Josh's introduction to developer advocacy
Josh Long: I was contributing to a project called Spring Integration in 2008/9 and the lead of the project was a gentleman named Mark Fisher. He now works on a function-as-a-service offering for Pivotal called Project Riff. I contributed several modules to Spring Integration.
Right after the acquisition of Spring by VMware, Pivotal had a bit of money to expand the team. Mark said that there was this new role open on the Spring team called a "developer advocate." I had never heard of that term, but I'd seen James Ward, at that time an Adobe evangelist, speak, and James, of course, is a living legend. So, I knew what an evangelist was and Mark likened one role to the other.
At the time, I was already out there in public debates, and on forums and panels at conferences. I'd written books and articles, so I was already in the community on my own time and dime. I had a full-time job as an engineer, but I was talking...