The career path for advocates
Trisha Gee: It's actually ridiculous that you've asked me the obvious question, considering that I'm working on a talk about career advice for programmers, and I've not actually thought about that for myself!
I've been at JetBrains for nearly four years. This is the longest I've ever worked for a company, for a start. I expect to be here for a while because my interests align with the company, as I mentioned.
Beyond this specific role for this specific company, I definitely think developer advocacy, in one flavor or another, is going to be my job for the next five or 10 years. Developers can't really see beyond about five years anyway.
With the variety, you can tweak whichever levers you want. If I don't want to travel so much and I don't want to do so many conference talks, then maybe I'll focus on doing some more tutorials. If I decide that I'm really fed up with struggling...