The advantages of being independent

Geertjan Wielenga: Going back into the general developer advocate discussion, since you don't work directly for a company, does that means that you can be 100% honest about everything and just speak from the heart?

Kirk Pepperdine: That's what I do. I generally speak true to my experiences. There have been some really funny situations.

Heinz and myself were the first non-Sun Microsystems people invited to speak at Sun Developer Days. The most embarrassing thing was that Simon Ritter, who was working for Sun Microsystems at that time, had something like 19 people at his talk. Heinz and I were looking at each other saying, "Okay, that's crazy because Simon Ritter is an absolutely fantastic speaker. He just nails it every time."

I actually really enjoy going to see his talks and I attend them regularly because he's really good. But he had 19 people at his talk and at my talk, I had 385. I remember the number because I remember the distinct gap between what the official advocates were getting and what I was getting and what Heinz was getting.

I was trying to figure out why this was. Was it because I'm a better speaker than Simon? No way. The problem was that people thought they were going to get product pitches from Simon. They weren't interested in the product pitches. I know, for sure, that Simon was not delivering product pitches, so these people missed out on a really good talk.

There were obviously enough people at the conference, but what it came down to was that we didn't work for Sun Microsystems, so we had some street cred. I have always thought that was crazy. I think that it gives us a little bit of a boost not working for anyone. People look at us and say, "Okay, you don't have an agenda."

I look at Cameron Purdy as the person I really learned a lot from. He's another amazing speaker. Cameron gave a pure tech talk, always. Everybody knew that he did the Coherence product. Everybody knew that he was a VIP at Oracle. But that didn't matter, because it didn't change Cameron's style.

I think marketing at Oracle was a little upset with him at times. They wanted to preview his talks because he got into a bit of trouble with them. The marketing people couldn't do anything to him, though, because he was the person in Oracle who was attracting everybody. Everybody wanted to see his talks because they were entertaining and highly informative.

He didn't do product pitches but everybody knew where he was from and everybody knew what he was working on. He didn't have to get up there and say that: they knew. It was because of that that people came to see him. From my perspective, that is a much better way of marketing things than what the traditional marketing people want you to do.

Geertjan Wielenga: How do you feel about developer advocates who advocate one tech and then a year or so later advocate the competing tech?

Kirk Pepperdine: I'll go back to what Cameron did. Cameron looked at the problem that he was trying to solve and he brought the problem down to first principles.

He never really talked about the product because he was sometimes actually pointing people to competitors.

Cameron did have a level of freedom because he wasn't a person who marketing could control. They wanted a more corporate message from him.

Cameron recognized that no one listens to the corporate messages. Since he was getting results by doing it his way, the marketing people had to relent in the end. They had to just let him go off and do what he was doing because it was working.

I think many developer advocates say, "Look, if you don't let us speak to developers the way we need to speak to developers, then you're just not going to get the audience. You're going to spend all of this money, time, and effort, and you're going to be giving not necessarily a bad message, but a message to the wrong audience." That's not to say that the Oracle marketing message isn't a useful message for somebody; it's just not a message that developers are willing to listen to.

Cameron and Simon, to just pick on those two, are authentic. They live, breathe, and eat what they're talking about. They're not really coming in and delivering a talk: they're telling you what they're doing. I would like to think that I do the same thing.

One talk that I put together a number of years ago, I keep doing over and over again because people just like it. It's entertaining and it's engaging. I would say it's close to a good magic trick. I give a performance problem to the audience and I say, "You solve it: here are the rules of the game." The people in the audience are engaged because they're trying to figure out what's going on. People are shouting out suggestions and they're directing the demo.

Geertjan Wielenga: Technical glitches happen all the time, so what are some horror stories that you've encountered?