The Developer Relations Path - From College Student to Developer Advocate - Ask Me Anything!

Developer Relations is a fast-growing field with more tech companies adopting this concept as they are coming to a realization of how important having Developer Relations is for the success of their product. What better time than now to start?

Often I am asked how I got into my field and what steps they need to take to get there. As this is quite a broad area to define, it would make more sense to ask directly what your questions are. Tell me about your situation and where you are at with college/career and any involvement you have in the developer community.

I started back in 2011 taking courses on Web Application Development with my first required course being Visual Basic which was in the Comp Science area. Being one of the 2 only women in my class, and seeing half the class drop out by the end of the quarter was quite challenging but yet motivating to work harder to keep up with the others who are making it. A year later into college classes, I made it a goal to stay after every class, finish my code projects before most, and spend time helping others debug their projects which made it so not only did they learn a lot, I was able to absorb and learn from helping them debug.

Following a series of thousands of situations of contributing to help make other developers more successful, which eventually led to a position as a Developer, then instructor teaching code, contributing to open source projects and developer communities, and now developer advocacy, I'd love to mentor/guide you through this blog post. I was inspired by someone who recommended I should look into Developer advocacy as a job Mike Stowe and then having a mentor guide me on what steps to take to get there Anthony Ferrera when he was at Google. Later down the road, Jessica Rose helped me through a lot of questions/situations and mentored me a lot. These people are amazing and simple things they've said to me have changed my life.

Who knows, maybe a simple reply from me could change your life?

Ask Me Anything.