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...

Getting up on stage

Scott Davis: Public speaking continues to be one of the number one fears that many people have. There's that common nightmare where you're standing up in front of your classmates at school giving a report and, all of a sudden, you're naked or you've forgotten what you wanted to say next. It takes a real act of courage to stand up and present yourself as an authority, especially to a group of your peers.

On the flip side, I really try to be mindful about not appearing arrogant. I try to turn each presentation about software into a personal journey—a "hero's journey" if you're familiar with the literary concept. I don't want to stand up and say, "I know this and you don't, so why don't you sit back and listen to me talk about how much I know." I like standing up and saying, "Hey, I'm a Java developer and I just discovered this new language, Groovy. Let me show you what I...

Scott's hot topics

Scott Davis: The iPhone is now over a decade old. I vividly remember when it came out thinking, "Wow, this is a game-changer: a full-fidelity web browser in my pocket!" That was before the App Store was even a glimmer in Apple's eye.

That was also the timeframe when Google Maps was first released. I was working on a pre-release version of Google Maps for a satellite imaging company, and I could viscerally feel how AJAX-based websites changed the whole user experience for the better. The iPhone and Google Maps forever changed the way we do web development.

"You can actually use your voice to communicate with the device in your hand in a meaningful way."

—Scott Davis

I'm feeling that same way right now about conversational UIs. We're hearing devices actually speak to us in realistic voices, not like the primitive chatbots of the past that used robotic speech synthesis like Stephen Hawking or in the movie...

Moving away from pure programming

Geertjan Wielenga: What would you say is the advantage of developer advocacy over spending your life being a pure computer programmer?

Scott Davis: Look, not everyone needs to be an advocate. I've got lots of friends whose real passion is rock climbing or snowboarding. For them, programming is an interesting, exciting, and innovative job, but more importantly, it's a well-paying job; it's something they do as a means to an end.

For me, I've got Alexa at home in several rooms. My family members all have iPads and iPhones. My advocacy, once again, comes from a place of authenticity—this is how we live; we live these digital lives.

My iPad is the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning and it's the last thing I see when I go to bed at night. A device, to me, is not just a computer that you sit down at and walk away from—it's something that you develop a kind of relationship with.

In terms of advocacy, it...

When technical glitches hit

Scott Davis: Resiliency is something we always talk about in software. I think resiliency is something you have to strive for as an instructor or as a conference speaker.

It's not avoiding technical glitches that makes you a pro: it's the grace and humor you use in reacting to the glitches when they inevitably happen. I've had a number of people come up to me after a talk that went badly and say, "I'm sorry that you had trouble up there on stage, but I probably learned more from watching you debug it in real time than if everything had gone right in the first place."

Nowadays, I take a screenshot of every website that I'm going to mention in my presentation and put it in my slides with a hyperlink. If I'm at a conference with good Wi-Fi, then I can click on the screenshot and seamlessly scroll around the live website as I talk about it.

If, on the other hand, I end up in a hotel conference room in the basement with crummy Wi...

Travel management tips

Scott Davis: I optimize less. I used to be really aggressive about it, saying, "Alright, my first talk is Monday morning at 9 a.m. I'm going to get in on Sunday at midnight because that is the least amount of time I need."

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn't leave any margin for error, as all professional travelers learn. Nowadays, I try to give myself a full 24 hour buffer coming in.

When traveling to India from the U.S., that 24 hour buffer is almost a requirement. There's a 12 and a half hour time difference between the two countries and around 18 hours of flight time depending on how many hops it takes to get there. At that point, night is day, left is right, and up is down. That kind of time shift can be brutal if you don't anticipate it and make accommodations.

"Trying to live in one time zone while being physically located in another is a recipe for disaster."

—Scott Davis

Whether I'm traveling...

Changing your mind about tech

Scott Davis: I think that it's important to be able to change your mind professionally. You have to ensure that you never get so dug into a position that you can't back out or make an opposing argument later.

One thing that I try to do, whenever I'm advocating a tech, is point out its shortcomings as well as its strengths. That kind of balanced approach is what I look for in conference speakers too. If they aren't able to say one nice thing about another tech, or one bad thing about their own, that's when I get suspicious and my spidey senses start tingling.

Neal Ford popularized the "Suck/Rock Dichotomy." This is when people say, "This framework is the best thing ever! That framework is the worst thing ever! Mine rocks! Yours sucks!"

"Since we're programmers, it's easy to slip into a purely binary mindset: 1 or 0, true or false, black or white, good or bad, and so on."

—Scott...