Ask HN: What is a "developer evangelist"?

e·van·ge·list: A person who seeks to convert others to the Christian faith, esp. by preaching.

Where "Christian" you can put whichever company grows along with it's API/code/lib usage and utilization by others.

As I see it it's a purely "hype" role and it's essentially a tech-aware marketeer seeking to attract fellow developers and engineers to work and experiment with his company's platform and products.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_evangelist:

...a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology, in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects.

Essentially, a PR person for the company who works by interacting with developers. They attend conferences, respond to developer concerns regarding the product, etc.

I have had a serious question about this all week. From everything that I've read this woman is very demanding in her professional life and not always the easiest person to accommodate. Why on earth is she in the one role the requires the most community interaction? Why would you not select someone for that role who tries to put their best face forward and represent your company to the best of their abilities while being judicious in their interactions with others? I am really lost on this one.

Last summer I was working at a small company and Adria came to 'evangelise' to the developers (I think) about using SendGrid in our product.

She came to the office, took the dev team out to a local ice cream shop (hot summer day, greatly appreciated) and then seemed to hang around after for a little while talking to our PR person, and a little to the CEO who is non-technical and wasn't going to make a decision about which email service we used.

To me, that didn't seem particularly good evangelism for developers. Conversely, I have seen a Twilio developer do a 5 minute talk for other devs, and it was basically a short bit of code, and a really cool 'wow' moment that got us all interested. That evangelist was a developer.

Maybe Adria wasn't a good developer evangelist, maybe this was because she wasn't a developer, I don't know if the two are linked. It is possible that she didn't really come to see us to preach the virtues of SendGrid, but rather just to make sure they were on our radar, which the free ice cream certainly helped with.

I'm finishing my undergrad in CS this year and was approached by Microsoft to interview for a "Technical Evangelist" position. The only questions related to programming were:

1.) "Describe Polymorphism" and 2.) "What are the differences between Inheritance and Composition"

The other questions were very head-in-the-clouds, like "What is the biggest problem in existence today that can be solved by software? If you had a budget and a team, how would you solve it?"

So weird.

Anyways, I was dumbfounded at the simplicity as this was in the middle of other hard-core technical screens from Amazon, Google, Facebook, and eBay for software dev. positions and the interviewer claimed over and over again that this was a programming position and your ability to code was #1. Why didn't they ask me questions to help determine that?

I've since been onsite at MSFT for other reasons and sat down with Technical Evangelists talking about different MSFT platforms. They seemed skilled at programming, and had the background to seem legitimate as engineers. This is what I think Microsoft and other companies really want. The job isn't technical but you need to look credible to the people you are working/speaking with. And above all I think you need to be diehard believers in the product/company.

i can suggest watching the Visual Studio Documentary from MSDN (http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/VisualStudioDocumentary/The-...). In the series, two woman explains what they did while MS tries to popularize their IDE and new programming languages back in 90's. Women were (and still) developer evangelists at MS. They arrange events, they give free MS software to developers and they support developers 7/24.

By the way, sorry for my bad english.

Based on some of the things I read on her blog and here, it seems like a mix between "developer advocate" and "forward sales". She mentions something about listening to developers talk about ridiculous hours, demands, etc.

It's a clever position for a company selling to other technology companies. First they send a person who cares about your time, who speaks your language, who advocates for you - no, who evangelizes you. This person is trying to unite the developer community, bring in fresh faces, embrace unrecognized communities... this person cares about developers. Next they tell you that, although the industry really needs to change, product x can ease your life in the meantime.

My last position was at a education startup. They used the same tactic, only instead of "evangelists", we sent former professors and teachers who were simply consultants. Their ability to gain traction in schools depended on their importance in the community -- hence, they give talks, blog about the educational issues, etc.

Someone who (most likely) isn't a developer but works to get developers who don't work for the evangelist's company to like said company.

Developer Evangelist's are not PR, Marketing, Sales or Recruiting and they are not coding all of the time either - although there are some of these involved. Essentially a Developer Evangelist's role is like a combination of Business, Product Development, Customer Care and everything that is in-between/connected to those roles.

The main role of a developer evangelist though is as a translator. By translator, I mean that they have to explain their product/technology to different audiences in order to get their support. A good developer evangelist gets people/developers excited about a product/technology by pointing out the benefits to the developers who are going to be the ones actually using the product. Thus, developer evangelist's need to be technical because, there is some coding involved in their role and they need to express/find the story in a technical message to get people/developers excited about a product/technology.

I don't have the answer, but thank you for asking it! It never occurred to me to do an Ask HN.

I was hired as a technical community manager/evangelist. I've chosen to take on neither of those titles in the few months that I've been in this position. I've been a dev since high school and still consider myself to be one (although sometimes it can be a while in between chances to write code).

I put "Vim Wielder / Cat Herder" on my business card. Turns out the cats I herd tend more often to be executives than developers. Developers are great: you show them a great product and help them to use it and they're on your side. Helping executives understand how tech community works can be difficult at times.

I can't comment on what particular brand of developer evangelist Adria Richards was, but there are many kinds. I'd hope that she was one who writes code and who contributes to thte community rather than just selling to it.

Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, strikes me as my model for a Developer Evangelist. Communicator, connector, storyteller, passionate.

He gave a very good presentation on Amazon Web Services. Not just technical content but enough marketing content to make you feel like AWS was something worth investing your technical learning time in. If someone had a question about S3/EC2 that he could answer, he answered it to the best of his ability. More importantly, if someone had a question he could not answer, he stated that he did not know the answer and he knew someone on the larger AWS team that he could (and would) get the person in contact with (if they gave them their business card after the meeting).

In his talk, Jeff threw in some entertaining anecdotal/behind the scenes stories about AWS. For example, Smugmug (at the time) was charging all of its AWS fees on a Corporate Amex card. Which qualified them for multiple round-trip airplane tickets to Europe or wherever every month.

For the developers in the audience who weren't using AWS, I felt like this was another positive push towards the tipping point to start using it - even if our current jobs were not cloud-oriented.

And, boy, he was passionate. Not in the sense of Steve Ballmer yelling at developers but evangelical in wanting to spread the good word of AWS.