Developer Relations Isn't Just for Extroverts - Fred Harper Interview

In this video interview, I got to sit down with Fred Harper, who is a fellow Canadian and developer relations manager at Tiny MCE. And I thought this was really cool because I haven't yet interviewed anyone who does developer relations. So, I got to learn a lot about that. We get to hear about his journey as a developer into developer relations and see how his extroverted personality ties into that. But if you're not extroverted, that's okay, too, because we go back and forth and discuss really how that can shift from when you are extroverted to introverted and how that all ties into different parts of developer relationships. So, I think you're really going to enjoy this one. Sit back, enjoy, and learn all about developer relations from Fred. Fred, thanks for joining me. if uh if you don't mind to kick things off maybe a little bit of background for how you got started in your career and how you got to where you are now for our audience. >> Uh thanks for having me. Really a pleasure. So uh you know I'm whole. I've been in tech for a long time a little more than 20 years. And I was lucky because um I don't know how it's working where you live. Actually you're from Canada so it's basically the same thing I assume. But uh you know they basically asked you when you're around 12 years old 14 years old like what do you want to do for the rest of your life because you need to decide where you're going to study and and what program you're going to take. And I was lucky enough that I had a computer at home which was not the case for every families at the time. I know right now it's a little more common but it was not in my time now I feel so whole saying that but [laughter] I was playing games and I liked it and in my mind I was like yeah I can become a software developer because I like playing games which one does not does not equate the other one but I was lucky enough that um I decided to study uh software development and I also liked it um so super lucky so I started as a software developer I've done that for about 10 years but I talked a lot. I'm an extrovert. I'm social. Um, on my free time, I started to organize meetups because I like I I just thought it was fun to like give back to the community because I was attending meetups. I started to speak at conferences. If I want to be honest, at first it was mostly for my ego, but also because I like to share and I like to, you know, share my expertise and help other people to understand and educate people on some topics of experience I have. I started to write technical blog posts and um I realized that oh there is a job for that like developer advocate and it was not super popular at the time. It was mostly bigger company like Hapo, Google, Microsoft they had like developer advocates. We were not even called developer advocates. We're either um technical evangelist or developer evangelist which was uh the title was used at the time. But um I switched from software developer to developer relations. So as developer advocate about 14 years ago. Uh first job was at Microsoft. Um they approached me. They were looking for someone who uh live in Canada because at the time the developer relations team were specific to different countries but uh I was covering Canada but they were looking for someone who speak French uh because you know I live in Quebec, I live in Montreal and people speak French here. Not everybody is bilingual. So they needed someone to be able to talk to that audience and they were like hey we're also looking for someone who is bilingual which I was not. So I had to learn English uh during that time. But they were looking for someone who speak French first and can and speak English as a second language instead of the other way around. So you don't have the accent when you go talk to uh people. So long story short, I've been doing developer relation for about 14 years now. Uh you know at Microsoft, at Digital Ocean, npm, Fitbit, uh smaller startups. And right now for about uh six months I'm at Tiny MCE uh leading the uh developer relations team there uh for different brands also from our parent company Taigo but as the high se part of my job I'm focusing on tiny MC rich text editor so been doing that for a long time loving it uh it's a great intersection between you know um being a software developer because I still I'm still developer my audience are developers but it really used my you know soul social extrovert skills and the fact that I love to help people being successful and it's a great way to do that. So been doing that for a while. So long story about uh >> where I am right now. I guess one of the questions I have and it's I find this kind of uh interesting because uh as we most of us are aware like I feel like uh you know stereotypically people that are into development are generally uh you know like I don't have stats to prove it but I think that uh more introverted versus extroverted. So it's really cool to kind of uh see that you're able to like leverage that sort of extroverted side of uh your personality. But one of the questions I had was like did did you find that you had to do a hard transition into like coding less or like to be able to tap into uh doing more of your your current role or or were you able to maintain that or what did that look like in terms of transitioning from like maybe more hands-on coding work to to what you're doing? Yeah. So unfortunately um with most role and and it tends to change a little bit for Sansley but like with most developer advocate role you still code. Uh the difference though is that usually you're not part of the product team. You're not really part of engineering meaning that like you're not building a software. You code because you need to learn the product because you're the customer zero. You need to test new release. You need to learn new technologies because it's not just about your product. You need to you know keep up to date. uh you need to be credible when you go on stage and speak at conference. You know, you you need to have the knowledge to be able to write blog posts or create videos. So, uh it's why I still consider myself a developer because I still code. I just don't build product anymore. Uh it's more about the learning. It's more about getting the knowledge that I need to be able to do my job. So, this is why I always say to people, I mean, like I miss coding full-time. uh I didn't left uh the software development role to uh developer advocate because I didn't liked it. Um I loved it. I love building product. I still remember my first LOL world. Uh every time I talk about it, I have goosebump uh and and it it was stupid. It was just showing LOL on a screen. But like I mean like I did that and I think I think it's fantastic. There there's some a magic part of like being a software developer. So I love it. But when I put this on a scale, I mean, I love doing everything else a little bit more. So that's a great mix. It's a great intersection between that's a technical role, but it really goes into a lot of other things that I like to do. And it's a people centric role, which is a little uh less available when you're a software developer. Usually like yes, you work with a team. You're not usually alone. You may talk to customers, you may talk to other teams internally, but it's not the same. Like sometimes uh when I'm at home, I'm going to have EM meetings like everybody else. I'm going to be alone in front of my computer, but um I travel, I do events, and when I do events, I talk to people, hundreds of people from like 8:00 to the morning to like 10:00 in the evening, and that's my day. Um, so with that said, some roles right now they're looking for kind of like a between like hey you're going to do I don't know 20 30 40 maybe 50% of your time where you're going to be part of the product team and you're going to build the product and the other 50% you're going to talk about what you built. Uh I think it's a fantastic approach. um also think that maybe it's not good in all the cases because as right now 100% of my time is about developer relation and I feel like I don't have enough time to do everything that I would like to do and I'm not even coding uh the product itself. So yeah, and after doing that a couple of years, I mean, if I really want to be honest, I consider myself still technical, but I'm not as technical as I used to be when, you know, I was coding like eight hours a day uh to build products when I was a software developer. >> Yeah, there's a there's like an interesting set of like things that you focus on, right? So like as a developer I mean so yes like as you're explaining to to remain technical you have to understand like the the the language that you're going to be building in the tech stack that you're that you're advocating for. Um but when you're building products and services and things like that it's it's not it's not just knowing those things. It's also like cool we have an existing codebase. How do we build and extend and go in different directions? Um, so yeah, I could I could imagine that if if you are spending more time doing the other parts of like I have to understand the feature set coming up and the direction the product's going versus I need to spend time making the decisions about how we go in that direction. Um, sort of a different thing to try and and balance. So um >> yeah, >> definitely definitely and and and >> No, sorry. >> No, you go ahead. Sorry. I was just going to say and on top of that um if you want to be effective with your job uh it's not just about talking about my product because you know most developer don't like product pitches and most conferences don't want that and most like if if I came here to your podcast and I was talking just about tiny MC for one hour like people would get bored as much as like I love the product and I think I'm not a bad speaker and I can't entertain people I mean people are not coming here just to learn about that it's okay to talk a little bit about it and there is some situation where it's fine to talk about my product, but in most cases I talk about everything else. I talk about like the best practices with some technologies. I'm going to talk I'm even going to do like non-technical uh talk or article or videos that still relate to my audience. So now I don't have just to learn about the technology we use or just the product that I home. also have to learn about a lot of other things which doesn't let leave me a lot of time for for for like you know a lot of other things too. >> Yeah. And that's uh so I'm curious about this. Uh so basically your role is like involves obviously a lot of marketing right but the audience that you are like targeting is an audience of people that probably don't want to be marketed directly to like uh I don't know the right way to ask this question but like how do you approach balancing that where you're like I have a highly technical audience that I need to like be able to speak to without it making it without making them feel like hey I'm selling you like on everything I'm saying because then they're going to be detached from that. And and the thing you need to understand with developer relation is that um it's not as defined as like any other role like you know when you're looking for a role as a software developer uh the technology is going to change maybe like the the how you're going to do it a little bit is going to change the the the the guideline in place or how the team is working the product you're going to work on but at the end of the day you code you build a product with developer relation depending on the approach of the company depending on the goal depending on the person doing that role that may change from my point of view. Um I try to do product pitches as little as possible and sorry boss as you're listening about that [laughter] you know my approach by now I've been there for six months but uh you know my job is to create connection with human and as you said developer uh developers we hate product pitches uh we hate being sold uh we hate like traditional marketing we don't like that so my goal is to help you being successful and I hope you're going to be successful with my product but most of the time I don't even talk about my product. Uh as I said like we have like that's on the Chinese MC side uh we have some partners. So when I go to their conferences because everybody there using our product yes I talk about new features of my product because they're already users. It makes sense but most of the time I do not talk about my product but I'm still Fred from Tiny MCE which mean that like I'm still promoting the company. I'm still help helping you with other type other technology and sometime there's also a way to you know talk a little bit about my stuff without being a product pitch like as an example one of the last talk I did was uh introducing developers to accessibility because most people know accessibility as like okay I kind of know what it is but I don't care that much about accessibilities but you know now there's laws and and even without the laws it's I think it's important to care about accessibility so it was not about tinium MC, but within my 30-minut talks, I took a minute and I said like, by the way, if you use Tiny MC or if you want to know Tiny MC, we have that accessibility checker plugin that does amazing. And it was one minute maximum and a 30 minute talks. And I was like, and I even made a joke. I'm like, hey, I need to do that. My boss wanted me to do that. Like, sorry about that. And people laugh and it's fine. And like it was not too much in your face. uh or you know one non-technical talk that I've I gave uh a couple of months ago was about how to create great developer documentations because sometimes depending on the company where you work it's part of your responsibility to maintain the developer documentation it's not part of my responsibility right now because engineerings uh own it at tinyce but it was part of my job at the previous company and when I gave that talk I was talking about how to build great developer documentation but >> which documentation I was using as an example the one that I [laughter] own the one that I created the one that was on my about my product. So, you know, there are ways where like you can talk about your stuff without being too much in your face. But as I said, those are really specific example. Most of the time, I'm not even going to talk about my product. I'm just going to introduce myself. I may just say at the end like, oh, if you're interested about rich text editor with a wig, if you have a use for or for this in your product, like come talk to me during the break. But that's it because again uh it doesn't make sense and it's others people's job to do those product pitch and and and to be that kind of person. But like if I really want to build build a relation with developers, if I really want to create something that is not just a short-term impact, I need to be transparent. I need to be honest. I need to just be helpful and not always talking about my own stuff. >> That's a really interesting point, right? It's like the I mean it's developer developer advocacy, developer relations, right? Like it's about forming the relationship with development and yeah I guess thinking about as you were kind of uh walking through that the the idea of being able to put content together, put you know talks together that are that are just generally helpful, right? Like you're trying to help the audience. Um they're going to be interested in that. they're going to want to attend that if that's an area where they're like, I need to learn about that. I want to be better at that. Then if you're able to like kind of add in something or the context happens to mention like the things that you're that you're doing and even the fact that you know if you're introducing yourself and you're saying I'm Fred from X, then you then they're able to say like it's kind of in their mind like okay like I I know that the company name or the area that you're in is not uh not gone missing, right? So it's just not in your face and kind of making people go like, "Oh, this feels kind of slimy like right from the beginning." >> Exactly. Exactly. I don't want that because, you know, for for us to be successful as developer advocate, it's a lot about who we are as a person. It's our personality. It's how people trust us and it's it's how they relate to us. So, and my job, I can have some quick win, but my job is mostly medium to long-term type of impact because it's around the human. Um as an example um at my first job when I was at Microsoft um it was a really Microsoft centric workshop but people known about it. There was people that wanted to learn to uh I think I was creating like Windows uh 8 application after we launched Windows 8 and I was uh leading a workshop and one attendee uh was having issue with AWS and I mean like I work at Microsoft we had Azure and he was using AWS and I was like fine like if I can help you I'm going to help >> get out of here >> and yeah exactly I'm like like get out of my room like you're not using the right cloud uh service but I was like no uh I can help you I have enough knowledge to help who AWS and I helped that person and that person was not you know super pro Microsoft because it was also especially in the time where Microsoft was not um has open and and and has let's say friendly for lack of other word uh that is that Microsoft is right now no matter your opinion uh it was during the Bulmer era and uh you know the guy was like hey you know Fred is not a a bad person and and maybe Microsoft is not that bad for having someone like Fred and a year or two after that person started to build application related to the Windows ecosystem and maybe I'm putting myself too much credit but like he told me that it was like it was because of you because you didn't dismiss the fact that I had issue with a competitor and you helped me being successful with that and this is kind of like you know the medium to longterm impact. So at that moment that person did not use Azure but like a year or two after I can't remember exactly they started user technologies because they were in a place at that time where it makes sense. So, you also need to keep this in mind in that role is that maybe right now I'm a tiny MC. Maybe you don't need a rich text editor, >> but we met at a conference, maybe your next job, maybe your next project, maybe you're going to need something like that. And you're going to remember me like, "Hey, I met the bold guy at a conference and like he was funny and was friendly and and and we had a coffee together and like, oh, I'm I'm going to try his product when it makes sense." >> I just realized we have the the same haircut. Yeah, we have the same style like the beard [laughter] and the hair. >> It's a it's the right way. So, um yeah, >> I agree with that. [laughter] I guess as you're talking about the medium to long-term kind of approach here and and a lot of your role has to focus on that from a I guess like a personal like career perspective in terms of feeling like um I don't know the right way to ask this like in terms of feeling like reward or feeling like you're making progress in your career kind of thing. I feel like as developers it's like we're contributing features. um you you kind of have a little bit I don't know maybe to me it seems like it's more tangible to be like I coded the thing I delivered the thing um we tested it got released customers are using it and the feedback loop feels uh maybe shorter term and uh more tangible how do you feel about that in in your role if if maybe a lot of it happens to be medium to long term in terms of that like that feedback loop >> you can have yeah I understand where you're coming from and I kind of agree like the feed feedback is clearer and and and and and faster when you're building stuff. Uh I'm still building in a way. I mean like I create a talk, I give it at a conference, I record a video, I put it on YouTube, I share stuff on social media, I write an article, put it in the blog and um obviously I could like keep track with the metrics and like say like, oh, I'm happy that many people re read my stuff or that many people watch my videos. But what really give me that like you know feedback loop is when people really take the time to say like oh Fred that tutorial was useful or after a talk people like uh take me like I'm at conference and during the break and say like hey good talk that was really amazing or that I learned something or uh that was that was insightful and because people are really fast especially on the internet to criticize thing or bad [laughter] things about your stuff which is part of the job you need you you cannot please everyone. I learned that the hard way. Uh but to for people to take the time to say positive things, unfortunately, it's not natural for most people and it seems like we go out of our way when we do that. So when people take the time to do that, it means like, wow, I had an impact on people. And this is how I I see kind of like the value that I bring to the community is when I get that feedback. I don't do that for the feedback, but it's always uh you know, it's a little bit heartwarming when people are like, "Hey, Fred, like tutorial you wrote really helped me with an issue I had with my product or it helped me learn about a new technology that yeah, maybe not useful right now, but I may like play a little bit uh with it during my free time and maybe like my next project is going to be useful for me or not." So that kind of feedback is is pretty good like seeing the impact that you have on people uh you know but that's the same thing as a software developer like when I was building uh software it was nice to also yes you build a feature but what really amazed me is like when I was able to talk to users and they were like hey your product really helps me to save time it really helps me to achieve something that I wanted to do. So it's a little bit of same uh with developer relation from my point of view actually. >> Yeah no thank thanks for answering that. I I wanted to ask the question because I think that um for for different individuals like everyone has different motivations for for things that get them engaged or like really what they want to pursue, right? So, you know, some some engineers are like I just really like hard problems and being able to put my head down and like really focus on that. Others are like um you know, I talk like the perspective of impact. It's like I I usually look at like two uh totally different ends of a spectrum for impact where it's like you might be able to have uh in terms of number of people the impact is smaller but how how much impact for you have you have for some individuals is really really great versus like you know like some of the stuff we're doing at Microsoft right now on like I work on the routing plane for Microsoft 365 that does trillions of requests per day. So the amount of impact per person maybe doesn't feel like much but there's many many people so >> impact looks different. Um and so because everyone has different motivations for things that get them engaged. I was I I wanted to be able to kind of you know hear from your perspective es especially I feel like maybe a lot of my audience that watches this they might not have a lot of insight into developer advocacy and developer relations. So they're like maybe for them they're like maybe that is an interesting area to get into but I don't know if that's for me like would I be finding that engaging or not? So >> yeah and I mean uh specifically for that I'm just offering that to your audience like if you're thinking about maybe developer relation could be interesting for me find me online. I offer free coffee chat uh basically like a 30 minute zoom call and you can ask me any question. I don't have the only truth, but I have a lot of experience in that role. So, I can tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly of that role and see if it makes sense uh for you as a person. So, would be happy to do that. And but I really think that as you said like everybody has like different goal or visions or or how they measure how they're successful, but I really think like if you want to be successful in that role, I think it really needs for you to come with the desire to help other people being successful. I think it's it's the part and the second part that comes with it like oh you hope that people is going to be successful with your product but like if you if you switch those it makes more sense business-wise but it doesn't make that much sense for the road uh the role itself. So really like the passion of like helping other people being successful. I think it's what makes people in those role successful no matter if you're extrovert introvert no matter if you had a lot of experience as a developer or not. >> That was uh the follow-up question I wanted to ask. I think you kind of just touched on, but if you're um like introverted versus extroverted, obviously you said for yourself you are extroverted. So, it it's probably helpful especially to for like let me stop for a second for people that aren't fully aware like in terms of being extroverted and introverted. Uh what I'm focusing on when I say those words are like if you feel like you're being drained from being around people all day and then you want to uh detach so you can kind of get your energy back. I would say that's more introverted. and the opposite when you want to be around people because that feels energizing extroverted. If that's not the official definitions, I'm sorry, but that's what I mean. Um, do you find that you can be successful as an introvert in in such a role? It maybe it looks different though. >> Yeah, actually if you would have asked me that question uh right when I started my first role as a developer advocate, I would have said no because in my mind to be a developer advocate, you need to be an extrovert. But in my first role at Microsoft, I work half of the team were introverts. And I was amazed by that because I I thought I had that kind of like and I'm not saying this in a negative way against introvert, but I thought I had like that superpower of being an extrovert that helps me doing that job. But as you said, the difference is that for them, let's say uh because at the conference, this is where we we we like we talk to a lot more people. So the day-to-day job of like recording videos and stuff like it doesn't matter. But like when you are with people, this is where it makes a difference. And from them, it was exactly as you said, we're talking to people all day long. After the conference, they were going back to their hotel room and they were not talking to anybody. And we're just like decompressing, relaxing, and getting back their energy and going to bed earlier. In my case, I had a lot of energy after doing an event. And I was going to the events party, the conference party, continue to talk to people. And after the conference party, I was still going to have drinks with other people. after even when it was done because I get a lot of energy being with people. With that said though, doing that job for a long time, I'm also not I'm also not 20 years old anymore unfortunately. Uh I feel like right now I'm more like a ambivert which would be kind of like a little bit of half and half. So uh right now we're still going to see me like at conference party. It's more because it's my job and I still enjoy being with people, but once in a while I'm going to tell my team I'm like, "Hey, you know what? I'm not going to even go to like the team diner. I'm going to go back to my hotel room. I'm going to go to bed early because I still need those time now that I didn't need before where I need to just like relax and and get my energy back. With that said though, I'm still I don't think it's half enough in my case. I call myself ambivert now. I'm still a super extrovert and just less a little less extrovert than I used to be uh before. But it's really, as you said, I think you can be successful no matter if you're extrovert, introvert. I just think from the discussion I had that it may have you a little more if you're an introvert because the energy part of it. >> Yeah, you'd have to find there's going to be aspects to the role where you do need to interact with people and like is if you're acknowledging that and you know how to kind of manage your your energy levels, I guess, then you can kind of work and optimize for that. >> Yeah. And there's different type of role too. I mean like um many developer advocates role will focus on all aspects of the job which include usually conferences or meetup which is the part where you talk a lot with people face to face. But uh depending on the size of a company sometimes the role are split uh between different aspect of the role. So someone can focus on like just creating video so they don't really go to conference and interact with other people. You're still developer advocate. just your focus on one part of the role because someone else on your team may be the extrovert that really get energy going at conference will focus on conferences and you split the job like that. uh it's not always depending on the role like sometimes it's like just a conference and events once in a while like once per quarter or something like that which I it's not that demanding but sometimes it's like oh 50 80% of your time you're in the role it depends on the approach it depends on the vision of the company vision of the person leading developer relations so uh don't assume that like hey if you want to maybe move to a developer advocate role but you're like hey I'm not sure if I have the energy to do that all the time depending where you go depending on like how the define developer relation you may find a better fit for you that will not require you a lot of like hey meeting with person and draining my energy >> right yeah so that's a good point so if people are you know listening and watching if they're like hey this seems like something interesting I'm just not sure yet for me uh it's not like ruled out completely or uh or a guarantee it's kind of like as you're looking around for different roles like these are things that you should be looking for and trying to see >> as advertised what the split kind of looks like and the expectations of the role. >> Yep. >> Awesome. That's uh Yeah. No, that's it's really fascinating. It's uh I I haven't I guess probably because of my own my own role, I have not done a lot of uh conferences until a little bit more recently just because of outside of work in terms of content creation. I'm like, I should I should go check out this this kind of stuff. And I've started to interact more with uh like folks in Devril. And it's like I for me personally I didn't realize like just how much there is in this space. So uh I found it kind of fascinating to learn from from others but uh at the same time it's like I have zero knowledge to share with other people about it if they're interested. So >> no I understand I understand. >> What would you say like I guess for people that are on the fence about it? what are kind of do you have like a couple of top things in in mind that um if they're like on the fence like hey if like if you like this if you like that or if if you're against these things maybe um that that might be something to kind of shy away from or kind of any advice in that in that >> that's a good question um I would say you know let me maybe first define what a quote unquote typical developer advocate roles mean because there is no real dayto-day and there is usually a lot of task and again it depends on the company you may not do all those things. You may focus on some stuff but usually it's a fine mix between you know you obviously things that everybody see like you speak at conferences uh or you speak at meetups sometime you're just like on boot duty if you sponsor an events uh sometime you just attend to network with people again because it's important to connect with the community uh most of the time you're going to do webinars or podcast like I do right now uh or uh live stream either at the company or external um you're going to record tutorial video tutorial. Sometime you may help other team and do more let's say traditional marketing centric videos but because you're like the technical expert you can you know help uh other team uh being able to do that you're going to write blog posts either on your own medium or externally uh you're going to help you know promote the new feature and stuff. So you're basically I like to call myself the the friendly, approachable, technical, social face of the company and this is basically a part of my job and you interact with a lot of teams like sometime you can have a discussion with people and you bring that people to the sales team because it makes sense or uh you work with the marketing team to maybe I would say protect your developer audience or help them to like how to approach developer uh you're going to be active on social media because that's the online way to connect people. You may or may not build or own a community uh like a slack or discord or some kind of forums where you're the one who's gonna like uh being the social media manager or be the community manager. Uh you may also be responsible for support technical support if the company is smaller and you don't have a support team. Uh you can own the documentation again if you don't have technical writers. So there is so many things you can do. So there's different approach to uh that role. So I would say um two things like if you like people I think it's a gift like you need to like people you like you cannot go uh at an event or talk with people online and and after you finish the discussion like h I hate people I mean like let's be honest that happens once in a while but if it's always [laughter] like that uh it it won't work uh as I said before I think you really need to uh love helping people being successful uh creating content in a way or another you can preference like I prefer to do video content versus written content I had to do both but there's a preference but in some role maybe you focus on those so there is some kind of like content creation that always been part in any any role um I think if you like those kind of things if you are also uh someone who technical like technical stuff because your audience is developer as I said you need to be critical you need critical when you talk to people you need to learn new technologies to keep up not everything but just enough. Uh so those things are kind of the things that uh you need to like uh or some of it. I mean to be able to be comfortable in that role with that say it's not always uh beautiful and rainbows and and unicorns [laughter] in that role. Uh I would say my biggest issue with developer relation is is one or two thing. Um one is that it can be totally different from one company to the other. uh because as I said before it's not like oh you're a software developer the job's going to be the same at every company what's going to change it the technology the product you're going to build and maybe like you know the best practices you're going to use but at the end of the day you are creating a software with developer relation it can means a lot of things and sometime it doesn't mean what I think it should mean sometime it's just like oh actually you're looking for a technical writer which is part of the role usually but now it's it's that role you're clicking for or you're looking for someone >> portion of it right is like >> exactly Yeah, >> exactly. It's different. Or oh no, actually you're looking for a saleserson and you just put it with all respect for sales people a cooler title with like developer advocates. So like everybody people use this at every s possible in every ways possible that is always that is not always developer relation. So that's a problem sometime. Uh I think it's a little bit better now because when I started uh we were not a lot of people doing that around the world because it was just big company because at it's an investment uh because you don't always get the return right away. Uh so that's one thing uh the inconsistency in terms of like what is exactly the role which is a also can be a benefit as I said before maybe you're looking to do more specific activities uh and you don't really like to do the other end makes sense for a specific role um the other thing is that um even if it's more popular now uh even startups now like they're they're fifth or sixth or seventh hired even after like having a full-fledged like uh engineering team they're looking for developer advocates so people understand now the benefit of having developer relation but there's still a lot of people that do not understand developer relation so I've been at jobs where we had a discussion we had interviews and it feels like we understood each other but once I was in the role I was like oh no like you did not understood or I was not able to maybe it was my fault I was not able to articulate probably uh what developer relation means to me and now actually what you want me to do is traditional marketing or what you want me to do is is basically being a salesperson which is fine but it's not what I want to do. It's not my vision of developer relation. So again because it's it's maybe not super well defined. Um I've seen many situation where like yeah there's a lot of misunderstanding like how we're going to track this how we're going to measure impact how the roles going to be. Um, I'm lucky enough right now that where I work, uh, my, uh, manager, uh, she hired me because she was like, "This is your thing. You know what it is. We know it's important. We used to have it. We want to have it again." Uh, but it's not my expertise. So, I want to hire someone who I'm going to trust that will be able to bring a proper developer relation that's going to benefit the company. So, I'm lucky enough that I like right now I'm like, "Yeah, I don't have that problem." uh because like she's supporting me and uh we have that understanding like we have each on her expertise and we try to bridge the gap on some stuff but at the same time she's like you know your do it. >> Yeah, exactly. Well, I was going to say I think that as you were saying the it can be a strength and like a problem when you have so much flexibility in the role and I think that probably just comes down to like expectations, right? So if you have different expectations and like whatever it h whatever conversation happens before the role versus when you're in it, >> if that's not met, then that's going to be challenging. But um I personally I find like the same as an engineering manager like if I'm being tasked with like here's like the area that you're responsible for and I have a lot of trust in you. Please go forward and and and take care of this the way that you see best fit. Obviously I'm there to support you. If I have that from my manager, that makes me uh set up for success in my role because it's like you trust me. Okay. And we have a good working relationship. If I need help from you or support, >> I'll come to you. Great. And I can imagine that in in your situation, if you're being told like, hey, like this is the exact box you need to fit into. You might be like, okay, like that only works if that box is the shape and size that I need it to be. And when it's not, it's like this really sucks because there's too much variability that they can try to to kind of force you into. Is that fair to say? >> Oh, no. And I totally agree with absolutely everything everything you said. And um the good thing is that you know when you're like, "Hey, I hire you because you have the expertise and you have the experience and I will trust you. I don't know you yet, but like you know, we talked a little bit. I'm like, okay, we're going to start with like I'm going to trust you to do the right thing." It doesn't mean that also uh my manager has nothing to say or you as a manager have nothing to say or me managing my people I have nothing to say. I'm like no if I think you're going in the wrong direction. We're going to have a discussion and maybe I misunderstood something and you will explain it to me and maybe I'm going to change my mind but maybe not also and maybe we're going to realign. The thing is that I prefer to trust people. I don't like micromanagement. I don't like being micromanaged. But if I'm doing something you think is wrong, maybe there's a reason. uh we're going to talk about it and maybe we're going to agree or maybe you're like hey um you choose your battle or we agree to disagree and we move to something else. Uh but yeah having that freedom I think is kind of important uh to be successful because again it depends uh I mean right now uh I report to like uh global d global director of marketing so my team is part of marketing but I own developer relation uh but when I was IC in IC role um sometimes my manager was a developer advocate so in that case it's a little bit different but when it's someone else like some at some point I was reporting to the CEO at some other point I was reporting to CTO uh they may have opinions they may even have experience but most of the time they don't uh sort of like it's more like opinion and even if I'm not owning Dell because like I'm not a manager I'm not like in a leadership role um sometime makes that relation a little more difficult but >> interesting >> yeah it's it's kind of like a case by case I would say but um yeah totally agree with everything you said >> that's no thank you for sharing that um in ter you were kind of uh talking through a bunch of the different sort of uh day-to-day responsibilities that you might encounter, right? And obviously, as we just said, that could that could shift a lot. Um I'm curious about uh maybe the backwards direction. So, a lot of what you were talking about was uh taking things that are like in uh either internal and and obviously advocating for them to a developer audience. What about going the other way? So when you're talking with all of these developers and uh you're hearing people either go this is awesome or people going this this stuff sucks or like we're frustrated um what does that interaction look like back into development or back to marketing maybe how things are messaged and yeah just curious on that. >> Now I'm ashamed because I forgot to talk about that part when I was talking about [laughter] the day-to-day because for me it's a super important part. Um you know it's a two-way street. >> [snorts] >> My job is not you know when I started that job um the title the the popular title were evangelists and I loved it because it was a good icebreaker. People were like what do you do? You go to church every Sunday and u hopefully it was not uh negative seen in a negative way for religious people. Uh for me it was just like no like technology is kind of like a religion you know just talk with like a big fan of iOS Apple and a big fan of Android put them in the room uh that's going to be like there's no way to change their mind like it's like even if you have like great like points and and like research about stuff like no this is my device this is the best this is my company this is the best so there's that kind of like religious part in technology from my point of view so I love the title evangelist but people assume that the role was just like I evangelize what I the company to the other people and it was just a one-way street. My job was just to be like, you know, a speaker for the company and just like >> I'm here to convert you, right? Like >> Exactly. Exactly. And obviously there's a little bit of that like at the end of the day uh like if I do my job well, I'm going to get more users. If I do my job well, I'm going to get more paid users. If I do my job well, paid users may pay more for their features, but it's a positive side effect of my job. With that said though, uh it's probably why the title changed more for developer advocate because I advocate on the name for the name of developer for developers. So yes, there's still a lot of like evangelization where when I I speak out about stuff, but as you said, it's super important to have it's a two-way street. My job is to represent developer internally meaning that all the feedback I get uh I bring it back to the product team or to the team where it makes sense. Um also try to I said protect because I had bad experience in the past but like I protect the developer audience. Uh sometimes uh I'm lucky right now it's going super well but at some other companies I was basically like trying to achieve something and marketing was destroying what I was trying to do with their approach or the sales team was like screwing up my stuff and I was like no this is not how you approach developer and let me help you to do that. So there is the part where I bring the feedback internally to help us either find issues or uh have features idea that we didn't have or sometimes just to confirm we're doing in the right direction or not with the road map. But there's also a part where like I'm a resource for internal teams, you know, uh let's say I'm not a salesperson, but as I said before, if I talk to someone who looks like, hey, I want to pay for that feature, I'm not the best. I can have a little discussion with them, but like I'm not the one who's going to be able to give them prices and bundle and and have like proper discussions on my expertise. So, I'm going to bring them to the sales team. But it's not just that, too. I mean like I can talk to the sales team and say like hey what are or the the the people doing support and what are the questions that are the most popular you get. Oh okay uh it don't seems like we have content to help you uh so you can have like that one link that you send them instead of having to repeat this all the time or that video that hopefully is going to minimize the number of question about that specific feature issues. So the job is really like hey developer relation internally uh representing external developer internally uh representing the company externally so it's it's kind of like a mix of all those things >> and would you find that like in that sort of that reverse direction from outside in I'm calling it reverse direction that's probably not the right thing to say but I think you understand um when you're going from outside in do you find that there's more interfacing uh and maybe this changes from company to company but more interfacing with like product management or like directly with the like the developer team and engineers or hybrid or like what does that kind of look like? >> It's I think you answered the question for me. Uh it's it really depends on the company. Uh you know right now at Tiny MC that's going to be a mix between I have a discussion with the PM or uh the engineering team if it's like if I usually go that way like if it's a if if I think it's a bug I just talk to the engineering team like hey I think I I think I got that bug reported. I was able to replicate it or I'm not able to replicate it. Can can you look at it? Uh if it's more like about the feature idea, I'm going to talk to the PM. Uh at some companies it's possible uh and I have a great interaction with the developer teams or the engineering team, the product team. Uh it was not always the case. I think to be successful you need to have that relation. But also it depends on the size of the company. uh when I was at Microsoft uh and and maybe that changed now because it was like 14 years ago uh we didn't really have access to the product team uh so yes I was listening to developers but it was really hard for me to bring the feedback to the product team uh I know a lot >> makes a big difference yeah >> exactly and and at the same time uh if I want to be honest not all the feedback that I get from external developers make total sense or or valuable so I'm also some kind of like the first filter around it >> and uh it's impossible also to please everyone and sometime but it's it's good to have that relation because also >> I don't always have the answer but I need to find the answer at some point and sometime the answer is we know that's an issue but we have a limited amount of people working on a product it's not a priority for X reason or yes that feature is really great but it's not in the mindset about where we think the product should go so things but like it like it won't happen. Uh and to be able to do that you need to like have clarity about the road map. You need to understand what's coming up. You need to understand how your team is working internally. So um right now um I have a great relation team previous company was the case other company was not the case also. So also depends um I had some companies where the product team was like >> don't disrupt us with with your thing like we we have a vision we do your stuff and I was like fine but like we have real users that may have issue may have problem have suggestion and they may not all be good but we need to listen to them because even if we don't implement those stuff that helps us to understand what the people using our product needs or have issues or misunderstand about our product because you build that thing all day long. you know how it's working. A new user may use it the wrong way, >> but maybe that's the way that most people use it because they don't know the product like you do as someone who build it. So anyway, I'm blabbering now, but long answer to say like yeah, it it really depends from one place to the other. But I think to be success like for a couple of years now when I do interviews and and u I change job or unfortunately I have to change job uh one of the thing is like how is my relationship? how is my relationships going to be with the product team because I think I need that relationship to be successful and I don't want to just tell my people like oh yeah no I don't talk to the engineering team so whatever you're going to tell me basically >> that's going nowhere >> yeah exactly like like talk to the plushies next to me that's going to be the same thing same result >> no that's uh thank you I think that's super helpful because uh I'm I'm thinking through uh like in my software development experience I've not uh not worked with uh Devril like at a at a company like you know with my team or anything like that but I'm some of the things you're describing I'm thinking about product managers I've worked with that do an excellent job of like some of those interactions where they're fielding you know customer requests it's not their full-time thing but if they're at um if they're working with salespeople they're working uh going to conferences they're doing some of that getting information directly um and [clears throat] I I feel like some of the things you're talking about where it's like, yeah, maybe not all the feedback is like we're going to go action that or maybe it doesn't make sense for the product, but you're describing a lot of things that from when I've worked with product managers that facilitate some of that. Um I that's not for me because I would be like overwhelmed by that or like trying to tell people like, "Yeah, we're not going to go build that." But but I also feel for you at the same time like it's uh yeah, it's a really that's got to be kind of challenging to have to [laughter] go both ways because the thing though is not always negative, you know, like uh last conference I was um we had a booth and and most a lot of people were using our product and people just came to the booth to say like amazing love it magical [laughter] and I was like yeah you know what great feedback and that just remembered me that I didn't bring that feedback to the product team for that conference [laughter] but like it's also part of my job not just to bring the negative but also like hey you know what because you like most of engineers do not interact with users Most of the time it's great to have like the feedback not just like understanding like oh bravo like like your product bring more revenues fine but like is people loving them or they just use it because they don't have the choice and was imposed no so also the positive feedback is something that >> if I want to be honest I'm not good at bringing back to the product team because I'm just like thank you and I move to the next step but like it's I think it's part of the job to also bring that positive feedback. Yeah, absolutely. Like uh I think probably many developers would say like knowing that what they're building not only obviously helps a business make more money, but people are like, "Hell yeah, this is great." Um I think that goes a long way. Um Fred, with a few minutes left, uh do you want to share any specifics around like what you're currently doing and how people can reach out and find you and like all of that kind of stuff? I'll get links and stuff from you after and I'll put them in the description and all that. But >> yeah, kind of share where you're at and how people can find you. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, um I'm a developer relations manager at TinyMC right now, which is a rich text editor. You may or may not have use it. We're there for the last we exist since like 20 years now, uh if I'm not wrong. Uh so it's basically a wizzywig and a couple of lines of JavaScript. You had this your application and you have like a full-fledged text editor. So if you're building anything that your users need to create some rich text content uh think about us uh let me know uh if you have a good or a bad experience as I said before if you listen to all the show it's part of the job uh to get both uh you can find me uh on LinkedIn uh fit Harper or just look for Harper uh maybe it's going to be easier uh I it's not my face though it's like a drawing icon on my face is where I use everywhere so it's it >> harder but easier also to find me. Uh I'm also on Twitter, F Harper. I'm on Blue Sky. Not super active there, but I'm still there. Uh and um yeah, also even LinkedIn. Uh I know some people do not accept everyone, but like if you work in tech, um if you're a developer, work in tech, you just want to have more one more connection. As I said, I'm really social. I'm going to accept you and I'm going to be really happy to have a connection with you uh connecting with you on LinkedIn or or on Twitter. And um as I said before also I offer free coffee chat. Uh basically as I said it's a 30-minut zoom meeting. We can talk about tech. Uh you can talk about developer relation. We can talk about tiny MC. We can talk about meditation coffee cats whatever you want. It's it's >> a cat in the back. [laughter] >> There is Yeah. Yeah. There's like I have two cats. One of uh the cat uh quote unquote work with me. Uh actually he's a bad employee sleep all the time [laughter] all the time and I have a cat. Yeah, he is lazy. I have a cat painting behind me. Uh I love cat maybe a little bit too much but uh those coffee chat are not like just business related actually. It's like if you just want to know one more person in the business. Uh it's nice because it's it's a tech is big but it's small at the same time. And what I always tell people it's often all about the network. It's about who you know who like who knows you. So uh just connecting with people. I think it's it's really interesting and I always love to do that. With that said though also I travel quite a lot for that job. So I do a lot of conferences meet up a little bit around the world. So uh two things if you see me in your city even if you don't go to the events where I'm going to go just paying me uh I may not have the time but sometime I'm going to be if I have the time I'm going to be more than happy to go have a coffee with you. Uh and if you organize conference and meet up think about this guy. Um, I have some speaking experience that I can bring to the table and uh always looking for uh places to uh share my passion about technology uh and help your audience uh with whatever makes sense for you. >> Awesome. Thank you so much. And honestly, I learned an awful lot here because like I said in our conversation, it's like I'm aware of the role. uh I know very little about it and uh you know I think it's helpful for me especially if uh if I'm talking with people and it's it's one more thing that I can kind of put in front of them to say hey maybe this is a direction that like you could be interested in. So uh Fred thanks again so much and like I said I'll follow up with you after and stuff to get links and uh we'll figure all that out. So >> yeah thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.