What is a developer advocate and how do you become one? In this episode, we have seasoned developer advocates, Kris Jenkins (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) and Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) answer the question by diving into how they got into the world of developer relations, what they enjoyed the most about their roles, and how you can become one.

Developer advocacy is at the heart of a developer community—helping developers and software engineers to get the most out of a given technology by providing support in form of blog posts, podcasts, conference talks, video tutorials, meetups, and other mediums.   

Before stepping into the world of developer relations, both Danica and Kris were hands-on developers. While dedicating professional time, Kris also devoted personal time to supporting fellow developers, such as running local meetups, writing blogs, and organizing hackathons.

While Danica found her calling after learning more about Apache Kafka® and successfully implemented a mission-critical application for a financial services company—transforming 2,000 lines of codes into Kafka Streams. She enjoys building and sharing her knowledge with the community to make technology as accessible and as fun as possible.

Additionally, the duo previews their developer advocacy trip to Singapore and Australia in mid-June, where they will attend local conferences and host in-person meetups on Kafka and event streaming. 

EPISODE LINKS

• In-person meetup: Singapore | Sydney | Melbourne
• Coding in Motion: Building a Data Streaming App with JavaScript 
• Practical Data Pipeline: Build a Plant Monitoring System with ksqlDB
• How to Build a Strong Developer Community ft. Robin Moffatt and Ale Murray
• Designing Event-Driven Systems
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Danica Fine’s Twitter
• Kris Jenkins’ Twitter
• Streaming Audio Playlist 
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Use PODCAST100 to get an additional $100 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)