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The Developer Advocacy Universe

Adrianne Tacke speaks about her current role, her focus and the challenges she is facing.

In this episode of the Developer Nation Broadcast we welcomed Adrienne Tacke, Senior Developer Advocate at Cisco. Adrianne spoke about her current role, her focus and the challenges she is facing. She also walked us through her journey and how she landed in the developer advocacy universe.

Adriane   

Hi, Ayan. Really great. Really happy to be here. Thank you for having me on Developer Nation. 

Ayan  

Yeah, I’m really excited for this episode, especially given the fact that we both are developer advocates, I’m sure I’m going to be learning a lot of things from you today, as well as our community members who are mostly developers, but I’m pretty sure many of them would be interested in a career in developer relations and could learn a thing or two from you. So, for our community members, could you just introduce yourself referring to what you are currently working on and also giving an overview of your career journey? 

Adriane   

Sure, I’ll give the short version so we can go into more depth a little later. I’m a Senior Developer Advocate at Cisco.. My journey pretty much started by accident as a lot of the things in my career have, 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, and found out that I actually liked doing this stuff as I was interning. And from that point on, I worked at several different medium to large sized companies around the Las Vegas Valley as a dotnet developer, then slowly kind of merging into the JavaScript land and some of the other front-end frameworks.  

Before, again, accidentally landing at developer advocacy, prior to Cisco, I was actually at MongoDB, also as a senior developer advocate. And that’s another story you can ask me about. I kind of fell into it, because I was actually sharing my journey on conference speaking. And MongoDB reached out and said; Hey, would you like to apply for this job? And I said, is this a job?  That’s super cool. I didn’t know that. And so, I did. And that’s kind of how I got to this point in developer advocacy. 

Ayan  

Well, that’s really interesting, because given the fact that you did not know that this sort of job exists and  now you are fully embracing it, going out to different conferences, giving talks and actually evangelizing for the company that you’re working for. So, tell me a bit more about that internship. Was it basically about learning development? Or was it more about how computer science in general works? What sort of internships do you have back in the days? 

Adriane   

So, at that time, 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, the job that I found was for an IT Helpdesk position. So, if you needed your passwords reset, if you needed help troubleshooting your computer, both students or professors, I was the person you call to try to help troubleshoot that. And it was through this job 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 dotnet, and also working with some Google API’s.  

This position focused on helping the email administration system of the university, which at the time was at Google, we were using Gmail. A lot of that was really learning what development was about because 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 sense, which is kind of funny but focused on learning how to work with SQL and how to write queries that would grab all of the accounts that needed to be either disabled or retroactively brought back if they were, you know, a student coming back. I worked with Google API’s.  

So, with a little bit of front end and learning with API’s, 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 foundational for me in terms of learning what software development is, what the types of teams you would work with, and what kinds of things you could do. But at the time, the major project I worked on was the email administration system for the university. 

Ayan  

What do you think about the influx of the next generation of software developers and computer science enthusiasts coming into the industry without necessarily having a computer science degree?  They’re pursuing some certifications or training programs, and they are very well developers, they are able to find their way in open source contributions and find their place into the industry. So, do you think that it’s okay to not have a professional degree and use these courses instead?  Is it very much possible to build a career and grow it? Or do you think that the degree would also be helpful? 

Adriane   

I think there’s a two-part answer to that for me in the experience I’ve seen so far.  

​​​Number one, you absolutely do not need a computer science degree, I have seen that throughout some of the best developers I know, who 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 versed in, and they just continue learning as much as they can, building as much as they can. You absolutely do not need a computer science degree to be successful. That’s a fact. 

The second part to that answer is, that this doesn’t mean that a 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 the extra building by doing the extra projects. Especially coming from my own experience, I did management information systems, we still had development, networking databases, a lot of that foundational coursework, in addition to business courses. Where I don’t have the background is in data structures and algorithms or some of that other foundational computer science thinking. But I added that later on, or working on that, either for preparing for an interview, or using it in the job as needed. 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. It’s still very, very beneficial to know those topics. Even if you don’t learn it beforehand, or learn it, officially in university, it’s still very, very helpful. And you’ll still probably make use of it sometime later on in your career. 

Ayan  

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 purchasing these courses have a professional college degree or like, what sort of ratio do you see? Or is it something that you don’t care about? And you’re like, “Okay, everyone’s welcome. I don’t care if you have a degree”. 

Adriane   

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 and are teaching. Again, I think it comes back to how passionate you are about it, how much experience you’ve had with the topic that you’re trying to teach.  

And honestly, there are a lot of courses to 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 you can learn it 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 need to learn this topic well enough to be able to be comfortable to teach it. So college degrees, again, are not necessarily 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. 

Ayan  

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 picked it up from there, and you made a transition in developer advocacy, what would you say is something that motivated you to continue in this career journey, and what is that you really love about being a developer advocate from your day to day role? 

Adriane   

I was working as a senior developer, and working on a migration from Azure or on prem to full cloud as your platform. And at that time, I was learning a lot. A lot of companies, they sometimes offer stipends for employees to kind of put towards learning and development. So that could be going to a conference, going to some courses, etc. At that same time, I went to a conference, and I was watching somebody talk about a particular topic, specifically how to build pipelines and 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 there was not a very good talk.  

It was at that moment that I said, “what does it actually take to become a speaker”? How did 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 at a lot of these conferences, you actually get in by applying and you just create a talk proposal and tell them, “this is what I want to talk about”. This is what I think will be useful for the attendees of your conference. ​​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, 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 think people actually want to hear the topics that I’m proposing, the way that I’ve written my proposal is good enough that it’s caught the eye of the committee and said, “this is good to put into our agenda.”  

That is what kind of kick started everything. And I’ll be honest, a big part of why I really love what I do is that I get to travel and I get to go to a lot of different developer communities and talk to all of them.In college, I actually was a pre-International Business major, because I thought that would give me a job like Anthony Bourdain, you know, you get your own show, you get to travel to a place, eat everywhere. And when I learned that wasn’t the case, I needed a plan B. It’s, it’s kind of funny how I’ve gotten into developer advocacy, because I am kind of fulfilling that in this role. What keeps me going in this role aside from the trouble and aside from getting to meet a bunch of different developers around the world, is that there’s a lot of different ways to teach something.

​​So for example, let’s say I had to create a demo or kind of give a workshop on something that I don’t know at all, it’s 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 experience a lot nicer, a lot more productive.

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, slabs, a lot of which Cisco has in sandboxes there’s so many different ways to teach something. I think that’s one reason why I do like this role is that, 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. 

Ayan  

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 come up when you are hanging out with those people. When you are not traveling, how’s the usual day at work in Cisco looks like, like what are different things that you’re currently working on? And of course, when you’re not traveling, what are your day-to-day things that you do as a Senior Developer Advocate that Cisco. 

Adriane   

So, as with all developer advocates at different companies, that can mean a whole bunch of different things. For me personally, I’m actually leading one of our OKRs which very much aligns with how I actually first felt when I joined Cisco, because, you know, when I would tell people, I’m going to be a developer advocate for Cisco, they’re like, “okay…” like, you know, and that’s part of my job is to kind of help bring what’s relevant and show that Cisco does have a lot of API’s.  

And they do have a lot of open source tools that would be relevant to developers, you just don’t think of them because, you know, that’s part of what we’re trying to change is Cisco is relevant to developers.  

Ayan 

You mentioned the good part of developer advocacy. Now let’s talk about some challenges that you find in a day-to-day, you know, 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? And as a developer advocate, I understand that there are a lot of things that you’re doing at a time attending a conference. At the same time you’re maintaining documentation, you also have to update the community members about what’s happening. So, what are your challenges at Cisco being a senior developer advocate? 

Adriane   

I’ll say these are pretty common to most places. So, this isn’t just Cisco in general. But what I’ve found as a developer advocate is that you are kind of expected to do a lot, you are the community manager. You are the person that goes to conferences, you are the person that is maintaining documentation. You are the person that’s creating tutorials, and if you 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 developer advocates are expected to do it all.  

The risk of burnout and just not knowing what is a priority, because everything is a priority is very difficult. So, it’s very much helpful to kind of align, you know, with your manager and say, what is the top priority? What are the things that I should be working on, then even better, if you can focus on a couple of those things, the better. What I tried 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 that if you can make a way or find a way to focus on a couple of those things, 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 that you actually really enjoy. 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 prepare 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 again, if you could 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, that 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, 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. It’s very, very difficult. So yes, it is nice if you get to go maybe once or twice a month, but if you are on the road a lot more, it’s exhausting. 

Ayan  

I see that you’re also involved in mentoring in different communities. And as a developer advocate, mentorship becomes a part of the role, community members look up to you for things that you could help them with. But you have also been a mentor at code.org and glue code. So, tell me about what motivated you to mentor the next generation of developers and people in tech? Is it something coming from the love of teaching? How do you see mentorship opportunities? 

Adriane   

That is very special to me, because it started with when I started to share my own journey on Instagram. This is when admittedly, Instagram was a little bit bigger, maybe it’s still big, I don’t know. But when I was in that role, right before I actually moved into developer advocacy, I just started to share my day-to-day of what I did as a developer because I didn’t see a lot of people like myself. 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 it said, that’s not the case. I’m a developer, and I’m completely opposite,  I like to dress up. I’m a woman, I like to talk to people not so much. But I do like to talk to people, I’m not in a dark basement or whatever hiding from everybody. I wanted to change this image of what a developer meant. 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.

T​​here are a 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 Filipino descent. I’m Filipino-American, but I’m very proud of my heritage. And so, finding other Filipinos because 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 to become a nurse. 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. This kind of naturally extended into sharing my story and kind of mentoring others at other schools in Las Vegas. Kind of just asked me; “hey, we see that you are there, you’re a part of the code.org list of mentors, would you mind coming into the classroom?” And just spending some time with these, first graders, fifth graders, third graders, high schoolers, I definitely would love to talk to them. 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, “you’re a software developer?” I’m like, “Yep, I’m a software developer, you can be one too.” Showing everybody that 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. 

Ayan  

Giving back to the community and not just in terms of development, I would say I personally feel that every developer should go out and also try speaking in different conferences, maybe local meetup groups. You just mentioned that you sent out the call for proposal and you got selected by seven different conferences. So, tell us about that. And if someone is a developer who is working on some new technology, some new stack, andthey just want to, 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 giving a talk and you say, oh, I could do better than that. What are your views and advice for the people, first of all, why should they do it and how should they do it? 

Adriane   

That it’s a great question. Yes. If you want to do it, absolutely do it. 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, ​​

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.  

If you take a look at all the conference talks that you see, or Meetup group topics, you will 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 different people have a different way of explaining it, and may have a better way or novel way to explain it. They will never go out of style, especially if they are hot 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 should be shared. There are a lot of other people who can relate to you. Don’t let that be something that stops you from sharing in order to get started.  

There are two approaches to this. There’s like the Big Bang thing, which is what I did. So, I just went straight to let me just apply to all the conferences that I think 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 place to kind of get started because it’s a smaller crowd, local meetups are usually easier to get to.

And people who run these local meetups are always looking for people to speak, they have a community already built, usually much nicer in terms of being more flexible in what you want to talk about. And it’s the local community. Once you do that once or twice, you get more comfortable with the community, you get comfortable with the audience, you get comfortable with what it’s like speaking to other people. And so maybe you work your way up. Maybe apply to a conference that’s in your state 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 1000s people. So that’s another way to do it. 

Ayan  

And I would add that even the most experienced speakers from the developer community are still sometimes being rejected from these conferences, and that’s totally fine. You don’t have to be heartbroken about that. There’s always a next conference or a next meetup, where your talk would be the perfect fit, and you just have to keep doing it.  

Ayan  

Do you have sort of mantra when it comes to community and building community or scaling community or, you know what’s your take on that because I feel that being a developer advocate, empathy is a really strong suite that every developer advocate should have, they should understand the needs of the community and be able to advocate that within the company. And this is what we need to prioritize.  

Adriane   

That’s a great question. I think, personally, I’ve kind of focused, as most people would, with the communities that they align with, and 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 into developer advocacy? What is being a software developer like? How do I prepare for an interview? How do I write a CFP or Chuck proposal? How do you not get nervous when you go up and talk all of these different questions? They come to me, partly because, 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 other Filipina software developers to grow that community. I know that we’re out there, I know that we’re not all in the medical field.  

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 who focuses on Azure topics. There’s Marylog in Denmark, and I’ve gotten the chance to meet Marylog but not Jonah yet- I hope to meet her sometime this year. And even though we haven’t met, we still have a friendship that goes across the internet. And we support each other, 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, because you have the expertise, and you probably would enjoy speaking here.” Those kinds of relationships,and then connecting people to the relevant places, I think, is a really big part of that community building. 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.

​​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 network even larger, where those connections may not have ever been made. 

Ayan  

When it comes to communicating ideas, developer advocates, usually write blogs or make videos or, you know, it could be like, I’m just going to give a talk out there in a conference about this topic and use that conference recording to put it out there in my community. So, what are your thoughts on this? How do you decide on this? Baes on the topic, like this topic is best fit for a blog. Or this topic is better explained when I share my screen, so I’m going to make a video about it. So how do you go about this? 

Adriane   

I think it depends. And that’s the famous answer. 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 what’s number one is what does your community want? What do they look for?  

Then once you 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, they like step-by-step tutorials. And then you may find there’s another subset of that community that actually prefers videos. So, this is where creativity comes in. Because usually when you create this kind of content, you probably do both to cover both of those communities. And sometimes the topic 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 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. Sometimes you just do a blog. But in most cases, most of the topics and content that you create are going to be in all of the different forms, so that it serves the majority of your community and the way that they want you to consume. 

Ayan  

I’m really excited about the things that we are going to be doing together. And that includes some blocks coming up for the Developer Nation Community. Would you also like to talk about this so that our community members know what they could expect in future weeks or months? 

Adriane   

This is something I’m super excited about, we have an open-source tool called API insights. And it’s a way to help developers pretty much create better API’s. And what I mean by that is, it’s a partly static analysis tool. But it’s also a tool that helps you look into your API’s. And it essentially calculates a score. So, 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 a score, how well are you doing against these specifications, and that concept is wrapped into this tool. Tthe next blog that I hope to write for developer nation is an introduction to how to get started with that tool, specifically how to install 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 hopefully, a follow up blog on how to integrate that into your CI/CD pipeline with GitHub actions. 

Ayan  

We are coming to the end of this podcast so I’m just going to ask you a couple of last questions. The first one being what are you most excited about in today’s tech world? What excites you, when you see technology happening here. I know, CES is happening in your city at the moment. And then we will have  Mobile World Congress next month. So, a lot of amazing things are to come. But what excites you the most in the tech industry at this present moment? 

Adriane   

So, one thing that I’ve been following closely, I don’t think it’s there. But I think we’re starting on is the prospect of being able to own our own data. And what I mean by that is, 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 unwillingly most of the time they have collected about us. So there are movements that come to light and say; “Hey, we should take charge of our own data of our own profiles that have been built up.” And are very excited at the prospect of potentially owning our data. And you know, if we actually wanted to sell that data to the companies ourselves, 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, it’s always been 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 

Ayan  

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. For someone who is currently doing some sort of development and they want to make a transition to Developer Advocacy, what sort of advice would you give them, where can they start? And what are the different places they can hang out, what are the different skills that they should learn? Do they need to be a really good speaker, and really good writer ? 

Adriane   

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 headfirst and found out that, hey, I actually don’t mind talking in front of 3000 people. I still get nervous beforehand, but I enjoyed doing it. It’s something I really like to do. 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’d like to do. If you find yourself creating videos in your off time, that’s what you’d like to do, you’d like to edit videos, you’d like to teach in a way that you screen capture recorded, write the scripts and write those out, maybe you have a way in by creating that type of content. If you’d like to 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, Ayanone 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 see what 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, to find what it is that you’re interested in and find what 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 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. 

Ayan  

Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Adriane for your time. I really had a fun time discussing everything with you. And I’m sure we will be getting you back in pretty soon for another episode. For now I’m looking forward to all the blogs that you will be sending our way for our community. So, thank you very much again for your time. I really had a fun time and we are  probably going to see you again. Thank you so much. 

Adriane   

I had a great time too. Thanks.