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Master Developers: Christian Heilmann
A developer evangelist fills an important role for a company. They serve as a communicator, a liason, a thoughful voice and more importantly, an integral part of the web development community. Few people encompass all of that as well as Christian Heilmann. Currently working as a principal technical evangelist at Mozilla, he’s literally written the book on developer envangelism and offers up some insightful nuggest on his work.
QI’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a bit of a fanboi, and I think you’re a model for all evangelists. What’s your view on the future of the ever-changing role of developer evangelists?
I am a tad worried at the moment how fashionable it has become to have a "developer evangelist" for your company and how many people call themselves this without coming from a developer background or actually releasing any technical information. It seems people have realised the potential and the benefits of having someone like this in their company – which does make me really happy.
On the other hand it is up to us to keep our territory clean and point out repeatedly that developer evangelism is not product marketing.
If someone only talks about their products without even acknowledging the competition or offering developers a choice, it is not developer evangelism, but plain and simple marketing or advertising.
A big change I am seeing is that our traditional channels for publication have been terribly washed out. Both LinkedIn and Slideshare is not as usable to me, as it used to be as they are full of noise. Hence, I am moving to Google+ and Facebook for a lot of my outreach. We have a lot of tools cropping up, too. Lots to test out and play with. I am really excited about what Lanyrd has up its sleeve for us – watch this space.
QAs an evangelist, how do you stay on top of the constant change we’re seeing in the web development world?
Half an hour on the cross-trainer is either wasted or useful for keeping up. Your choice.
RSS feeds – that’s why the news about Google Reader really hit me hard. Feedly is a good replacement, though, and I installed Fever on my server. A lot of it is also constantly looking at what your peers are doing. So don’t go to conferences, give your talk and leave – watch what others are doing and check YouTube and others to keep up to date with what your competition is talking about. I watch tech talks in the gym – half an hour on the cross-trainer is either wasted or useful for keeping up. Your choice. The constant change in the web development world is just that – a constant. If you want to be a web developer, you need to keep up to date all the time. That is what makes our job so amazing. There is no certificate to pay for; you need to learn all the time.