Tim's tips for progressing to advocacy

Geertjan Wielenga: Based on your experience, what would be the best way to progress from being a developer to being an advocate?

Tim Berglund: If this profession sounds like a good idea to you, then it probably is. That's one of the nice things about developer advocacy. There's a large community of developers who think, "I guess I might be able to give a talk, but doing that work full-time sounds terrible." If anybody does want to do this full-time, then they should pursue it. They are probably qualified.

The way you start is to make up a talk on something. If the work that you do is with very bread-and-butter tech, you may think, "It's a good tech, but it's not super cutting edge. The world already has a Josh Long talking about Spring. I'm not going to be him overnight. How am I going to make something interesting about my day job?"

My advice is that if the code that you write in...