techno.blog("Dion")

There is a role in the developer team at Google called Developer Advocate, and I consider myself an honorary one of those.

What is interesting, is how the name has had an effect. When the group kicked off, we really didn’t like the term ‘evangelist’. The religious connotation is so strong isn’t it? It also feels like an evangelist is going to run around with his particular religion, and will be trying to persuade you to join, without really listening.

An advocate on the other hand sounds just a touch different. I can advocate something, and part of that will hopefully be heavily listening, and participating in the open community. Of course, these are just words, and you have to make this happen. We could call ourselves evangelists and do a lot of listening, or become advocates and do none. The word choice though does make you think about what you should be doing.

More importantly, in my opinion, is the word developer. Rather than talking just about technology, we are talking about humans who use it. This again makes you feel like you need to be more part of the community, working with developers on their level.

Then you put it together: Developer Advocate and a funny thing happens. What does that mean? At first people think that you are advocating to developers, but it is also very important to think about the other connotation. You think about being an advocate of the developer.

What does this mean? It means that when you are in a meeting with your product group, you are their mouth piece. What do they think of the products? the APIs? What are they asking for? You get to almost be an outsider on the inside.

That is the power of the developer advocate role, and why it can be such a fun one at companies.

Of course, I don’t even need to tell you that we are hiring for this position in the US and elsewhere in the world :)

NOTE: Right after I posted this I saw that Jeremy Z had a post titled Two Tech Jobs: Technology Evangelist and Network Operations

I have seen the Google Code team churning away under the inspiration of DeWitt for some time to get to where we are today. Google Code launched a redesigned site that is so much cleaner and gives developers access to so much more. I love the fact that we both ate our own dogfood, and some open source variety. DeWitt puts it well here where he talks about how we have grown:

One of the most exciting things about the redesign is that everything you see here was built using technology and APIs that are available to everyone. The pages we’re serving don’t rely on any secret back-end tricks; the site is built on plain HTML, JavaScript and CSS, each using our public APIs. In fact, all of the techniques used on Google Code can be duplicated on your own site.

For example, the search results pages use a combination of the AJAX Search API and Custom Search Engines. The homepage gadgets use the AJAX Feed API and Google Reader feeds. The videos are powered by the YouTube API, the blogs by the Blogger API, the events powered by the Google Calendar API, the metrics by Google Analytics, the forums by Google Groups, etc., etc.. And we’re pleased to use jQuery, the wonderful open source JavaScript library (not ours, we’re just fans), to help power each page. Stay tuned — over the upcoming weeks we’ll offer detailed articles and tutorials about how we built the various parts of Google Code using open technologies.

Remember when you would go to a huge list of APIs? Now more takes you a great product page which gives you a lot of context. Search is a first class citizen (which makes sense… Google and all) and you now have great suggestions and a fantastic use of CSE. I can’t wait to show you more of the innards via interviews with the team…. now that they can have a bit of a breather.

The breather won’t last long though, as this just the beginning. When I look at the thoughts for the future I get really excited. Google Code got a lot better today, and will go to a new level soon.

I love launch days :)