Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.

So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously¹ recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.

How do you keep your skills up to date in this fast-moving and turbulant industry?

So, I get asked a lot about how I got into technical advocacy / evangelism¹, so it seems like the most cost-effective way to answer this question is to write a post about it. Warning: it’s a long one!

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.

Last Thursday I gave a keynote at GOTO Berlin to address the problems of deciding how to learn a new technology/framework/process (Spoiler Alert: it’s not by putting it into production).

Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don’t suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO Aarhus, a talk I wasn’t enormously happy with as there was no way to cover a lifetime of hard-fought experience in such a short time.

I was flattered a couple of weeks ago to be interviewed by Google as part of their women techmaker’s series, as it moves over to Europe. In this video I talk about going to Mars, education, planning your career, being a developer, and the impact of technology on our lives. So, not much…

I had an interesting discussion last night at the LJC developer sessions, and it’s a topic that comes up again and again:

When you’re applying for a job at LMAX, your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen.

I’m going to let you into a secret.