial broadcast it's great to have you here with us on the podcast today how's it going really great really happy to be here thank you for having me on developer Nation yeah I'm really excited for this episode especially given the fact that we both are Developer Advocates so I'm sure I'm gonna be learning a lot of things from you today as well as our community members who are mostly developers but I'm pretty sure most of them would be eyeing to make career in developer
(00:30) relations and would learn a thing or two from you so for our community members could you just introduce yourself for uh what things you are currently working on and uh uh your your career Journey where you started with and where you are today so people know understand your background and what things you're going to be working on at this present moment uh sure I'll give the short version so we can go into more depth a little later but hi kamusta I'm Adrian techa I'm a senior developer Advocate at Cisco my
(01:01) journey pretty much started uh by accident as a lot of the things that in my career have um I never sought out to be a developer I never studied computer science I actually majored in management information systems and I got into software development through an internship mostly because I needed a way to pay for college so I found a student internship that focused on software development found out that I actually like doing this stuff as I was interning and from that point on I worked at several different uh medium to large
(01:35) size companies around the Las Vegas Valley versus the.net developer then slowly kind of merging into the JavaScript land and some of the other front-end Frameworks before again accidentally Landing in developer advocacy um prior to Cisco I was actually at mongodb also as a senior developer Advocate and that's another story you can ask me about that but I kind of fell into it again because I was actually just sharing my journey on conference speaking and mongodb reached out and said hey uh would you like to apply for
(02:08) this job and I said this is a job that's super cool I didn't know that and so I did uh that's kind of how I got to this point in developer advocacy well that's really interesting because given the fact that uh you were not uh knowing that this just sort of job exists but now you are full-fledgedly embracing it going out to different conferences giving talk and actually evangelism evangelizing for the company that you're working on it's pretty cool and you did mention about the internship
(02:37) so uh tell me a bit more about that internship was it basically about learning development was it more about uh how computer science in general work and what are different career paths that someone make in whether it's data science whether it's into co-development system level what sort of internships do you have back in the days sure so at that time um like I said I wasn't even sure what I was going to do and I actually found it through my student job so even before the internship um the job that I found was for an I.T
(03:09) Help Desk position so if you needed your passwords reset if you needed help troubleshooting your computer both students or professors I was the person you called to try to help troubleshoot that and it was through this job uh that I found this internship so this internship was focused on software development to help in particular the University's office of Information Technology and at that time the language that I worked in was actually vb.
(03:37) net and also working with some Google apis so this position focused on helping the email Administration system of the University which at the time was at Google or using Gmail and so a lot of that was really learning what development was about because I had I had no idea so I was very lucky to actually have a full team of all women as my first software development team and I've never actually had that since which is kind of funny but um focused on you know learning how to work with SQL and how to write queries that would grab all of the accounts that
(04:12) needed to be either disabled or retroactively brought back if they were you know a student coming back I worked with Google API so a little bit of front end and learning with apis how to work with Google's interface to create accounts how to add information how to send all that information through to Google to administer those accounts for the email for the University system and then I worked with a bunch of other different people so that internship was very very um foundational for me in terms of learning what software element was what
(04:48) the types of teams you would work with and what kinds of things you could do but at the time that was the major project I worked on was the email Administration system for the University really interesting uh the thing I wanted to take this conversation forward is uh and I often ask this to a lot of the podcast guests coming on developer Nation broadcast is uh there is this huge influx of the next generation of software developers and computer science enthusiasts coming into the industry that don't necessarily have a computer
(05:17) science degree but they are pursuing some courses they are pursuing some uh some uh certifications or training program and they are very well developers they are able to find their way in we open source contributions and find their place into the industry so do you think that uh uh you as as you also mentioned that you don't have a professional computer science degree do you think that uh it's okay to not have that professional degree and use this courses and it's very much possible to build a career and grow on it or do you
(05:47) think that this degree would also be very much helpful if you have that in place as well as discourses so you can bundle up together and it's easier and a faster Pace when it comes to making a career in professional computer science engineering or anything that's remotely related to development or developer developer advocacy in general I think there's a two-part answer to that for me in the experience I've seen so far so number one you absolutely do not need a computer science degree I have seen that all throughout some of
(06:18) the best developers I know don't have a computer science degree they really just have a knack for learning they want to know what the latest and greatest is or they pick a specific topic that they really want to get well uh versed in and they just continue learning as much as they can building as much as they can and yeah you absolutely do not need a computer science degree to be successful that's a fact the second part to that answer is I while I while I say the first part that doesn't mean that a
(06:50) computer science degree is not helpful or that you don't need it I think if you have both you actually put yourself forward and you have a leg up on a lot of other developers who also have a degree by doing the courses by doing that extra building by doing the extra projects and so I think especially coming from my own experience I did management information systems so we still had development networking databases a lot of that foundational coursework in addition to business courses and so where I don't have the
(07:28) background is in data structures and algorithms or some of that other foundational computer science thinking but by adding that later on or working on that either for preparing for an interview or using it in the job as needed that's kind of where I guess I picked up or made up for that last time where I didn't have it in University and that's still very much useful it's still very good to know how things work under the surface it's still good to know to have that way of thinking and so it's
(07:59) still very very beneficial to know those topics so even if you don't learn it beforehand or learn it officially you know in University it's still very very helpful and you'll still probably make use of it sometime later on in your career I totally agree given the fact that you also have courses of your own now on LinkedIn learning platform do you see a lot of the people who are pursuing this courses have a professional a college degree or like what sort of ratio do you do you see or is it something that you
(08:29) don't care about and you're like okay everyone's welcome I don't care if you have a degree but I'm just trying to understand what sort of people are taking these courses yes so um at least of the other instructors that I've seen it runs the whole gamut there are people who don't have college degrees there are people who have phds who are teaching and again I think it comes back to how passionate you are about it how much experience yourself you have with the topic that you're trying to teach and honestly
(08:58) there are a lot of courses too where there are people who are like I want to learn this subject and the best way to learn it is to teach it so um you can learn it in a one way uh but when you go to teach something you find all those little bits and pieces of okay so I need to explain this topic to someone who doesn't know it at all and that's kind of where the deeper Learning Happens because you need to go that extra mile you need to go and see what are the pieces that are missing that you know that you needed to learn this topic
(09:29) well enough to be able to be comfortable to teach it so um so no college degrees again are not necessarily necessary necessary but they're not a bad thing you know they don't work against you but it's absolutely possible if you don't have it absolutely coming to your current role as a senior developer Advocate as you mentioned back you were just giving talks in different conferences because that's what you loved about it and mongodb kind of uh picked it up from there and you made a transition in
(09:58) developer advocacy uh what would you say is something that motivated you to continue in this career journey and what things you really love about being a developer Advocate from your day-to-day role sure so a very quick intro to that um I was working as a senior developer and working on a migration from Azure or on-prem to full Cloud Azure platform and at that time I was learning a lot and so at that same time a lot of companies they sometimes offer a stipend for employees to kind of put towards Learning and Development so that could
(10:37) be going to a conference going to some courses Etc so at that same time I went to a conference and I was watching somebody talk about a particular topic specifically how to build pipelines in Azure devops and I was thinking to myself this person is really bad they were not a great speaker the talks that they had or the content that they had they're basically just reading off of the slides reading bullet points and it was not a very good talk and so it was at that moment that I said you know what does it actually take to to become a
(11:12) speaker like how do these people get up there because I felt I could do a better job than that person there and so I researched it and found that a lot of these conferences you actually get there by applying and you just uh create a talk proposal and tell them hey this is what I want to talk about this is what I think will be useful for the attendees of your conference and so I said you know what I just felt like let me just try to submit and see what happens and I did and at that time I got accepted to seven conferences so I freaked out
(11:45) because I'm like oh my gosh you know I'm a nobody like nobody knows me why would they accept me but that was kind of the first point that I said that made me confident to say oh people actually want to hear the topics that I'm proposing the way that I've written my proposal is uh good enough that it's caught the eye of the committee and said this is good to put into our agenda and so that is what kind of kick-started everything and I'll be honest um a big part of why I really love what
(12:16) I do is that I do get to travel and I get to go to a lot of different developer communities and talk to all of these different developer communities another backstory to that which makes sense which will make a lot of sense is that in college I actually was a pre-international business major because I thought that would give me a job like Anthony Bourdain uh you know you'd get your own show you get to travel to other places eat everywhere and so I'm like oh and then when I learned that that wasn't
(12:46) the case I'm like oh well I need a plan B so it's kind of funny how that has how I've gone into developer advocacy because I've I'm kind of fulfilling that in this role and so what keeps me going in this role is aside from the travel and aside from getting to meet a bunch of different developers around the world is that there's a lot of different ways to to teach something so for example let's say say I had to you know create a demo or kind of give a workshop on something that I don't know at all it's
(13:20) a new product or it's a new feature or it's something I may not be familiar with There's an opportunity to learn more about it to see what developers would find relevant about that product or find why it would make their um experience a lot nicer a lot more productive and just finding all the pieces that are relevant to developers and bringing that to the Forefront so doing a lot of that and having a lot of different Avenues to do that conference talks videos blogs uh learning Labs a lot of which Cisco has and sandboxes
(13:54) there's so many different ways to teach something I think that's one reason why I do like this role is that you know if I if I ever get tired of conference talks which I don't think I ever will there's always another way to teach something and provide more resources to all kinds of learners I couldn't agree more that's the best part for developer advocacy you get to meet a lot of people who are actually like-minded and there are a lot of collaboration opportunities that comes up you are hanging out with those people
(14:23) the the atmosphere at this conferences are really good and productive you mentioned about the good part of developer advocacy now let's talk about some challenges that you find on in a day-to-day uh you know uh running your developer advocacy program what are some challenges and what are some aspects that you think are hard and you're still working on that and as a developer Advocate I understand from from the fact because there are a lot of things that you're doing at a time you're training a
(14:50) conference and at the same time you're maintaining documentation you also have to update the community members what's what's happening so what are your challenges at Cisco being a senior developer advocate I'll say these are pretty common to most places so this is this isn't just Cisco in general but what I found as a developer Advocate is that you are kind of expected to do a lot uh you know you are the community manager you are the person that goes to conferences you are the person that is maintaining
(15:20) documentation you are the person that's creating tutorials and if you take it this look at those four things I've mentioned those are all jobs in and of themselves those are four separate things that four separate people could do but there's this expectation that people developer Advocates are expected to do it all and so yes the risk of burnout and just not knowing what is a priority because everything is a priority uh is is very difficult um so it's very much helpful to kind of align you know with your manager and say
(15:53) what is the top priority what are the things that I should be working on and even better if you can focus on a couple of those things uh the the better um what I try to do because I know as you know in the experience that I've had is that you kind of just get asked to do a lot of different things is if you can make a way or find a way to focus on a couple of those things uh it's easier for everybody involved because it's easier to manage your time it's also easier to focus on a few of the things
(16:25) that you actually really enjoy so if you like creating videos for example and you like creating content that alone can take up a lot of your time you have to prep for that you have to research you have to write the scripts you have to film the things if you're doing video you have to edit it that's a lot of work and that's just one task so um again if you can focus on what you want to do it would be a lot easier for everybody involved another thing that's kind of difficult in developer advocacy
(16:52) in general is if you are the person that's on the road travel is glamorous but if you're on the road for like three four weeks two months you get tired of it you get tired living out of a suitcase you miss your own bed you miss um the jet lag is real when you get back trying to coordinate different meeting times trying to still keep up with your meetings and tasks while you are on the road uh it's very very difficult so yes it is nice you know if you get to go maybe once or twice a month but if you
(17:26) are on the road a lot more it's exhausting foreign agree more Adrian I see that you're also involved mentoring a lot of folks around different communities and as a developer Advocate mentorship becomes a part of the role uh community members look up to you for for things that you could help them with but you also being a mentor at code.
(17:53) org who code so tell me about what motivated you to you know Mentor the next generation of these developers and people in Tech is there something coming from the love of teaching or what what's what's in for you like how do you see mentorship opportunities that is very special to me because um it it started with when I started to share my own Journey on Instagram um this is when admittedly Instagram was a little bit bigger maybe it's still big I don't know uh but when I was in that role right before I actually moved into uh developer advocacy I just started to
(18:28) share my day-to-day of what I did as a developer because I didn't see a lot of people like myself um you know when you think of a developer a lot of people at the time and unfortunately a little bit now when you say developer the first words that come into your mind are probably they're a guy they like to wear hoodies and they're all in black and they're in the dark and they don't like to talk to people there's this very very single one-sided Vision or image of what a developer is supposed to be and I said
(19:02) that's not the case I'm a developer and I'm completely opposite from all of that I like to dress up I like you know I'm a woman I don't I like to talk to people not so much but I do like to talk to people I'm not in a dark you know basement or whatever hiding from everybody I wanted to change yeah I wanted to change this image of what a developer meant and so I started to do that in my own way by sharing my journey on Instagram and that actually became a community in and of itself there are a
(19:35) lot of other girls and women who had reached out to me and say thank you so much for sharing your journey I didn't know there were other developers or I didn't know there were Filipina developers I also like sharing that I'm a Filipino descent I'm filipino-american but I'm very proud of my Heritage and so finding other Filipinos because um in our culture it's very popular to kind of go into the medical route either to become a nurse or a doctor and I was not one of those people I did not want
(20:03) to become a nurse and so as a Filipino person you're kind of like well what do I do like that's kind of the only path that is set forward for me and so again it's like hey here's this other path that is a really fulfilling and satisfying path that you can be proud of if you don't want to go into the medical field so I did it to do that and so this kind of naturally extended into sharing my story and kind of mentoring others other schools in Las Vegas kind of just asked me hey we see that you are on
(20:39) there you're part of the code.org list of mentors would you mind coming into the classroom and just spending some time with these you know first graders fifth graders third graders high schoolers and like absolutely I definitely would love to talk to them and so it's really interesting to go into those classrooms and say hey I'm a software developer this is what I do this is how you can get there here's what you can do with code and it's really really fulfilling to see especially the little girls who are like
(21:07) you're a software developer I'm like yep I'm a software developer you can be one too and so just showing everybody that this is a possible route and it's something that's really fun and can offer a very fulfilling career path I think that's why I like doing it and continue to Mentor as much as I can it's amazing giving back to the community and not just in terms of development I would say I personally feel that every developer should someday I go out and also try speaking in different
(21:35) conferences maybe local meetup groups so I I you just mentioned that you sent out the call for proposal and you got selected by seven different conferences so tell us about uh that and also like if someone is a developer who is working on some new technologies some new stack and if they just want to you know take it forward and speak about it at a conference or a local meetup group and they are a bit shy about that how would you say that they go about it because you're also coming from the same experience because you've seen someone
(22:04) giving a talk and you say oh I could do better than that so what are your opinions and what are your views and advice for the people who who and first of all why should they do it and if they want to do it how should they do it that is a great question uh yes if you want to do it absolutely do it um the that's the biggest question I get is I'm kind of scared or I don't know if I can do it or another thing I hear is oh this topic has been done so many times like why would I want to give a talk about that and what I'll answer is
(22:37) everybody may do the same topic but they don't say it or explain it in a way that you will because your voice is unique so if you take a look at all the conference talks that you see or meetup group topics and you find what's common among them there are a lot of JavaScript topics a lot of the same JavaScript topics a lot of the same react topics there are a lot of topics that are done over and over and over again but why do you still see them and it's because of different people have a different way of
(23:09) explaining it and may have a better way or a novel way to explain it so they will never go out of style especially if they are hot to topics or topics that are here to stay in the tech industry so if you think that is something that you are working on if it's new to you that's still a very valid perspective that is um well should be shared and there are a lot of other people who are like you who may be in the same situation as you who can relate to you so absolutely don't let that be something that stops you
(23:41) from sharing um in order to get started there's there's two approaches to this there's like the the big bang thing which is what I did so I just went straight to the conference right I'm like okay let me just apply to all the conferences that I think uh would be relevant and where I have something to share and see what happens and I got accepted to seven and you kind of just go in there and you do it the other way if you want to do it a little bit more methodically and build up to it is meetups are a super great
(24:13) place to kind of get started because it's a small solar crowd local meetups are usually easier to get to and people who run these local meetups are always looking for people to speak they want they have a community already built for you they're usually much nicer in terms of uh you know being more flexible in what you want to talk about and it's the local community and once you kind of do that once or twice you kind of get more comfortable with the community you get comfortable with the audience you get
(24:44) comfortable with what it's like speaking to other people and so maybe you work your way up so maybe you apply to a conference that's you know domestic or you apply to one that's in your state if you have a conference running there and then slowly but surely as your audience grows I think that's one way people find the confidence to kind of get all the way to the conference level where they're speaking in front of thousands of people so that's another way to do it that's amazing and I would add that even
(25:15) the most experienced speakers uh from developer Community they still sometimes get rejection from the from these conferences and that's totally fine you don't have to be heartbroken about it there's always the next conference or a next Meetup where your talk would be the perfect fit and you just have to keep doing it so uh do give out talks because yeah please oh I will add to that that the rejection for the seven that I got when I first applied I had about 121 rejections yeah absolutely uh so do you have uh sort of
(25:52) a mantra when it comes to community and building Community or scaling Community or you know what what's your take on that because I feel that being a developer Advocate empathy is a really uh strong suite that every developer Advocate should have they should understand the needs of the community and able to Advocate that within the company that this is my what my community wants and this is what we need to prioritize but uh let's talk about Adrian mantras when it comes to communities and developer advocacy
(26:20) so that's a great question I think personally I've kind of focused um I think as most people would with the communities that they align with in the communities that they would like to grow into or be a part of so I'll explain that by saying when I mentioned how a lot of other Filipina girls and women would contact me and say oh you're a developer you know they would ask me questions similar to how you are doing right now like how did you get to developer advocacy what is being a software developer like how do I prepare
(26:54) for an interview how do I write a cfp or a talk proposal you know how do you do you not get nervous when you go up and talk all of these different questions um they kind of come to me partly because yes my face is out there you know I've spoken at conferences I write content for companies I have a book my name is out there so people come to me but in the beginning I purposely intentionally tried to find in other Filipina software developers to kind of you know grow that Community I know that we're out there I know that we're not
(27:27) all in the medical field and so again it's part of showing that there is this community that actually exists and wants to be part of the larger Tech Community as a whole and so that Focus has led me to find other Filipina speakers who are in Tech who are around the world and that's been a really great part of focusing on this community there's Jonah in Sweden who is also a speaker focus on focuses on Azure topics there's marilog in Denmark and I've gotten the chance to meet marlag but not Jonah yet I hope to
(28:02) meet her sometime this year and even though we haven't met we still have this friendship that goes across the internet and we support each other you know if we have a conference that's happening and they're looking for more speakers I reach out to them and say hey here's a great opportunity for you to go speak at this place place because you have the expertise and you probably would enjoy speaking here and so that those kinds of relationships building those relationships and then connecting people
(28:31) to the relevant places I think is a really big part of that community building so it's one thing to meet it and grow the network for yourself it's another to kind of say hey you are a perfect fit for this particular thing and then that Community kind of naturally grows because you're connecting people so I think if there's any Mantra of mine when it comes to community it's I kind of Meet the people myself first and then I see if there's a fit for them and then I try to connect relevant people together to grow that
(29:03) network network even larger where those connections may not have ever been made that's amazing that sort of uh connecting people and enabling Serendipity so they found different ways on when it comes to collaboration you never know what sort of things would come out when people who have like sort like-minded thinking uh come together so that's amazing I love that when it comes to communicating ideas or developer Advocates usually write blogs about it or make videos or you know it could be like I'm just gonna give a talk out
(29:32) there in a conference about this topic and use that conference recording to put it out there in my community uh so uh what are you what are your thoughts on this like uh do you segregate this basic on the on the basis of topic like this topic is best fit for a Blog I might try to blog about it or this topic is better explained when I share my screen so I'm gonna make a video about it so how do you go about this is it because of topic is it because what community likes what sort of things comes into your mind when
(30:00) you want to put something out there yeah I think it it depends and that's the famous answer uh for me I think it comes from number one what does the community want so that could mean what topics are most relevant what topics are they searching for what do they want to learn because you may be really interested in some super Niche topic but nobody wants to learn about it for you great but as a developer Advocate you want to serve your community you want to serve the developers that you are creating this content for and so that's
(30:33) number one is what does your community want what do they look for then once you kind of narrow down those topics then it goes down to how do they like consuming it so you may have a community that loves blogs they like reading it they like um step-by-step tutorials and then you may find there's another subset of that community that actually prefers videos so this is where the creativity comes in because usually when you create this kind of content you probably do both to cover both of those communities and
(31:05) sometimes the topic itself lends itself well to having both so you may have a video that has the screen capture and you're doing a voiceover of here's how you do something but then you have an accompanying blog that has code Snippets that's easy to copy and paste so that they can work alongside you in a alongside the video so it depends on the topic sometimes if it's a bit more generic or just an overview then yeah maybe a video is fine that will be enough or sometimes you just do a Blog but in most cases most of the topics and
(31:39) content that you create are going to be in all of the different forms so that it serves the majority of your community in the way that they want to consume that type of content that makes a lot of sense and talking about content I'm really excited about the things that we are going to be doing together and that includes some blogs coming up for developeration uh Community would you also like to talk about the things that we're going to be do I know for the fact that we would be doing some content around apis and API insights if you
(32:08) could just you know tease our community members what they could expect in future weeks or months like just take it away and tell us about what we are working on sure so this is something uh I'm super excited about we have an open source tool called API insights and it's a way to help developers pretty much um uh automate creating better apis and what I mean by that is it's a it's part static analysis tool but it's also a tool that helps you look into your apis and it essentially calculates a score so
(32:43) if you like games and you like gamifying things this is like the perfect thing for you so as you're writing your API we have an engine that statically analyzes your API endpoints and it checks all of the different versions of your API against say an open API spec and it calculates the score how well are you doing against these specifications and that concept is wrapped into this tool and so the next blog that I hope to write for a developer nation is an introduction to how to get started with that Tool uh specifically how to install
(33:17) it on vs code because we have a vs code extension for it and to do just a couple run-throughs of how you would use this tool in your developer workflow and then and hopefully a follow-up blog on how to integrate that into your cicd pipeline with GitHub actions wow very exciting and I'm Gonna Leave the links when the blocks are up if you're coming and seeing this video later on will we get you covered I'm loving this conversation Irene but uh we are coming to the end of this podcast so I'm just gonna ask you a
(33:48) couple of last questions so the first one being what are you most excited about in today's Tech world what are you what are you you know what excites you when you see technology Happening Here I know CES is happening uh in your city at the moment and then we will have a Mobile World Congress next month so a lot of amazing things to come and unveiled but what excites you the most in in tech industry at this present moment so one thing that I've been uh following closely I don't think it's there but I
(34:16) think we're starting one thing I am excited about is the prospect of being able to own our own data uh and what I mean by that is uh I think it's pretty understood at this point that a lot of different companies have a lot of data on us they know us very very well from what we search online to how we shop to what devices we use and a lot of people don't necessarily understand that there's this really large profile about us that uh unwillingly most of the time they have collected about us and so uh
(34:51) there are movements to uh or there are more people kind of bringing to light and saying hey we should take charge of our own data of our own profiles that have been built up and I'm very excited at the prospect of potentially owning our data and you know if we actually wanted to sell that data to the companies our cells why not make a buck off of our own data right so the people who want to be super private can have autonomy over their data and then the people who want to make use of that data can so we're it's always been
(35:25) talked about and it's something that always interested me but I think now it's becoming closer to reality because of all of the protections that we have in place and because a lot of it is being brought to light so that's what I'm excited about 100 I wouldn't mind monetizing moisture data in my room any day why not all right so I have the last question for you because this podcast is mainly focused on inspiring people from the career trajectory of our guests so for someone who is currently doing some
(35:55) sort of development and you know into the tech industry in general and they want to make a transition to developer advocacy what sort of advice would you give them where they can start and what are the different places they can hang out different skills that they should learn do they need to be a really good speaker and good writer like just just share about your vision of developer advocacy and what someone in this uh wanted to make a career in this field in this field can start and how they can progress forward
(36:23) of course so yes the developer advocacy is a very exciting thing to be thinking about as a developer what I would say to those who are considering it is if you find yourself sharing in a particular way about what you're doing hone in on that so for me the first thing that I wanted to do was share via speaking because that's something that I was used to and wanted to learn more about was I a great speaker before that no I again went into it head first and found out that hey I actually don't mind talking
(36:57) in front of 3 000 people I still get nervous beforehand but I enjoy doing it it's something I really like to do and so what I would say is for those who are thinking about a career in developer advocacy or want to switch find what it is that you like to do if you find yourself creating videos in your off time that's what you like to do you like to edit videos you like to teach in a way that you know you screen capture record it write the script write those out maybe you have a way in by creating that type of content if you'd like to
(37:29) write blogs really focus on making your writing better make it more concise learn all of the different tools like become more well versed in markdown or some other writing tool that makes it easy for you to publish on a better Cadence start a newsletter to kind of get into that zone of producing something every week or every two weeks if you like talking to people go to your local meetups host one yourself or organize one yourself or see if you can help volunteer and be a part of those local meetups because then you get to
(38:06) see what does it take to run a Meetup how do you organize it what does it take to get people in seats how do you Market your event there are all these different pieces that you don't necessarily learn until you've done the thing and so that's my advice is to find what it is that you you're interested in and find what you know makes you happy and then do those kinds of additional things to help you learn what it means to do it like going to the local events or continue to write or continue to make
(38:35) videos and then share that with the outer community and then you'll find that there are a lot of people who are wanting to hire you for developer advocacy for that particular thing that you're doing and sharing absolutely amazing uh well thank you so much Adrian for your time I really had a fun time discussing everything with you and I'm sure we will be getting you back real really soon for another episode but yeah for now I'm looking forward to all the blogs that you will be sending our way
(39:04) for our community so thank you very much again for your time really had a fun time and we'll probably gonna see you again thank you so much my plan I had a great time too thanks
