The progression of developer relations
Tim Berglund: I think it's just very new. I traced the origins of the controversial word "evangelist" to 1984 and Guy Kawasaki. That was a slightly different kind of work he was doing: he was trying to convince what we used to call independent software vendors to go and write programs for the Macintosh. He was evangelizing the platform.
"Developer relations, as a discipline, is really just emerging."
—Tim Berglund
Developer relations, as a discipline, is really just emerging. It's a consequence of open source maturing and businesses forming around open-source projects. There are all these activities happening. In the last five or 10 years, more people have realized that there's a discipline here.
The word that comes to mind is "inchoate." Developer advocacy is not completely formed. As a result, not everybody appreciates that it's a thing. Everybody's been to a conference...