Source

Tech lunch 24 by Algolia on Developer advocacy

tl;dr

Speaker Valériane Venance, Deputy CTO at Le 24/24, Junior DevRel

• Developer advocates are not so different from evanglists

• They make your product believable to a technical audience (in opposition to the Sales department)

• They talk mostly about and to, the Product, the dev team and community of users

Speaker Laurent Doguin, VP Developer Relations at Clever Cloud talk

• Developer advocate discuss with their audience (in opposition to evangelist that have a speech)

• They are here to have an impact with people (dev team, users, future trainee, etc), to do so they need to have a presence either online (blogging, open source contribution) or physical (training, talks, hackathon, feedback from conferences) so they tend to move a lot

• To avoid burning out and maximize the impact they should focus on the quality of their actions instead of the sheer numbers

• It’s also hard to try to measures concrete impact you have outside of the company (beer paid off can be a useful metric)

• Don’t necessarily specialize, more focus on curiosity and area of knowledge

• Really try to establish a connection with people and not to sell anything (tech person don’t take the bait)

Speaker Noël Macé, Developer Advocate at SFEIR talk

• Even if you don’t have a product or a service to promote, like SFEIR that is an ESN you can focus on making your ecosystem better to help the company

• Focus on the way they do thing by offering formations, blog post, and open source contribution

• You can help dev to avoid 3 main issue that: dev burnout, isolated dev recognition, and dev bored out

Afterword

I understand that this specific role is created for a people that at the junction of tech lead (good knowledge of product and dev organization) and a spokesperson (great at public speaking, enthusiastic).
Some of the tasks can fit into a tech lead or a senior dev in the organization but at some scale, you can’t expect him/her to still do all of this and programming.
You are not here to sell but to promote, what you promote is tied to your company and your own interests.
I am glad to see another carreer path outside the classic pattern of tech lead or manager that are often suggested for developer