What Do Developer Advocates Do?

I recently contributed to an article on the { key : values } blog. The article defines what it means to work as a “Developer Advocate” by sharing the experience of 15 people working in the field. Each section needed to be short, but here’s a longer response to give more insight into my day-to-day.

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The mission of Developer Relations at Pantheon is to Attract, educate, and inspire developers by advocating for better development practices with Pantheon. You could summarize our role as circular advocacy: from Pantheon to developers and back to Pantheon again.

The majority of my time is focused on education and training, but I also actively contribute to the Drupal and WordPress communities. I feel like we’re doing it right with programs like Pantheon for Trainers (free stuff for educators) and workshops like Getting Started with Drupal 8; a class we run in-person at conferences and online for Drupal Global Training Days.

Pantheon expects the DevRel team to “know” the community, so we’re encouraged to actively participate in the community whenever possible. Most of us volunteer in some capacity at the camps and conferences we attend. Sometimes that means speaking or organizing, other times it’s a less glamorous job like the cleanup shift. There’s no better way to get to know a group of people than serving alongside them.

Developer Advocacy is the perfect job for me. I’m not selling anything, I’m just sharing what I’ve learned, contributing what I can, and seeing first-hand that it makes a difference.

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So what’s what I do in a nutshell. Want to learn more? Leave a comment👇, send me a Tweet, or just talk to me directly.

Pantheon is a pretty cool place to work. We’re not currently hiring anyone in Developer Relations, but there are always openings in Marketing, Sales, and Engineering. Take a look at all open jobs at Pantheon.