Tim Berglund

Introducing Tim Berglund

Tim Berglund is a teacher, author, and tech leader with Confluent, where he serves as the senior director of developer experience. He is also the co-presenter of a bevy of O’Reilly training videos on topics ranging from Git to distributed systems. Tim can be seen speaking at conferences across the U.S. and around the world. Find Tim on Twitter: @tlberglund.

Geertjan Wielenga: Could you start off by explaining what you do?

Tim Berglund: I work for Confluent and I run a team there that we call the "developer experience (DevX) team." It's really a developer relations team, but we call it "DevX" because we think it sounds cool. I have a background as a full-stack Java developer, trainer, and speaker.

Geertjan Wielenga: A basic discussion between people who do this particular profession is whether they describe themselves as "tech evangelists" or "developer advocates." How do you see yourself and what is the difference between those two descriptions?

Debating job titles

Tim Berglund: This is a perennial discussion: we always talk about it. 10 years ago, I was involved in a meetup for software architects.

The first 50% of the meetup was about what it means to be an architect and then the other 50% was something useful.

In our line of work, we all do the same thing. I don't think there is a difference, especially if you stack up all the people who do this type of work and arrange them by title. When they talk about titles, some people say, "They're so different because a developer advocate is working for the developer and an evangelist is just trying to make something look good." That's not true.

This discussion does bring out some interesting aspects of our work. There are some ethical issues, such as who are we really fighting for? That said, I'm almost completely uninterested in the distinction. I usually say I'm a "tech evangelist" and at my company, we use the word "evangelist."

There have been people who have said, "I don't like the religious overtones of that. I don't want to be called an evangelist." Of course, I completely respect that and I'm not going to make somebody uncomfortable, but the work that we do is the same either way.

Geertjan Wielenga: How does the term "spin doctor" feel to you?

Tim Berglund: There are conferences that won't accept anyone whose title is "evangelist" or "developer advocate." I'll be straight: they make me mad.

I think the accusation of us being spin doctors is ridiculous only because some of my best professional friends are people who do this work. I know them and they do it authentically.

They're not interested in misleading people because that's wrong and they don't want to do a wrong thing.

The product marketers I've known are not developers or developer advocates; they're marketers. They're obsessed with facts and the logic of the claims they're making. These marketing people are a little too hung up on the lawyering of their statements.

We think, as tech people, that marketing people just lie and distort. You're going to find that there are unethical people everywhere, but my experience with actual marketing people is that even their spin doctoring is really careful and thought through.

Computer programmers will always call you out. There's this culture of software development where you can just raise your hand and say, "You're dumb and I don't agree with you!" Somehow that's okay! We even have a little bit of rudeness in this industry sometimes; people call each other out online.

"The controversy around our work is a lot smaller than we think."

—Tim Berglund

I just don't know how you'd get away with being a spin doctor when talking about code. This could be pure self-defense because it's what I do and I don't like being accused of spin doctoring. I just think the idea is nonsense because I don't see much of it happening. Actually, I think the controversy around our work is a lot smaller than we think.

As a developer advocate, your money is on the table, as it were, relationally. Your reputation is integrated with the community and you can't just lie to people. Also, you speak to people all the time, so you're good at it and you're a professional communicator. I don't see that as a negative.

How Tim got started

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you become a developer advocate in the first place?

Tim Berglund: I started my career as a firmware developer and I loved that. Then I moved into Java and the web, right as the first dot-com bubble was collapsing. That was my impeccable timing: getting involved in the web while the web was crashing!

A while later, I found that I like being in front of people and I like teaching. I'm good at teaching and it's a really energizing and rewarding thing for me to do. This was a time in my career when I was an independent consultant. I had some freedom to explore teaching, as long as I could get somebody to pay me for it.

During that time, my practice shifted from custom software development to training and conference speaking. That's how I got into speaking. I'll always remember the first meetup I spoke at. It just felt like I was on fire, in a good way, and I knew I needed to do more of it.

Geertjan Wielenga: The speaking aspect gripped you immediately, then?

Tim Berglund: Yes, it wasn't the first time I'd spoken in front of a group, but I felt that this was the right time to take speaking forward.

I wasn't a professional developer advocate or a tech evangelist, but I wanted these activities to be part of my brand and my personal identity. I wanted to take tech that was important to us as a community and help people to get started. I wanted to take something, learn it, and teach it. I was sucked in by that.

I started speaking at meetups and I thought, "I need to do something bigger and speak at conferences." I wanted to make this happen, so I pursued it. I got some breaks and began speaking. I was a guy just doing speaking at conferences because I wanted to, then later, I got a job where that was my role. I figured out how to build teams and align this work with what a company's priorities are.

Geertjan Wielenga: Which organizations have you worked for in this role and what did you advocate/evangelize?

Tim Berglund: The first regular army job I had in this space was at GitHub. My title was actually "trainer." GitHub was a flat organization back then and there was only a small group of trainers. This was 2012, so Git was still super scary to people and it was strategic for GitHub to drive adoption by helping people to be comfortable with using the core tech.

We did training and conference work, but the evangelism function was informal. As trainers, we were good in front of people, it was a role we loved, and we had friends in the community we were part of. We wanted to be out there talking about our work. We absolutely did evangelize the platform and the tech.

"We started to figure out how to evangelize a commercial product."

—Tim Berglund

From there, I went to DataStax and that job was also, by title, a training role. I ran a curriculum team and we built online training. We evangelized open-source Apache Cassandra and Spark, and the integration. We started to figure out how to evangelize a commercial product and play with that boundary a little bit.

During my tenure at DataStax, we put together some plans to formalize this process. We said, "Here's how we train our customers, here's how we evangelize the tech, and here's how we make documentation work together with that." We tried to make this a coherent vision that we could articulate.

At Confluent, there are people who function as evangelists throughout the company. I don't manage a big team of them, but I coordinate that overarching program.

Geertjan Wielenga: Is developer advocacy recognized sufficiently within your organization?

Tim Berglund: Yes, there's absolutely no question about it. I'm fortunate to have a CEO who functioned, historically, as the public face of the underlying open-source project. He really understands the value of this work and the company culturally understands the community of developer advocacy, so that's a big win.

Geertjan Wielenga: Clearly, you're very enthusiastic about all of this. What keeps you interested?

Tim Berglund: This is like breathing to me. I need to be able to speak.

Geertjan Wielenga: If someone doesn't enjoy speaking, is there a place for them?

If you don't want to be a conference speaker

Tim Berglund: Yes, certainly on my team there is. I've got a member of my team who doesn't like speaking and doesn't like being in front of people. She's an amazingly high performer.

My view of the evangelist role is that at meetups and conferences, this is a performance role, but you also have to deliver content that's useful. On my team, we have a content person. What she does, for example, is take different parts of the open-source stack that we've built, and even parts of the enterprise product, and say, "These things are supposed to work together. Product marketing says this works this way. Let me try and build something that does that."

This is amazingly valuable work because we can find out that the product doesn't work, so we need to fix that. We can also find out that the product works well and create content around that.

Geertjan Wielenga: Is the variation of tasks part of what you find enjoyable about this role?

Tim Berglund: Yes, although what lit my fire initially was the performance aspect of the work; that remains critical to me.

Documentation is a function that reports to me. It's a rich developer advocate function that needs to be there. That's part of the way that we communicate with developers.

"The variety of my work is important to me."

—Tim Berglund

Leading a team is a big part of my role. I could just be a guy on the road performing and I'd love that, but it's also motivating to me to have a group of people and give them a vision. I give them a context in which they can thrive and grow, and I find the next thing that they're going to do. The variety of my work is important to me.

Geertjan Wielenga: What kind of advice do you give to your team?

Tim Berglund: My team is more than just developer advocates. I've got a tech writing team that's growing. Then I've got a community team that's much more operational. I have a video producer who reports to me right now. Then I have one and a half developer advocates. Most of the people who do developer advocacy are distributed, as I mentioned. They're off in other teams being solution engineers or things like that.

When it comes time to give advice, I give feedback on new decks, along with helping to shape a narrative structure and providing those nuts and bolts of how to do the basic job well.

I also talk about how to deal with the various problems that can occur on stage when presenting, including dealing with hecklers. That's rare, but it happens.

A lot of conversations involve a member of the team asking, "Should I speak here? This conference reached out to me, but is it a good one for us?" We then try to assess community impact and commercial impact, and make a strategic decision for the company.

Geertjan Wielenga: How often do you refresh your own talks?

Tim Berglund: There are some things, like an introduction to Kafka, that are going to change slowly. Where the raw content doesn't change too quickly, a talk can live for a long time. Although, I don't actually want to be giving the same deck for more than two years. You get tired of it and you realize that you have to change it.

Requirements for being a developer advocate

Geertjan Wielenga: What are some minimum requirements for this role? Are there any personality traits needed?

Tim Berglund: As my boss has put it, my team is a rare zoo of unusual, unique animals: we're all different.

For the developer advocate role, I think you need to have an engineering background. This is a role where you are communicating with, relating to, making friendships with, and helping computer programmers. Let's not lose sight of that.

These are people who write code for a living; it's hard and scary. They never know how things work and everything's new all the time, and it's your job to help those people. I don't think it's realistic to say that you're going to be good in this role if you're not also one of them.

Geertjan Wielenga: You said that you need an engineering background, but imagine you're somebody interested in switching from a different career. Would that even be possible?

Tim Berglund: I'll put developer advocacy to the side and just think of developer as a role. We already see people coming into professional software development without a computer science degree. That's wonderful.

I'm not particularly bent out of shape about what path people take to get into tech. I certainly don't think you need to come through a university. You can do that, but it doesn't matter if you don't. However, I'm a little opinionated. I think that to be a developer advocate, you have to have spent time as a developer.

I wrote my first program when I was 10 and never looked back. Other people take different paths, but I think you need to spend time as a developer because you just need to understand that life.

There are very technical product marketing people who are very smart and are able to talk about the tech. You've got to be careful with that role, though, because you're never going to get it quite right if you're trying to use a marketing voice to talk to developers.

I think of this anthropologically because it's not just the practice of coding: there's a set of shared traditions, values, vocabulary, and myths that we have. To give an example, I'm from Denver and I think this is evident when I'm in Europe because I'm as American as one can be. When I speak, I don't try to hide that. There are all these things about me that I now recognize as being American things.

"There is this shared software development culture globally."

—Tim Berglund

As developers, there is a sense that we have more in common than we do not. There is this shared software development culture globally and you need to be an insider if you're going to have credibility in front of people. That's why I think you need to spend time as a developer. You've got to have spent time writing code.

Just in terms of the standard evangelist/advocate public role, you should have a certain level of comfort in front of people. It is really a performance role, as I said, and that's a core skill.

If you look at professionals like Venkat Subramaniam, you may think that you can't live code and tell jokes for 60 minutes, to a whole room full of people, as he does. And no, you can't. Maybe you never will be able to, but you need to want to do that. You need to love the interaction at that level. You don't need to be an extrovert and you don't need to be a people person.

Not all performers are extroverts, but you're going to be on stage and that needs to be at least a little bit exciting to you.

Tim's tips for progressing to advocacy

Geertjan Wielenga: Based on your experience, what would be the best way to progress from being a developer to being an advocate?

Tim Berglund: If this profession sounds like a good idea to you, then it probably is. That's one of the nice things about developer advocacy. There's a large community of developers who think, "I guess I might be able to give a talk, but doing that work full-time sounds terrible." If anybody does want to do this full-time, then they should pursue it. They are probably qualified.

The way you start is to make up a talk on something. If the work that you do is with very bread-and-butter tech, you may think, "It's a good tech, but it's not super cutting edge. The world already has a Josh Long talking about Spring. I'm not going to be him overnight. How am I going to make something interesting about my day job?"

My advice is that if the code that you write in your day job isn't very cool, then find something you think is cool and learn about it. Make a talk about it. It's not dishonest to do that; you're not a fake. You'll have actually done the work to learn about the tech and know enough about it to be able to then talk about it for 45 or 60 minutes at a meetup.

I'll say it again: find a tech you're interested in, build a talk, and then find a meetup in your area that deals with that tech. Maybe it will take four or six months to get on a schedule, but you probably can do that.

In terms of the mechanics of how to build a good presentation and how to speak well, there are great books on that. Dive in! After you do a meetup, do another one. When you've done four or five of those, submit at a conference. Submit a talk at five conferences and you'll get in.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you need to know absolutely everything about a tech before you can promote it?

Tim Berglund: No, you don't. You will find, as you talk about the tech, that you learn as people ask you questions that you don't know the answers to. I learned as a professional trainer that you need to make peace with the fact that you're not going to be able to answer every question. No matter what, somebody's going to be able to think of something you don't know.

Geertjan Wielenga: What do you do in that situation?

Tim Berglund: You darn well better say you don't know! I've just switched tech stacks in the last year. I didn't know anything about Kafka a year ago. Sometimes, you are in situations that are embarrassing. There are things that you should have known, just as basic knowledge of the tech, but get over it! Take the hit. Often, you will receive good, thoughtful questions that nobody could have anticipated. You just have to say that you'll look up the answers later.

Geertjan Wielenga: What do you do when you're not completely behind the direction that your organization is taking, then you're up on the stage and you get a question about that?

Tim Berglund: Firstly, I should say that, happily, I'm not in this position right now, so none of this is personal. There are a couple of dimensions to this. You're the face of the company and even if you're an individual contributor, you're functioning as a leader. You're in front of a group of people who are asking you a question.

Whether or not you have any say in the direction of the company is one thing, but there's an assumption that you do. I think you should get to the point where you at least have a shared understanding with the company about its direction and your shared commitment. You can say that you have a consensus and even if you don't agree, this decision has been made by a team and you're going to carry that ball.

"If you think there are actually ethical principles on the table, you have to quit your job!"

—Tim Berglund

If you get up in front of people and you say, "My company is doing this but it's dumb and I wanted to do this instead," that's weak leadership. If it's something that you feel strongly about, or if you think there are actually ethical principles on the table, you have to quit your job!

It would be better to say to yourself that you're on board and representing this decision, but you've still got your own opinions. In a private conversation, it's fine to give a private opinion, especially if it's a big community thing or relates to open source versus commercial, but in public, you have to represent the consensus position you hold with your employer.

If the organization is employing developer advocates, there's the assumption that the product has some surface that developers can touch, such as a development tool or an API. In my company, it's infrastructure. Only programmers use Kafka, which means there's a community. The leadership team should be relying on the developer advocate team to understand what the community thinks.

Being open about bugs

Geertjan Wielenga: How honest are you when you know that there are bugs in the tech that you're promoting?

Tim Berglund: I will 100% cop to the bugs. I think that's a different matter altogether because it's a fact that software has bugs.

Geertjan Wielenga: Would you cop to any and all bugs? How far do you go?

Tim Berglund: You have to take that case by case. I'm not going to go out of my way to say, "Well, here are all the bugs!"

Nobody wants to know that. They're just thinking, "How can I succeed with this?"

Geertjan Wielenga: As a developer advocate, you can certainly grow attached to a tech and to the community around it. A downside might be that you could end up being too attached to it. Have you experienced this?

Tim Berglund: No, I love tech, and I can't imagine a life of mine that didn't have tech in it, but I've always been able to decouple myself from it emotionally.

When something is going wrong in a community, or a company is making a wrong business decision about how to handle open source, I'm far enough removed that I don't feel like the real me is threatened.

That doesn't mean that things don't happen at work that get to me. I've got my buttons, but the tech is always kind of wrong; you've just got to love it for what it is. For my many weaknesses, getting too attached to any particular piece of tech is not one of them.

"If the tech goes wrong, it's not you that is broken."

—Tim Berglund

I worked for a company a few years ago that viewed itself as not just a cool company but a completely different idea. It wasn't just a good start-up: it was a shining city on a hill. I saw this attitude and I thought, "Guys, your god is going to bleed at some point and it's going to be a bad day for you!" That day came and it broke a lot of people. You've got to have other things in your life. You also have to realize that there's a boundary around you. If the tech goes wrong, it's not you that is broken.

Geertjan Wielenga: What does a typical day look like? Is there a typical day?

An average day for a developer advocate

Tim Berglund: My answer will be colored by the fact that I'm a leader of a developer relations team, so an individual contributor would have a slightly different answer.

On the road, I can be speaking at a conference during the day or traveling to a conference in the evening. There are meetings with people too. Those people might work with completely different tech or they might be people in my tech community who I'm catching up with. Maybe we're only going to see each other twice this year, so I have a lot of relationship maintenance to do in a short time.

At the same time, I still need to be on certain calls. I also need to attend to emails and Slack. Being on the road doesn't mean that office life stops. Since I'm the leader of a team, those management responsibilities don't go away.

At home, it will again be email, Slack, or phone calls that dominate my day. Every once in a while, I'll have some time to create a new presentation. I'll spend time writing and editing content. One of our responsibilities is the company blog. We also make video tutorials. A couple of times a month, I'll have a day in the studio recording some video content. But a typical day looks like it does for any manager.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you prefer to work from home, then?

Tim Berglund: Yes, that's very important to me. I'm traveling at something approaching 50% of the time, so when I'm not traveling, just from a lifestyle and family perspective, I really want to be at home.

There's no reason for me to go to the office. In this role, since we tend to be road warrior people, there's a strong preference toward home office work when we're home.

Geertjan Wielenga: Then the follow-up question would be: what percentage of the week do you get up before lunchtime?

Tim Berglund: I happen to be an early riser. A normal day is 5:00 a.m. for me and a late day is 6:00 a.m. or 6:30 a.m. That's just me: I get up early. A few times in the winter, there'll be a day when I don't have to go anywhere and it'll be pajama pants all day. That's a major victory!

Geertjan Wielenga: How do you deal with things like jet lag, missed flights, and all the typical problems of the traveler?

Tim Berglund: In the U.S., there's melatonin available over the counter. It might be complete nonsense, but I take a couple of those tablets before bed. Just anecdotally, I feel better for it.

Generally, jet lag is tough. When I come to Europe, for my first two or three nights I'm going to wake up at 3:00 a.m. At lunchtime, I'm going to be super tired. If I have a session, I'll feel pretty rough.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you tend to try to arrive a couple of days beforehand to deal with that?

Tim Berglund: Not generally. I don't plan business meetings or talks on the first day now. I did it because of a delayed flight once and it was the worst experience.

I was supposed to leave on a Sunday but flew out on a Monday instead because of a delay. I landed in London at 6:00 a.m. and had to teach at 9:00 a.m. There was this guy coughing and there was a baby crying on the flight, so I couldn't sleep at all. It was terrible.

Geertjan Wielenga: Imagine you've traveled across the world and, for some reason, your projector connection to your laptop doesn't work or only two people turn up to listen to you. How do you deal with that?

Tim Berglund: A little over a year ago, I had a projector on a Mac that flat out didn't work. That talk was actually in California. In that case, happily, the deck was a simple one and I exported it from Keynote to PowerPoint and threw it on somebody's Windows machine. That worked.

"Just do your job and don't worry about the number of people at your talk."

—Tim Berglund

In terms of the second problem, give those two people a great talk! Just don't worry about that. Yes, I want there to be 2,000 people attending too; everybody wants that. But just do your job and don't worry about the number of people at your talk.

Taking a break

Geertjan Wielenga: Have you encountered burnout? How do you know that you're on the verge of it and what are some ways to deal with it?

Tim Berglund: I don't know how to define it. My pace hasn't really changed over the years, so if I have flirted with burnout, it hasn't taken me down. Everybody needs to recognize that there are walls, though. That can be in terms of physical health or even emotional health. Anybody can be preoccupied with thinking, "I'm not sure if this is right for me," but burnout is different.

What you need to look out for is thinking, "I actually can't do this now. My body is preventing me and my mind is preventing me. I'm unable to do the work." That's burnout. That hasn't happened to me, which is something I'm very thankful for.

You need to take time to rest. I have for the past eight or nine years tried to build in a no-travel December. I make small exceptions to that. There's a conference in South Florida that I usually speak at in December. My wife and sometimes my adult children come. My wife and I used to live in Florida, so we get to see friends and there's warm weather, so it doesn't feel like travel to us. Otherwise, I think, "I'm on the road a lot. Let me take a month to reset and be at home for a while."

Geertjan Wielenga: One thing that's quite special about you is that you've been doing DevRel Radio. What's the background to that?

Tim Berglund: We actually recorded a few episodes early last year and then for various reasons, relating to each of the three co-hosts, we put it on hold for a while. We've picked it back up now. Viktor Gamov, Baruch Sadogursky, and I said, "Hey, we should do a podcast." We're all friends. Viktor and Baruch are already famous Russian podcasters.

I'm pretty good at being a radio host. We realized that this profession needs some community around it. We're all community builders: serving various communities, doing our thing, helping people, and mentoring new people. The podcasts are just the wisdom of people who have built things and have been doing this for a long time.

Geertjan Wielenga: Where can you find the podcasts and are there going to be any new episodes?

Tim Berglund: You can find them on iTunes, but devrelrad.io is the easiest way to find them. We're going to be producing approximately two episodes each month. That's ambitious. It's okay if we don't hit that target; we won't feel bad about ourselves.

Geertjan Wielenga: How do you stay up to date with the latest tech trends?

Tim Berglund: I work with smart people and I talk to them. This is a little embarrassing, but I read Hacker News every morning. I don't read the comments, though, just as a life choice.

My Twitter feed is mostly professional, so I see things there. I'm part of a few communities with old-style mailing lists too. Those aren't really sources, but I rely on those people.

Geertjan Wielenga: How do you explain what you do to a non-technical person?

Tim Berglund: I tell people that I mostly just write emails, talk on Zoom calls, and occasionally fly to places. Functionally, my role is easy to describe. The shortest shortcut I can come up with is that my job is the intersection of marketing and engineering. I have a team of technical people who are trying to explain a piece of tech to a community of users of that tech. We're doing that in a way that is fun and winsome.

My work is explicitly outreach. Saying that usually lets people at a cocktail party know that if they're not careful, I'm going to talk for a lot longer and they need to change the subject fast!

Geertjan Wielenga: Why do so many people not know about the profession that we're in?

The progression of developer relations

Tim Berglund: I think it's just very new. I traced the origins of the controversial word "evangelist" to 1984 and Guy Kawasaki. That was a slightly different kind of work he was doing: he was trying to convince what we used to call independent software vendors to go and write programs for the Macintosh. He was evangelizing the platform.

"Developer relations, as a discipline, is really just emerging."

—Tim Berglund

Developer relations, as a discipline, is really just emerging. It's a consequence of open source maturing and businesses forming around open-source projects. There are all these activities happening. In the last five or 10 years, more people have realized that there's a discipline here.

The word that comes to mind is "inchoate." Developer advocacy is not completely formed. As a result, not everybody appreciates that it's a thing. Everybody's been to a conference. Everybody knows that there are meetups. Everybody likes sample applications. But as a coherent whole, the role is not fully known yet.

Geertjan Wielenga: You mentioned Guy Kawasaki. Are there other people in the industry who inspire you or who you've learned something from?

Tim Berglund: Yes, there are a number of them. I've always been a fan of Scott Davis. I always thought, "Wow this guy's just everywhere. He's such a great presenter. He's got this cadence of a Baptist preacher!" I really admired that fun stage presence.

Ken Sipe, Stu Halloway, and Neal Ford are also people I admire. I learned a lot from Neal about presentation structure and narrative.

He's done some pioneering thinking and it's had a huge impact on me. Matthew McCullough and I worked together in the early 2010s too. These are all people who shaped me.

Geertjan Wielenga: We've talked about many positive things thus far. What would you say are some lows that you have experienced in your years of doing this?

Tim Berglund: It's a trope that we're on the road all the time, even though there are ways to structure the role so that there's not as much traveling. If you have a young family, you have to ask, "Is this going to work?" I got into this when my kids were not so little anymore. My youngest was around 10, so that wasn't such a stretch. You've got to be willing to travel, though.

I'm always thinking, "Where does this go? What's the career arc in this industry?" It's a middle-aged, sole-breadwinner kind of anxiety. To speak frankly about age and tech, somewhere around my mid-30s, I was looking around a bullpen full of developers and I thought, "Does your mom know you're here?!"

These were grown men and women, not children. It just struck me that many developers are really young, although, in the evangelist/developer advocate community, this is less the case. It doesn't mean that you can't be young and do this role well, but these roles seem to be a magnet for more senior-level people.

In the U.S., the assumption is that past 35 or so, you're not really going to write code anymore. You're going to get into management or a product role or something else. I don't know if that's true. I'd like to validate that. You have the celebrities who are not, in any sense, young anymore, but they're still doing this. Short of that, what happens for everybody else?

"What's our career arc? What should it be?"

—Tim Berglund

What's our career arc? What should it be? How do we feel about it? How should we prepare young people? I do think it's possible to do developer advocacy over the long term and ride with it into retirement. I think that can be done, but I don't know where my story will go yet.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are some roles that would flow naturally from this if you did want to change paths?

Career options for developer advocates

Tim Berglund: You could be in the leadership team of organizations that do this. If you're working as a developer advocate now, you're on the road, you're teaching, and you're doing talks. You're getting results and people are benefiting and your reputation is increasing. You could go from there to leading the same type of people.

The issue is that not everybody wants to do that. They might be gifted at all the work I just described and not gifted at leading. We should let people do what they're good at, but if they're motivated to lead, they can apply their own experiences to help other people to come into the role.

Marketing could be an option. I've mentioned that I tell people that developer advocacy is where engineering meets marketing. That's scary language among developers, but I don't think it should be.

Geertjan Wielenga: Right now, you're working within a company, but initially you were giving talks for your own enjoyment. How would you compare that experience?

Tim Berglund: I think, just with my particular set of capabilities, I'm able to create more value within a company structure than completely independently. The part that I miss is the greater creative freedom that I had when I was on my own. I could just write talks about cool things.

Geertjan Wielenga: Could you take some cool things and combine them with the work that you do now?

Tim Berglund: Probably, but the problem is with the workload that having a full-time job presents. My role doesn't leave much time for creative exploration. It hasn't worked out to be practical to do that. I haven't figured out how to combine anything new with our go-to market and responsibly give a talk in the community. It's theoretically possible, but I'm skeptical.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you see yourself working forever in a company setting, then?

Tim Berglund: Definitely in the short term I will keep working for "the man." I'm pretty happy with it. There may come a time when I don't need an income. I don't know what I'll be like, or be interested in, or be doing at that point.

If there is some kind of retirement phase in my life, then I could just go and creatively explore fun things and still have a platform to be able to talk about them. That would be a pretty great retirement!

I could go back to advocating independently and certainly put food on the table, but it doesn't seem like the right move for me right now. There are good things going on with some of the companies that I've been involved with.

Geertjan Wielenga: Would you say that some people in our domain, who don't work for companies, really need the conference scene because that's where they see people in the industry?

Tim Berglund: Yes, I've got all kinds of those peers. That's really a good reminder that you should make time for your colleagues who are independent when you're at conferences. They need you.

Geertjan Wielenga: What would the 20-year-old you think of the current you?

Tim Berglund: There's just no way I would have been able to predict this career path. When I was 20, I wanted to write code, do digital logic design, or do signal processing, or a mix of those things.

As I mentioned, I actually had a job writing firmware while I was a college student. I was coding professionally and that's all I wanted to do. I wanted to build embedded systems and write firmware. I just couldn't imagine a cooler thing.

There wasn't a culture of developer advocacy like there is now. The only conferences I knew of were the Computer Dealers' Exhibition (COMDEX) and the big networking or consumer electronics conferences. I just wouldn't have had any concept of developer advocacy as a role.

For advice, I probably would tell the younger me to start a little earlier. Not that I feel I missed any kind of boat, but this job is so great that I wish I had got into it sooner. "Start now" is the best advice I could give primordial Tim.

Geertjan Wielenga: Thank you, Tim Berglund.