Venturing Into the World of #DevRel

Well for those that may have been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks, may not know that I recently accepted a new role as Developer Advocate at Sitecore. But I'm still getting to grips of what this new role really means and how it changes my view point a little bit on it's "customer" and who I'm really helping in this role.

Now before I go too far and talk about my role at Sitecore, I first wanted to express how much of a dream it has been to work at the "Mother Ship" as the Sitecore community likes to call it. I've been working with Sitecore since version 7.2, and over 7+ years. I've worked with multiple different types of clients and implementations, from household names to companies so large, but no ones ever heard of them, because they do manufacturing or a defense contractor. I've been fortunate for this journey that I've been on, because it has helped to build a stable and reliable future, and this latest step I always assumed would be inevitable, however I didn't quite see the role I would be taking with Sitecore.

A Developer Advocate position where my primary customer moving forward is not a company with thousands of employees but now instead a customer that is a developer trying to use the products that my company builds. Now I have to ask, if I was a developer using Product A, does the documentation, sample code, videos etc., truly detail the journey needed to implement this correctly. It's about making sure the developer is setup for success.

So what is all the Avocado talk and pictures coming from then? I'm honestly not sure, somewhere along the way of the building of this career, Avocado = Advocate, is my guess to why that exists. I'm not sure, but I'll stick with it, and because of that, you might be seeing a lot more avocadoes on my online profiles moving forward.

Rebranding Myself

This new role brings a unique opportunity to rebrand myself, shifting away from the pure focus of Sitecore and my previous Sitecore handles. Sitecore and/or my boss is supportive of this change. Not because they are against the "Sitecore" alias in my old account logins, but because this starts to build my own brand that can adapt to any current and future possibility.

New Personal Site

With the rebrand, I'm shifting away from "sitecoremaster" and therefore the domain I previously owned will come with that. The new site is a custom built application (more on how it's built and the code behind it coming soon), but the days of using Word Press are over.

The new site will also have a lot more than just blog posts moving forward. It's still a work in progress, but hopefully as I find time, I'll introduce other types of content, including POCs from Github, general guides, video content and short snippets.

Moving forward

So what's next for me? Well more of the same, but a lot more of it. Someone mentioned to me, when I got the role, that I would stop contributing to my YouTube or that my contributions would change. But honestly, this role is going to take a weekend hobby and amplify it. Everything I could produce in 5 to 10 hours a week sprinkled in throughout the year, is now a 9 to 5 focus, to not only produce content on Sitecore but also develop my own brand, and focus on topics that are cool and exciting!