Introducing Matt Raible

Matt Raible is a developer advocate at Okta, speaking regularly at development events, and he has a reputation as a must-see conference speaker. Matt's been the lead user interface (UI) architect for LinkedIn and the chief architect of web development for Time Warner Cable. He's worked on the JHipster project and regularly writes technical blog posts for the Okta Developer Blog. One of the most experienced global presenters in developer advocacy, Matt's been building the collaborative developer community with his blogs for more than 20 years. Find Matt on Twitter: @mraible.

Geertjan Wielenga: Could you start by talking about who you are and what you do?

Matt Raible: I'm a developer advocate for Okta, which means that I'm tasked with writing a few blog posts per month and speaking at some sort of developer event once per month. I'm paid to do that.

The biggest pro is that I get to create my own job. I'm the one who decides what I work on every week. Around 25% of my time is spent doing maintenance work on blog posts or past presentations I've done.

For the most part, I create a plan every six weeks and decide what blog posts I'm going to write. The blog posts usually require an example app. I have to actually code for a day or two and make things work before I can write about them. I'm constantly learning new tech, new frameworks, and new ways to do things in order to talk about that.

If all I ever blogged about was Spring Boot and Angular, then there wouldn't be that many blog posts. If I need to write 50 blog posts a year, there's a lot to learn.

My company is the leading identity provider for cloud. The product that I focus on is APIs. Much of my work centers around authentication, but I do like to vary blog posts so that people know how to make two techs work together. Mainly, as developer advocates at Okta, we just try to help developers to learn tech and if they happen to have a need for our tech too, then that's great.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you prefer the term "developer advocate" or "tech evangelist" to describe what you do?