 So my name is Lee Brandt, I'm a developer advocate at Okta, and I'm here with Matt Raible, who's also a developer advocate at Okta. And today we're going to talk about what it's like to be a developer advocate. So Matt, let's start with something simple. What is a developer advocate? What are they supposed to be doing? So a developer advocate is just an example programmer. An example programmer. That's what I tell people. Basically, the idea is that you're advocating your company or its products to developers. And so I like to think of this as what I was doing before I joined Okta. I had an interest in various open source projects. I would learn how to use them or I'd use them myself. And then I would develop talks for conferences and I would go talk about that open source project, how I used it, and the story about how it worked for me. Well, now that I joined Okta, it's pretty much the same thing. But I'll just show how to use Okta as like five minutes as part of the talk as well. So it's really advocating something that you're passionate about. And then if you can sneak your company's product in there as well, then great. Okay, cool. I always tell people it's like being a programmer except for I changed having one big deadline deliverable to having 500 small deliverables each week. Right. There is that. So what's what's a typical day like? What do you do during the day? So there's two typical days, right? One is when you're on the road and one is when you're at home. So obviously these times we're at home and I prefer to be at home. So I typically wake up, you know, I have my kids 50% of the time. So when we have them and they actually have school, it's a little earlier day, right? I wake up about six and make a breakfast about seven. My son is in driver's school or training together, you know, permit. So I'll drive them and then come back. So sometimes I don't get started till nine, but when I don't have them, you know, I'll get started at eight. I'm one of those bad habit people where I'll start with email. And I know that it's not a great way to start because it can derail your day. But I like to have zero unread messages. I'm one of those type of people. I don't always respond to everything. Sometimes I'll start them. But I'll start with like maybe an hour of that and then they'll be, you know, checking Slack. They'll be checking maybe our developer forums to see if I can answer anything on there. And then I typically have a task and I try to start that at, you know, 10 or some time in the morning. And that's either maybe writing an example app for a blog post or maybe I've already written the example app. So now I just have to work on the blog post or maybe I'm shooting a screencast like this one to put on our Octa developer channel. Now there's also days where I just completely work with the team in the sense of I'm just on Slack. I'm always available. I'm looking at our developer forums and I don't actually plan on getting anything done that day. And I like to have days like that because then you're not frustrated at the end of the day. You're like, hey, it's five o'clock. I'm done. I did everything that I was supposed to do. But if it's one of those days where I'm, you know, writing a blog post or shooting a video, soon as I'm done with that, I try to go on a bike ride or just get out of the house, take the dogs for a walk. And, you know, basically just clear my head a bit because, you know, it can be intense when you're, you know, writing those blog posts or example apps or even the screencast. Yeah. So one of the things that we also do is we advocate for the developer inside our organization too. So what's, what's that like, what's that about? Well, a lot of that is on Slack and answering questions related to customer identity in the sense of people will be asking about features or maybe SDKs and whether they support something or how they do something. And so a lot of that support happens on Slack a little bit via email. But, you know, just trying to help people out that maybe, you know, try to make something work and couldn't make it work. And that was another reason I created OctaDev Schematics. It's a Schematics open source project that basically can create a new like spa app and then integrate Octa in under a minute. And so for me, it was because I was tired of just doing that all the time, right? You had to go and modify three or four files. So having something automated for you helps a lot. And so even when helping people internally, I'll be like, hey, can you try this, right? Here's three commands run these. If this works, then, you know, it's not our SDK, you know, it's something in your app. Okay, so what happens if they if they find something in the SDK or if the SDK doesn't work for their particular scenario, or maybe it's supposed to work, but if there's a bug in the SDK, what are you supposed to do then? So if it's an external person, usually I'll try to get them to log a GitHub issue. And then that gets more visibility to the people that actually work on the SDKs. And then maybe I'll even ping the person that works on the SDK and be like, hey, you know, I was able to reproduce this. Do you think we can fix it? Or do you have a timeline? And, you know, typically in open source, it's very commonplace not to have timelines, right? Like we'll release when we release. So, you know, it can be tough to get that. But if it's a critical issue, they'll usually fix it, you know, that week. Okay. So what's your favorite thing about being a developer advocate? Well, the finishing, right? Like you said, we have deadlines, right? Instead of having, you know, one deadline a quarter or one a month, we have deadlines every week. And so it does, it is kind of draining, right? But when you finish that blog post or you finish that screencast, there is a certain sense of like, yes, I'm done, right? I did it. And it's just like giving a talk at a conference, right? Same thing. Like when you're done with that talk, it was just like, just that calming feeling. Now you get to go out and have beers with everybody. Right. So what's the worst thing about being a developer advocate? The deadlines are always there, right? Like there's always a blog post, right? There's always a screencast to shoot. And, you know, it's tough to have a week where you're just like, I don't really have a whole lot of cognitive load, right? And I think, I think the no traveling thing maybe increases that because before when we travel, like, you know, next week, maybe I was going to DevOps France. And so, you know, I might review some contractor posts or do some editing or, you know, QA some stuff and make sure a certain blog post works. But as far as like me writing a blog post or shooting a screencast, you know, and you're on the road, you just, you don't have time for that. So it's almost a break. But then you also have to speak, right? Which is very like, you know, anxiety-ridden. So it's weird not having, you know, that break. But at the same time, I was planning on taking a year off from travel starting in July of this year. And so this is kind of just, you know, a few weeks early. So there's just a lot. And what I've learned is we have this app now that Okta provides called Headspace. And I don't use it enough. But when I have used it, it's been pretty nice. It basically like helps you clear your mind, right? It's only like 10 minutes. But it's a sort of meditation where it's like, you know, you don't have to, you know, worry about the stuff in the future all the time. Just kind of embrace the present and be happy with where you are. Nice. So how did you become a developer advocate? Kind of an accident. I was a, I was, like I said, I was doing it for open source. The first talk I ever did was in 2004 at Apache con in Las Vegas. And it was comparing web frameworks. Right. And back then it was a job of web frameworks that were very popular. So it was like struts and spring NBC and tapestry. And I enjoyed the conference experience and it seemed like I was kind of good at speaking. So I would do a few a year and I was an independent consultant at the time. So what I found was if I did something that compared various technologies, chances are I might get a client out of that. And they would contact me and they'd say, Hey, I saw you comparing these and we're thinking about adopting this. Would you like to come help us? And so there was a year in there where I stopped doing it. I think it was maybe 2008 or 2009. Like I wasn't, I didn't travel for a whole year. And I found that it kind of dried up my pipeline, right? Not having that presence out there and that marketing. And so I started doing it again. And then I ended up joining storm path as a contractor only working half days. So I'd work for computer associates in the morning at a contract with them doing JavaScript afternoon was storm path doing Java. And after about six months, they were like, we'd like you to come on board full time. And I was like, I like contracting. And then they're like, well, you could be a evangelist. And I was like, well, that sounds fun. I'll do that. And so it's all, you know, and then they bought octa about storm pass. So that's how I ended up there. Nice. Well, and I always tell people that one of the cool things about this job is you get to mess around with the cool new stuff and then show the people how to do it. But that's not always the case. Sometimes you have to go back and write a blog post on how to use octa with some really ancient technology. Like SAML that maybe you've forgotten about how to use. So that can be a challenge as well. Okay. So what I love to tell people is I only test in Chrome. That's the best part of the job. Yeah. So thanks Matt for joining me today. I hope this is helpful for somebody. If you're looking at becoming a developer advocate or maybe you're, you've got an offer to be a developer advocate and you don't know whether or not to take the job. This may be helpful in helping you decide whether or not it's for you. Thanks again for joining me and we'll see you guys later. Yeah.