Developer Champion
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"
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:
I'm inspired to write this post because Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. Of course a more accurate statement would be "I disagree with some aspects of what someone on the internet said, even though they have an entirely valid point of view". But that's less catchy.
Continue reading "Reading Code is a Skill"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"So I came to the blog to update my upcoming events (at least something stays up to date) only to find it's been nearly a year since I last blogged! This is terrible!
It's not that I haven't written anything in a year, it's that a lot of my writing energy goes into stuff for the actual day job. Which is good, because that's pretty much what I wanted from the day job, but the blog makes it look like I don't write any more.
So I'm going to cheat. Here's the stuff I've written in the last 12 months.
I've also done a bunch of screencasts & webinars for IntelliJ IDEA, Upsource and Team City.
Oh yeah, and I had a baby. I'm contemplating blogging about being a working parent, but I'm a bit concerned that Of Course a woman is going to blog about Being A Mother, when previously I just blogged about... well, come to think about it I blogged about all sorts of things, including haircuts and hangovers, so I guess I could probably get away with it.
So, I get asked a lot about how I got into technical advocacy / evangelism1, so it seems like the most cost-effective way to answer this question is to write a post about it. Warning: it's a long one!
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?
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?
December disappeared in a rush of vacation and a fleeting tour of Australia. It's hard to believe that it's the eve of Christmas Eve already, it's almost impossible to feel Christmassy when you're getting sunburnt on a boat and seeing people in swim-suits wearing santa hats. A mid-winter festival (complete with trees and fake snow) just feels very odd in summer.
For no reason other than LinkedIn communications are starting to irritate me, here's my personal LinkedIn Etiquette guide. Feel free to disagree with it all.