Ted's advocacy journey

Ted Neward: I'd always been interested in programming, ever since my dad brought home an Apple II Plus in 1978, but I never really thought of it as a career path until college.

I was scouring the paper looking for jobs and I found one company that was looking for a programmer. My roommate basically double dog dared me to interview for this position. I said, "You've got to be kidding me!"

He said, "What's the worst that could happen?"

So, I interviewed and actually almost got the job, which really surprised me because out of 35 candidates, I was one of four finalists and I didn't have a CS degree. I had been working in C++ for a couple of years at that point. That was really where the light flipped on in my head. I realized that I could do this professionally. I could, in fact, make a career out of this. That was something that I had never really thought was possible. I'd always assumed that I had to be a CS major and have a deep love of all of these algorithms, which I find tremendously boring.

The next step was working for Mike Cohn. He was the first certified Scrum Master trainer in the world. The phrase I'd like to use is that I "worked for Mike before either of us was famous!" He was working on a book, with a couple of other people from the company, so I knew somebody who was writing a book. When Manning Publications approached me about writing a book I said, "Why not? A book is just a really long paper. So, sure, let's go after this."

That's what got me into the book world. From there, I ended up teaching for DevelopMentor and doing corporate training, largely based on having done a Java book. Now I stand in front of rooms and teach on a weekly basis. So, from 1995, when I started working on the book, to 1999, when I went to work for DevelopMentor, to 2002, when I was invited to my first conference, I went from just coding in the background all the way up to standing in front of people and talking about this stuff.

Geertjan Wielenga: Few people know about this profession. Why do you think that's the case?

Ted Neward: It's new from the standpoint that previously, developer relations was limited to those companies that were marketing to developers. Oracle, Microsoft, and Google have had these roles for 10, 15, or 20 years.

Unless you wanted to work for one of those big companies, you'd never really heard of the term and there was really no chance of you doing anything outside of those companies. Plus, you had those developer-facing companies that just called the role "sales or marketing," as I mentioned. But the turning point, I think, was the proliferation of API culture: when APIs stopped being something that only developers used. APIs are now becoming more consumer-facing. Even if we have to dress them up and put them into a big blue box, they can stack together.

As APIs have become more prevalent, they have begun moving out of the tech-only sphere and into every company. If every company is an IT company and every company wants to talk to other IT companies, then, by definition, every company is going to become an API company. Who's going to talk about that? Who's going to own that story? That very naturally falls on the shoulders of those who can write code, write about code, and talk about code.

Geertjan Wielenga: Let's say that you're an IT student or someone in a completely different profession and you want to make a switch to this interesting role. What would you need to do? How do you get started in this?

Ted Neward: I think the starting point for most people would be learning to code. You really have to have that technical knowledge.

Otherwise, if it's just writing and speaking, you're in the marketing department. It's that knowledge of code that's going to make the difference between somebody in marketing or sales and somebody being a developer advocate.