So i'm a Developer Evangelist now.
Officially.
For Kainos
Now it might seem a bit odd being a developer evangelist for a company that doesn't have product or service but I strongly believe it's a vital role regardless of company type. The fact that Kainos now has a Developer Evangelist is a public declaration that we have a duty of care to help grow the technical communities we affect. It's not to say we didn't do this before but now it's out in the open - we can start setting goals and measuring our successes and failures.
I want Kainos to be recognised as a great place to work for people wanting to grow their technical career - not through random word of mouth or shiny recruitment campaigns but by real honest community engagement and commitment to contributing to Open Source. Initiatives that were once internal by default will be external unless there is good reason (customer confidentiality being a key one). Doing things in the open not only helps other people but provides us with a fresh perspective on things we've probably taken for granted. We have so much technical expertise across a huge range of technologies and we want to discover ways of sharing the things we do in a more public forum.
This is not about sales, marketing or recruitment - all these things are happy side effects if I've done my job correctly. No this is about showing we genuinely give a damn. This is about building trust in the developer communities around us. This is about finding the people in our company that want to speak at conferences or work on open source projects and giving them that support. This is about people and community. This is about craft. I know it's cheesy but I truly believe in the concepts of Software Craftsmanship - it's about genuinely caring about the work you do.
Of course those that know me will know none of this new to me, hence why I'm the first of many developer evangelists that Kainos will likely empower but the fact I have time and budget to do this stuff means I can ramp up my activities and experiment. Try Things is one such experiment and I hope by the year is out to have started something interesting and engaging with it in both Belfast and London.
This is only the beginning, here goes nothing...
* It's probably worth nothing that while the role is full time this doesn't mean I immediately distance myself from day to day project work - that would be pointless. It is simply not possible to extol the virtues of "craft" without practising it. I'm going to remain delivering projects and livin' the dream.