Category: Career

Posts that either contain information about my career to date, talk about what I want from the future, and/or may contain helpful career advice.

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Getting Started with Presenting

Martin Thompson and Trisha Gee

Context and Background

It's currently 2024, and I was looking for some "Getting Started with DevRel" content from my blog. All my posts are in a GitHub repo/IntelliJ IDEA Project first, and then ported into WordPress at some point. Searching my IntelliJ project I found this post, which apparently I wrote in 2020 and never published! What's more confusing is that it's based off something I wrote in 2014, so it was written 10 years ago and then I failed to publish it twice.

So, with that in mind I'm going to publish it as-is and hope that there are some useful bits and pieces in there for someone. Better than having it stuck in my drafts folder forever.

Welcome to 2020, all over again...

I have loads of advice for aspiring speakers, which is lucky because I get asked about how to get started (or how I got started) all the time. I found an email I sent to someone absolutely years ago (2014) and thought it useful enough to dust off and post. It's interesting to see my mindset back then because now I've largely forgotten what it was like in the early days.

The timing is not great, since in these Coronavirus times no-one's going to or presenting at conferences, but I firmly believe that with all these virtual events and conferences there's a much lower barrier to entry to speaking, and that now is exactly the right time to start presenting if it's something you've ever had on your wish list.

"I was hoping I could get some advice off you as I'm starting to look at ways to get out and speak a little bit more at events. Would you have some insights from how you started?"

Continue reading "Getting Started with Presenting"

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Working Smarter, not Harder

This is a post I've been meaning to write for eight and a half years. Inspired by this tweet from Ceora, I'm finally doing it.

I have a question for parents in tech, especially moms.

How has having children impacted your career?

I wanna hear the good, the bad and the ugly. Tell me whatever you’re comfortable sharing 😛

— ceora🌸🌺 (@ceeoreo_) May 15, 2024

The most immediate impact having a baby had on my career is I needed to work much smarter not harder. Babies (and children) take up all that so-called free time, and and almost all of your not-free-time, that you used to have.

Continue reading "Working Smarter, not Harder"
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Time Management for Parents

Photo of my desk area

I wrote a 3000 word blog post in response to a Tweet about how having kids changed my career (which in retrospect probably doesn't even answer the question). So I decided to pull this section out into its own post. It became a 2000 word blog post about planning, sigh. This is why I find it hard to find time to blog.

So here are my Top Tips For Time Management And Planning for Working Parents.

Continue reading "Time Management for Parents"
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Gradle Gradle Gradle, with Gradle we’re going to play

I know I owe you a blog post1, and today I actually have the time, energy and inclination to write it. It's not often those three factors coincide.

I have already done the Great Reveal about the job I am doing now that I'm no longer at JetBrains.

The question I wanted to answer (if only to remind myself later in life!) is why?

Continue reading "Gradle Gradle Gradle, with Gradle we’re going to play"
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What’s Next for Trisha?

Right. It's about time I started looking for my next job/gig/source-of-income. I'll be honest, 9 months of sabbatical has not been as restful as I had hoped, but apparently writing two books and taking on the ownership of a restaurant are not restful activities. Who knew?

Anyway this blog post is because it's too hard to explain in 140 characters (OK fine 280, but I'm old school) what I'm looking for. There are three main paths I'm exploring:

  1. Developer Advocacy
  2. Engineering
  3. Consulting & Training
Continue reading "What’s Next for Trisha?"
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Being a Developer Advocate at JetBrains

Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.

So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously1 recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.

Continue reading "Being a Developer Advocate at JetBrains"
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New Year, New Adventures

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying "the MongoDB people", and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills. I have met all these goals, and more - I met some fantastic people; learnt different approaches to software development; discovered my new favourite database for creating applications; moved to Spain; started both a MUG and a JUG; worked to understand the value of community and evangelism, and to help create a strategy for these areas; and my evangelism efforts and open source work earned me the Java Champion title. I'm extremely proud of what I've achieved over this period, and very grateful to MongoDB for giving me these opportunities.

But now, a new adventure is about to begin. If you've seen my live coding demo this year, you'll know of my love affair with IntelliJ IDEA, a tool I use daily (even for blogging). Well, now I'm joining the team at JetBrains, where I'm going Full Advocate. I hope this means I get to carry on doing more of what I love - presenting, writing, and working on demos to help developers become more productive. I hope this will give me opportunities to stay ahead of the curve in the Java/JVM world.

And yes, in answer to the Most Frequently Asked Question, I am staying in Spain. I've fallen in love with Sevilla and I'm not ready to leave yet.

I shall leave you with my somewhat disasterous "Top Ten IntelliJ Tips" from GOTO Aarhus, which is worth watching just to see Dan North save me from the curse of the live demo. Things can only get better from here, right?

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Career Advice for Programmers (YOW 2013)

Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don't suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO Aarhus, a talk I wasn't enormously happy with as there was no way to cover a lifetime of hard-fought experience in such a short time. Dave seemed to like something in it though, as he gave me the opportunity to present the topic again at YOW last December, and this time I think I managed to distill the important points into the (still ridiculously short) time allotted.

Please give me any feedback you have.

I recognise there are many many more topics I could cover, so I'd better start making a list. Suggestions?