Choosing a job title

Matt Raible: At my previous company, Stormpath, and when I first started at Okta, I had the title of "developer evangelist." I went to Devoxx US one year and Arun Gupta said, "Don't use evangelist." Many other people in the room agreed because it has religious connotations. That doesn't work in some countries. You won't be allowed to speak if you say you're an evangelist. They immediately advised that I change my title, and I did. We call our group "developer relations" but we don't say we are evangelists—we say we are advocates.

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you end up being a developer advocate in the first place?

Matt Raible: I was an independent consultant for 20 years. I did do advocacy as a side hobby.

I started a blog in 2002 and wrote about Java a lot. This was before Stack Overflow, so I used Struts and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE).

I posted my questions...