What’s a Developer Advocate?
Developer Advocacy
The job of a Developer Advocate is a challenging but interesting one. We have the opportunity to explore so many innovative technologies and better, we discuss and work with startups, partners, and developers in order to create killer applications and cloud solutions.
I’m very proud to be part of a fantastic team of Developer Advocates at Oracle. However, most people do not understand what a Developer Advocate does. So, here’s my quick explanation:
As Developer Advocates, we focus on outreach activities so that we can help developers use a number of technologies, frameworks, tools, and cloud services.
Among those technologies, we promote cutting-edge, emerging technologies like Blockchain, IoT, AI, DevOps, and others, the ones that allow enterprises to innovate and increase their revenues. Then I would say that our ultimate goal is:
To help developers do whatever they need in order to develop their products, execute their ideas and innovate so that they can be successful in their endeavors.
The happiest side of it is that we write code. We use great tools and frameworks to develop Microservices with MicroProfile.io, Helidon, Spring Boot, Quarkus, or Micronaut. Besides, we can work with many interesting Java APIs and database-related technologies like JDBC, R2DBC, and RSI, to name a few.
Do you need to orchestrate Docker containers with Kubernetes? Checked!
I do not need to provide more examples, you know Oracle is strong and unique in technology and open-source, and we are the team that helps developers innovate with our second-to-none technology.
Let’s say that additionally you also want to go Serverless and achieve the highest level of hardware and platform abstraction, right?
Ok, we have an excellent open-source option called Fn created by Oracle. Besides, a managed FaaS solution is also available — OCI Functions. We have a complete solutions stack! Come on, let’s build innovative solutions!
We can help with many different technologies as our skills and backgrounds range from Blockchain, Java, microservices, serverless, containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure, front-end web technologies, open-source, gaming, and artificial intelligence to software and solutions architecture, and all things Cloud.
Developer Advocacy Pillars
In order to provide true value and maximize the quality of our contributions to the broader developer community (both inside and outside our team), we execute actions aligned with three core Developer Advocacy pillars as listed below:
- Content Creation — we have a special focus on content creation, so blog posts, videos, tutorials, quick guides, articles, and workshops are among the rich content we create in order to help developers. We understand that good content is crucial to help developers accelerate the creation of mission-critical applications and solutions. Beyond content creation, we also share relevant technical content and we use social media outlets for that;
- Community Engagements — we use all the options we have to engage with developers — both online activities (webinars, social media, live Q&A sessions, discussion forums, Slack channels, StackOverflow, open-source projects, GitHub, and others) as well as face-to-face ones (technology conferences, meetups, user groups, workshops, hackathons) so we can meet and help you in places where you have your questions discussed and the interactions happen within the IT communities. Just to mention, we organize great developer conferences as part of our Oracle Developer Events, including JavaOne.
- Engineering and Product Management — While we connect with developers face to face and online with the primary goal of helping them to build their solutions, we also collect their feedback regarding our services, APIs and SDKs. Then we work together with Oracle’s product management and engineering teams in order to implement the requested features and improve our services and software.
At the end of the day, we want to help you use our best-in-class, cutting-edge technologies to “manage and protect the world’s data for the benefit of all”.
So now that you understand our role, our team, and how we can help, let’s talk about how we can accelerate you with our varied core technologies in order to execute your ideas.
Be it that innovative project you’re working on at the moment, an IT transformation and modernization project, or research and development, there are many things we can provide in order to help your IT teams and as a consequence your business.
I strongly advise you to have a look at our Oracle Cloud services as well as our Oracle Developer resources for Databases, Blockchain, and Containers including Kubernetes and Serverless, Java, Javascript, DevOps, Chatbots, and APIs.
And last but not least we also believe in Open-Source (MySQL is one example of our strong commitment) and we have a diverse set of reusable code libraries and components published on GitHub! Not to mention that we have an extensive collection of OSS projects related to Linux and Docker containers but also our own solutions Virtual Box, that virtualization tool that every serious IT professional has in a toolbox.
So for small companies, the time to execute ideas, implement not only automation but true AI, and expedite their business processes has come.
Likewise, for big corporations with legacy systems, the technologies cited above can be readily applied to help them with the complex and arduous journey of IT Transformation and Modernization. It’s hard to imagine the possibilities we have, so just feel free to approach us!
Cloud has allowed companies to focus back on their core niches and be liberated to amplify their gains without having to manage all the burdens of IT governance, infrastructure, security, and critical non-functional requirements.
Think about it, never before have the technology and IT corporations offered us the opportunity to get mission-critical cloud environments, services, systems, tools, and programming languages without having to deal with the problems of hardware depreciation, investment needs, and all the issues with on-premises data centers.
There’s no better time to innovate with the Oracle Cloud, the only Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) that started from scratch to create a second-to-none Generation 2 Cloud. In case you want to know more about the technical features of this Gen2 cloud, please check this video.
Developer Engagement
Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Medium.
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