 And this is for the room. It's been a long night. I'm going to try to be quick. I'll make it under 20 minutes. So first of all, I want to talk about how to get the job as a developer advocate as a community manager, basically as someone who works in developer relations. That's what DevRel stands for, developer relations. Why am I speaking about this? Well, I do a bunch of things in this world. I volunteer for Mozilla as a tech speaker and as a Mozilla rep's mentor. And that means I help Mozilla build community in my free time. Because I like the idea of a job getting paid and paying my belt. I also work for Nexmo as a JavaScript developer advocate. Has anybody heard about Nexmo before? OK, so that's all Whidging's friends. Nexmo's actually a company that does cloud communication APIs so we can send SMS programmatically, make phone calls, and stuff like that. And this is Nexmo's been my first job as a developer advocate. I switch from an engineering background from a developer to a developer advocate. Now, don't take me too seriously. And one of the speakers before me had a disclaimer page with a bunch of text. Well, this is my disclaimer page. Don't take me too seriously. I sometimes do not so smart things like try to recreate the mannequin piss in a New York City public fountain with the police looking at me from across the fountain. I'll tell you at the end of it if I got a ticket or not. But at the same time, I'm part of this amazing team of about 30 developer advocates and community managers and event managers. And our only job is to make developers' lives easier. We try to help developers who are trying to use the Nexmo APIs and the Nexmo platform accomplish what they want to accomplish as easy as possible, as fast as possible. We've also won a bunch of awards last year and this year as well for our developer platform, for developer relations program and other things. So you could say I'm not the best of them, but I'm part of a really amazing team that's been trying to redefine how developer relations works. And this whole talk started because after I got a job as a developer advocate, all my friends, especially my Muslim friends, started asking one simple question. How? I was like, look, it's magic. I don't know how I got this job. I was just lucky, really, really lucky. That was it. I was lucky. I have no idea how I got into developer relations. It just happened. And if you look at what developer relations is online or what developer relations people do, there are a thousand definitions, and it spans from marketing to sales to maybe engineering to everything in between. There's no clear definition of what developer relations is or what developer relations does. I think my favorite one is make developers' lives easier. There's this thing called DevRollometer that you tell you what you do as part of your developer relations role, and it tries to tell you what your role should actually be. So there's developer evangelists, developer advocates. And if you ask people in the room, they're going to tell you it's exactly the same thing, just a lot. Community managers and so forth. So if you go to that, it's actually built by Phil or Chief Overlord at Nexmo. But it tries to help you out define developer relations. It was hard for me to do so, even though I got the job in it. It was really hard for me to do so. Because I look at all my coworkers, and that's not too alike. Not everybody got into developer relations the same way. Some of them, like me, was their first job in developer relations. Some others have been doing this for like 10 years or something. And I looked online and tried to see how people get into developer relations, because my friends are really, really pestering me about it. So I found this from Josh. Josh works in developer relations and says, from what I've seen, no two journeys to developer advocacy look the same. Successful advocates come from engineering, community building, and other disciplines too. I was like, that's really specific, Josh. I agree with you. But then I started to travel the world. Part of my job is to actually travel the world. I'm homeless at the moment. That's because I used to live in London until six months ago. And then I came here for a conference called GS Confagia. And I kind of stuck around and never left and now live out of an Airbnb in Gaelang. So I like, yeah, I know Gaelang. Don't get me started. Yeah, yeah. But I started traveling the world. And I've met a bunch of people who all do this. And we have conversations like when you go to conferences and your job is to speak at conferences, you've seen all the talks. Like you've literally seen all the talks. It was really nice Kubernetes talk, by the way. I've seen it three times by now. Four. This month. So the interesting bits that happen at conferences is the speakers, the nerd, the after parties. The places where you meet new people and you talk and you have a new conversation rather than when you sponsor a conference, you have the same conversation 100 times. Have you heard of our next one before? So I talked to people. And after talking to a bunch of us who joined developer relations, a pattern started to emerge. And I wasn't sure if it was just coincidence or if it was just my circle of friends or people I was meeting. So I put out this survey online. By the way, feel free to fill out the survey, which asks people how you got into developer relations. One simple question. What was the first role? How did you get it? What do you do now? And I got a bunch of replies. As like you can see, developer and engineer are probably the most common ones, or marketing or tech writing. But if you look deep down, it's like academic philosopher. What did you do before a developer relations job? I was an academic philosopher. Or there's actually undercover office puppy, software consulting, and a bunch of other things. So I was like, this is a quote from one of the replies I got. I got asked to speak at an event. We were sponsoring that. Then I decided to try speaking a lot local meetups, too. And I found that I enjoyed it. There were a bunch of speakers here. A bunch of you probably do speak at meetups. So this is one of the steps, or your first step, to join developer relations. This is Martin. Martin actually works for Nexmo. And when I asked Martin how he got his first job as a developer advocate, he said, I also ran a pretty large hackathon series at the time. And it helped that I had done that. I was also spending lots of time helping clients understand that developers, internally and externally, so we could better design their API. So if you look at it, speaking or running events or trying to understand developers' pain points. Amanda also works at Nexmo. Amanda said, the tech writing helped me understand our APIs, which helped me help users when I was at the event. So it all boiled down to, well, I was writing a bunch of articles online. And then because of that, I was able to help developers. I was like, OK. So it looks like everything converges into the same thing. It's different starting points, but basically all roads lead to Rome. So looking at what I did to join developer relations, I was like, well, maybe it does feel like my story fits in here. Because my first public speaking session, when I first came in front of 100 people and said my piece, was an accident. I was actually at an event with a friend. We were doing, my friend was supposed to talk about the work we do together for Mozilla or the work we did together for Mozilla. And she was like, look, I'm in the United States meeting a client. Can you make the slides for me, please? I was like, sure, sure. I'll do the slides as long as I don't have to walk up on stage. That's perfect. And then the day of the conference comes along and she says, pick me up from the airport. I go to the airport. I wait, I wait. And then at a certain point, her flight, like an hour after she was supposed to land, it just says, canceled. So I call her and I ask Yoana, where are you? And she's like, in Paris. It's only like three hours away. So you drive to the conference, tell them to stall, move our session towards the end of the day, and I'll finally make it to the conference. So I go to the conference. The conference organizer is luckily a friend. So she keeps pushing our Yoana's speaking slot until the last slot of the day. And the last slot of the day comes along. And the conference organizer goes on stage and says, and now, about the Mozilla community, Alex is going to speak about the Mozilla community. And I was in the front row. I was like, it took me a good minute and a half to walk two meters. I was like, me? Are you sure? After I got on stage, the video is still on YouTube, so you can see how poorly I did. Thank God it's in Romanian, so you won't understand much of it. But you can see me standing there for a good minute, looking at my audience, just looking. Then I put my hands in my pocket. And then I started to shift from food to food. And then I started talking. Nobody could stop me. You see hands being raised in the audience for questions and stuff like that? That wasn't happening. I gave my half an hour talk, and then the Q&A session started. And in the Q&A session, I was talking about Mozilla, right? I love Mozilla. Whenever there was a question that said or implied Chrome was better than Firefox, or that said Firefox's nuts are good, I took another step into my audience and another step into my audience. And by the time the last question happened, I was in the middle of my audience. And someone from my left asked me a question. I actually tried to go in between two chairs to walk through that person. And that was my first speaking slot. And I said, I never do it again. Of course, by the time I finished my talk, Yoana was in the audience. My friend was in the audience. I was like, OK, karma. And I said, look, I got through this. I'm never doing it again. Two weeks later, we were running an event, or MC was sick, and Yoana said, you know what? You were actually decent on stage. Don't you want an MCD event? There's no one else. And now I think this year I gave close to 40 talks, or I did 40 events this year. And every time I get on stage, I still get nervous. But it just means I care enough to get nervous. And after doing all this public speaking things, that's when I started seeing a bunch of job type, those that said developer advocates. And I talked to a bunch of them and I asked them, what are you doing? And they were like, well, we get paid to travel the world and speak on stage. I was like, I can do that. It sounds better than the office life. Of course, that was just the sales pitch. You know when you go to the store and you see that the sales ad, it says price $300 star? And then you go into the shop and it's like $300 plus other $600 in taxes. Yeah, as developer relations. So it turns out there's a bunch more things that people in developer relations do than speak. We build developer communities. We speak in public. We do technical writing. We do blog posts, documentation, you name it. We do events sometimes. We host meetups, we organize events. And we build things. And all of us, the joint developer relations, started out before joining developer relations, started out doing a few of the things on the list, not all five of them. I don't think anyone, I've talked to did all five, or anyone in developer relations today does all fives. Maybe there's a few exceptions. But they did one or two of the things in there. So it's easy. You do two out of five and this is your first step into developer relations. You can look at doing all of them. If you want to do public speaking, or if you want to get better at public speaking, there's a few programs around. One of them is called the Zlatak speakers, obviously, because I love them. And they give you training and support and hotel and flights for you to go in your local region and speak about web technologies. It doesn't have to be as long as it's the web. They help you with that. If the web isn't your thing and you're a Java dev, I'm sorry for you, but there's always Toastmasters. There's always Toastmasters. And I was looking, there's actually Toastmasters Singapore. Now what Toastmaster does is it trains you, it helps you to talk in front of people about random shit. Now I'm not a fan of Toastmasters, but if you have anxiety or if you're not really sure you can talk about things in front of people, Toastmasters actually teaches you how to do impromptu talks in front of people. It's a safe environment where if you go, they'll give you feedback about how you did or how you spoke so you can get better. If you want to do technical writing, I think the best advice I can give you is to start blogging. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be out there. Document all the things you do. As a developer or as a computer science student, the thing I absolutely hated was to write documentation. Or worst of all, document my code. I think I used to tell everybody my code was self-documenting. And that's one of the biggest lies I tell. But it turns out documentation is good. If you want people to actually use your code, you have to document it. If you want people to actually improve your code, someone was mentioning, I think a speaker before me, you don't build software on your own. If you want help, you have to document things so people can understand them. There's also writers clubs, which kind of help. It depends. There's a few around Singapore where just show up at the coffee shop, show up at the coffee shop. There's a theme, and you start writing on the theme. It might be write an article with JavaScript or write an article with Python or whatever. Or it might be all fantasy, and you have to, I don't know, talk about your dead cat. There's also this website, which I didn't have to my slides, but there's this website that looks popular in around Singapore, which is called Dev2. It's amazing. A lot of people, I don't think Wei is here. But Wei and Huijing both use Dev2 as a publishing medium, and the community around it is amazing. If you want to build community, there's a few options for building community. Again, Mozilla has a program called Raps, which Mozilla gives you support to organize events for the local community, in which you can help out with things like Privacy Awareness Month or localization, translation, and stuff like that. If you're not a Mozilla fan, there's also the Fedora Ambassadors program, which is kind of the same thing except for Fedora. There's a bunch of ambassadors, heroes, or whatever programs that you can join, and those are going to help you to build community. If you want to organize events, I think Meetup is the best place for you. Everybody needs help with their Meetup. I don't think I took a screenshot of Junior Dev, but Singapore CSS is there. So if you want to help organize events, probably you can do it today, organize your first event. You're going to fail. So the easiest thing to do is to help someone else organize their event. Help one of the Meetup organizers organize the Meetup. Everybody's looking for help. I'm a Meetup organizer, and I think at this point we have four co-organizers, and there's never enough. In terms of building things, I don't have a lot of advice for you. Just do stuff. But most importantly, after you build things, put it out there. GitHub is really good for things like this, even though there's this whole controversy online about ICE and GitHub being bad or whatever. The people behind GitHub are questionable. GitHub has software. It's good for you. So after you build something, put it on GitHub, let other people see. So if you think about the developer advocate as one five-part entity, to get your first job, you don't have to do all five of them. That's why most of us don't do all five of them. I think the organizing events part, I don't do that. I rarely organize any more Meetups or stuff like that. But I do speak. I do build community. I do build stuff. Not the smartest stuff in the world, but I build them. I think my latest build was an ASCII text generator as a CLI with a bunch of collars and write about it. If you want resources on all of these combined, me and Julia run this newsletter called developeravocados.net. Why developer avocados? Someone made a spelling mistake once, and instead of saying developer advocate, said developer avocado. And now developer avocados is a thing. So there's this newsletter. And every week on Monday, it depends on which part of the world we are. Because Monday here is Sunday everywhere else. So every Monday, you get five to seven articles about one of the five topics in there. This is going to help you improve. And you also get one to four conferences, it depends, that are looking for speakers. And the conferences always have a code of conduct enforceable. And they always assist speakers in some manner. Some of them pay for full flights and accommodations and a stipend. Some of them might pay for flights and accommodation only if your employer can't pay for it. But they help speakers get to the event and speak. I want to personally thank everybody who filled out the survey. Some of them wanted to be anonymous. These are the people who didn't want to be anonymous. They were amazing, and it helped me put together data around my hunches and feelings. And I want to thank you to all of them. On the same note, if I've convinced you and your next job is going to be a developer advocate or developer relations, my team at Nexmo is actually hiring. So if you go to developer.nexmo.com slash team, hashtag join, you'll see you actually have a bunch of open positions here in Singapore. We're looking for a community manager right now. And we're looking for some more people as well. So if you want to join us, talk to me after this is done. With that, I want to thank you. Before I close up, Huijing asked me to remind you all that Monday there's the Mozilla Developer Roadshow. If you haven't signed up, Huijing says, pretty please sign up for the Mozilla Developer Roadshow. I'm going to put my slides and everything else on Twitter. So you might as well follow me on Twitter. And with that, I thank you. Thank you.