Evangelizing Explained

Evangelism explained Christian Heilmann, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 06/11/2008 (Yahoo Internal)

I’m Chris. Hello I am Chris

I live in London, England

But originally I am German

Doesn’t matter though, both countries keep losing against you playing football...

Anyways...

Developer Evangelism

Sounds like not working, right?

Far from it.

As a developer evangelist you are first and foremost a translator.

Tech Colleagues The Business Evangelist The Outside world

You are lucky if the business understands that as an evangelist you need your freedom.

You are also lucky if the business doesn’t have any short-term agendas.

Your colleagues are very much needed...

...as they keep you rooted in the now and the reality of the company.

They can also be bad for the cause as they have to suffer a lot more day-to-day frustrations than you do.

Your job is to find the middle ground of these frustrated voices and the business message.

This is where the truth lies.

First and foremost you need to be an independent voice.

Keep your eyes open all the time and follow what is happening on the web.

If a startup or a competitor of your company does something cool...

...you should know about it.

Don’t barge into the developer “scene” trying to sell only your company’s solutions.

No matter how cool they seem at the time.

Instead show them as an offering, a system that works well with others...

...making everybody’s life easier and our jobs less of a hassle.

This is very important right now as if you don’t work efficiently...

...you might become redundant.

Which brings me to another, very important asset of successful evangelists.

Don’t bring your own agenda...

... instead know what problems the people you talk to have.

I’ve had quite a hard time in my career to get my bosses to sponsor me a ticket to go to conferences...

...or even leave the office and talk to other companies and developers.

Which meant that when I finally went to one...

...I made sure I got my money’s worth.

Whenever you talk to people about your products and services...

...make sure people can take something back to impress their bosses with.

Which means that you need to do your homework and find out what people want from you.

You show different products to a design agency that you would to a Python crowd.

Talking about geeks...

Coming from a large international company may be a benefit...

...but only when you use it right.

Deep down every geek sees every large corporation as evil and replaceable by a small server script.

I thought that.

Now I know that these corporations are made up by geeks like you and me.

Photo of Pete LePage of Microsoft and Peter-Paul Koch of Quirksmode.org drinking at The Ajax Experience in Boston Not the Antichrist Not a hairpiece

And our job is to get the world to at least hear about these geeks...

...if not meet them in the flesh.

Which is why we should not only be present at developer events...

...but also open ourselves to geeks and invite them to come to us for some informal (yes, beers) events.

As a developer you need to be visible to get your concerns heard.

You might be the best deliverer out there but if you really want things to change...

...you also need to tell people about what you do and how you succeed in being efficient.

If you share your knowledge, you are less of a risk.

You should work for the company, for yourself and for the next developer taking over from you.

By sharing information internally you make sure that developers can have a real life and get sick without stalling projects.

You also allow for developers to move around from project to project, thus preventing boredom and elitism.

Sharing information internally is an absolute necessity to have a successful team.

However, to get the full picture you also need to validate your ideas with the outside world.

The same applies to big companies.

We could be arrogant enough to say we know what people need.

But in essence we know jack until we can get it confirmed from outside our echo chamber.

And that is what we are doing with our evangelising.

Evangelising means that we prove and improve our products and assumptions.

Business Evangelist Internal Developers

Evangelist World Evangelist Internal Business Developers

So how can we get the message out there?

Well, first of all by using the internet.

Set up a local mailing list that people can subscribe to.

Have a blog that explains techniques and solutions built in the company.

A good example is the Filament group blog. http://filamentgroup.com/lab

I found this via a bookmark on del.icio.us...

...that made it to hotlinks... http://dev.upian.com/hotlinks/

...which I have subscribed to in Google reader...

...which meant a friend of mine found it through my shared items...

...who lives next door to them and didn’t know them!

The web is a web of linked systems.

Not a billboard.

Instead of just building something and hoping that people come...

...be present where people already hang out.

Have a twitter bot telling people about things that happen.

Use social bookmarking, photo sharing sites and social networks.

Then you will reach much more people and point them to your resources.

They in turn will tell their friends and contacts.

And word of mouth from people I trust is much more powerful than a corporate message.

Whatever you do, wherever you show up...

Be very responsive. Establish yourself as a “way in”.

So what do *we* have to offer you can talk about?

It all starts at http://developer.yahoo.com

Designers can benefit from our design patterns: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/

The YUI is an amazing framework to build web sites with (CSS, JavaScript, Widgets) http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Our APIs give access to all our data: http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html

In various handy formats and now even accessible with a SQL-style syntax: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

Using the Yahoo Application Platform, people can develop applications running on Yahoo! sites: http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/

The performance team assembled an amazing array of cool tools and information how to make web sites lightning fast: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/

There is great information on server security and attack vectors on the web: http://developer.yahoo.com/security/

And for people who want to mash up data in a nice, visual way, there’s Yahoo! Pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/

There are several systems to use to authenticate users for your apps with our help: http://developer.yahoo.com/auth/ http://developer.yahoo.com/oauth/

Lots of stuff to talk about and package up in an easy to understand way.

Why not have a go at it?

Obrigado! Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | twitter: codepo8

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Evangelizing Explained

by Christian Heilmann on Nov 05, 2008

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