Scott's path to advocacy

Scott Davis: Yes, absolutely. My parents met at IBM in the 1960s. My dad was a software engineer and my mother was an IBM Selectric (an early programmable typewriter) consultant.

I literally grew up surrounded by tech in the house—the first IBM PC came out while I was still in elementary school. My dad taught me how to put together spreadsheets, and my mother showed me how to crack open the computer case to add more RAM. I'm not sure that I could've ended up anywhere else than where I am right now, given the parents that I had.

Geertjan Wielenga: Initially, were you purely into programming?

Scott Davis: I actually started out studying architecture at the University of Nebraska. I was doing fine except for all of my architecture classes, so I dropped out for a year to figure out what I wanted to study next.

I got a job answering phones at a call center for a long-distance phone company. On my own, I put together a spreadsheet that had the names of the operators down one column and the days of the week across the top. I used this magical @sum function to total up the number of calls each operator answered every day. I showed it to my boss and it blew her away. I got into software development very quickly after that.

What I was doing at work wasn't sophisticated, but it was a real game changer in terms of what my boss had to do. Having software take those mundane, repetitive tasks out of your life really adds value.

When I went back to school, I ended up with a degree in Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis (ISQA)—half statistics and half software development.

Geertjan Wielenga: How did your career progress from there?

Scott Davis: My first job out of college was teaching software classes to business professionals. I started out teaching DOS classes—things like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, dBase, and Harvard Graphics. Not too long afterward, I started teaching classes for brand new Microsoft products like Windows 3.1, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.

As we installed networking in the classrooms, I got certified in Novell NetWare 3.11 and began teaching those classes. Over the next couple of years, I ended up with 15 Microsoft certifications in Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0, Exchange, SQL, TCP/IP, and Internet Information Server (IIS), the web server included with the operating system. That was in the early- to mid-1990s, when the first web browsers like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer were introduced to the general public.

What teaching allowed me to do was take a deep dive into different, competing software packages in the same category. Each of those applications was stronger in certain areas and weaker in others. It gave me a more democratic view of software in general—there isn't "one ring to rule them all" when it comes to software. There isn't one true way to do things. There isn't one true programming language, or one true web framework, or even one true operating system.

Tech really is a world of strengths and weaknesses. Advocacy, I think, is where you honestly say, "If we balance out the pluses and the minuses, I'm going to send you down the path where there are more strengths than weaknesses. But I also want to make sure that you are aware of the sharp, pointy edges that might nick you along the way."

I spent eight years in the classroom as a software instructor and that has really informed my entire career. It's one thing to sit down and kind of understand how something works when you're cowboy coding on your own. It's another thing altogether when you're standing up in front of an audience of tens, or hundreds, or thousands of people.

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you get from that classroom setting where you were teaching Windows and DOS to being on these public stages?

Scott Davis: My mother, in addition to working for IBM, was also in theater. Thanks to her, I've been on the stage since I was five or six years old, so I've always had that confidence that comes from being a performer.

It boils down to this: I know my lines and the audience doesn't; it's not a fair fight. They aren't going to know when I make a mistake unless I stumble. The audience is there for the performance, not for a line check of every last word and syllable. Honestly, they want you to succeed—they want to be entertained and informed.

A great stepping stone on your way to presenting on the "big stage" at professional software conferences is giving a talk at a local meetup or user group. I've spent over 20 years in the user group community.

I was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in the early 2000s, and after that I ran the Boulder Java Users Group for years. I just wrapped up the HTML5 Denver Meetup after running it for over a decade.

If you don't feel ready to give a 60-minute talk on a topic, look for lightning talks. They are typically only 10 minutes and 10 (or so) slides. It is literally just long enough to say, "Hey, have you heard of this framework? Here's how you install it, and here's a quick 'Hello, World!' example." But in that quick 10 minutes, you still have the basic elements of an effective 60 minute talk: introduce the topic, pique the audience's curiosity, and give them enough to explore it further after the talk.

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you get to an international stage? What was that process?

Scott Davis: It was through the Denver Java Users Group. I started attending that and then thought, "There are a lot of really great advanced talks here, but could we have a series of talks that would be a gentler introduction to Java?"

Starting a "Basic Concepts" series of talks at the Denver Java Users Group led to a writing opportunity—my first book, JBoss at Work. Then, as an author, you start getting invited to local and regional software conferences. From there, it grew to national conferences within the U.S., and later, I was able to broaden out to the international stage.

Geertjan Wielenga: Developer advocacy isn't a common career path. Why is this?