Developer advocacy community launches today 🎉

Mentoring developers is one of my major passions in life. Actually, mentoring anyone is a passion. For whatever reason, I've always had the desire to share the things I know with anyone who will listen. When I launched Devocate, the intent was to build a SaaS product serving developer advocacy programs—both internally and externally. That dream is still very much alive, and you may even start to see updates on this in 2022.

For now, though, there is a major candidate gap in the developer relations space. In my role at Lacework, I'm currently hiring developer advocates, a community leader, & a community engineer. Recruiting has been my most difficult challenge thus far. This has been the consensus in the industry since the pandemic started.

While I'm working through life and eventually getting to that SaaS product, I felt it was important to help fill this gap within our industry. In order to do that I felt we needed more education and direct impact with aspiring developer advocates, as well as content to raise awareness of developer advocacy overall.

Community benefits

Our community is hosted on a platform called Forem. It's the same community platform here at dev.to and is now available for others to leverage. Huge shoutout to the Forem team for sponsoring Devocate and giving us access to such a powerful community platform.

We hoped that if we could give developers a similar experience as what they're used to with dev.to, that it would make them feel more comfortable joining us and engaging. Spoiler alert, it's already been positively mentioned.

Learn about developer advocacy

Between the content that we share, and what is shared by our community members, there will be lots of great resources and information to help you learn about developer advocacy and improve your professional soft skills.

Each week our team will create content & engagement opportunities around a specific topic, keeping the content focused and allowing folks to learn a topic deeply each week. This week's topic is developer advocacy 101. Take a peek at our public content calendar for future topics.

Mentorship guidance & peer reviews

You can find experienced mentors within our community sharing great content & resources. Ask them about their experiences and career paths—they're advocates, after all, they'd love to share insights with you! You can also ask for a peer review of the content and resources that you're creating.

Practice advocacy

We're partnering with trustworthy, developer-focused companies to bring you opportunities to practice advocacy & build your reputation. We also encourage community members to write about their favorite tools and products, guiding them along the way to learn advocacy as they make a positive impact on those companies—likely inspiring their peers to want to learn more.

Career opportunities

You can find career opportunities in our job board. We also share many opportunities that we find across the internet (and through social listening) in our Devocate Digest newsletter, which lands in subscribers' inboxes on Saturday mornings.