Technology Evangelist

AI coding assistants have become basically omnipresent at this point and it’s honestly just crazy to think how quickly it all happened. I remember when Copilot first came out and was met with this weird mix of “is this magic” and “ugh this is so buggy”. And now there’s Claude doing full re-factors, ChatGPT giving you a complete project from a couple sentences description, and a dozen other smaller tools which honestly sometimes do a better job at small things than the big generative models. But here’s the thing, the tools… well… aren’t going to be replacing developers any time soon (I’m dropping the hot take now) but they are DEFINITELY shifting the types of work that we do.

I won’t beat around the bush on this one, it takes a particular kind of person to excel at this. Developer evangelism is objectively a ridiculous job in terms of skillset requirements. Coding-wise, you’ve got to be good enough that developers are not immediately dismissive when you share code with them, but not so good that you end up in engineering and never speak to another human. (I like to think I’m good at both though, what can I say? Dual threat.) Speaking is an obvious prerequisite. Presenting, after all, is a key part of the job. Workshops, podcasts, tweets half the time, when a JavaScript framework you use every day drops a breaking release at 2am. Writing, too, is key, because much of evangelism is written, in blog posts, documentation, GitHub READMEs that are…readable? Wow that’s rare when I think about it. Oh, and you better have the gift of the gab on top of all of that, or your community just won’t vibe with you. It’s a difficult thing to explain. Some days when I see the line-up for the next tech conference, I just shake my head at what people have to put up with to be great at this job.

The pay ranges drastically as well which makes the whole profession even more peculiar. From what I’ve observed talking to people in the industry, the big tech evangelists can be making well into six figures, upwards of $200K+, with stock options, trip reimbursements, the works. Sure, you’re flying business class to give your talk in Singapore for one vendor one week, then on to Berlin the next for another gig. And the developer advocates? The developer advocates at young startups are lucky if they have $80K, and have to pay for their own conference passes while hoping someone on the floor will care about their pitch. In terms of title inflation, that’s what really chaps me. Developer Evangelist? Developer Advocate? Developer Relations Engineer? Technical Evangelist? Community Engineer? Every company has a different name for their people doing these kinds of roles and it becomes this ongoing conversation (or argument, more like) in the developer community over whether these different job titles have different meanings or whether it’s just corporate speak BS.

Debugging is pretty interesting tbh. You paste your error message and some context and get some suggestions and occasionally it’s impressively accurate! Obviously not every time but frequently enough where I have folded it into my regular process now. So instead of immediately searching or checking docs I ask the AI. Worst case it’s giving me the wrong answer and I go research anyway, best case it points me directly to what I need to fix and I save like 15 minutes of Googling. I think on average it probably saves 20-30% of debugging time which really adds up over a week.

Security is also… yeah we gotta talk about the security landmines. AI models will write perfectly working code with hardcoded passwords or SQL injection flaws if you’re not super careful. They don’t “natively” have a sense of security best practices, they just pattern-match them from what’s in their training data. And a lot of that training data is random GitHub repos with shitty insecure code, so it’ll be what it is. You HAVE to be diligent about reviewing everything with a security mindset, AI will not do that on its own.

Junior devs are getting maybe too reliant on these tools, I think. I think if you never learned how to actually read documentation or grok the fundamentals because you just ask AI for all the answers… that’s going to come back to bite you later. These tools are supposed to augment your skillset, not replace learning the basics. I mean, senior devs use the tools heavily too so this isn’t meant as an attack on juniors, but seniors can usually tell when the AI is spewing garbage or taking an objectively bad approach because they have the years of experience to recognize. Juniors will often blindly accept… or not recognize they’re being blindsided. Which is not good.

How one measures actual “impact” is so damn fuzzy. How do you know you’re doing a good job? Downloads of an SDK? Numbers of attendees at an event? Stars on GitHub repos? Tweets? Developer engagement in communities? Companies can track that sort of thing but it’s a herculean task to cleanly correlate “that evangelist did an excellent talk at that conference” and “signed up those three enterprise accounts.” It’s a tension that is never far below the surface. Management wants metrics, they want return on investment. They want numbers and email blasts and slides saved and webinars uploaded to YouTube. The evangelists are out there spinning their wheels, trying to cultivate relationships and build community. There’s value in both and it’s frustrating for everybody.

There’s the open source side of things, because much of the best evangelism often happens in those communities where developers contribute because it’s their passion project and they aren’t expecting a return on investment the next quarter. Answering questions on Stack Overflow at midnight? It’s not because your quarterly targets demand it, but because that’s how you build trust and rapport. Fixing bugs in another project’s docs? Not for that quarter’s numbers, but for the overall ecosystem’s good. Developer evangelism can’t shake that friction between community cultivation and that drive for short-term company gains. Every company does it a little differently and the companies that do this well handle it differently as well, obviously. Some that just…

As for the future, I think it’s pretty clear that we are not going back to a world where NOT using AI coding tools is even a thing. It’s just like using Stack Overflow is these days. The tools will only get better at context and start to avoid common pitfalls and eventually maybe they will actually be good at architecture level decisions and not just code generation. But we’re not there yet and tbh I’m not sure we want to be? There’s something very human about the skill of software development that I’m not sure we should be able to fully automate. But it is what it is for now. AI coding assistants are just another tool in the developer’s toolkit. Powerful. Useful. Frustrating at times. Not going anywhere.