Ray's path to developer advocacy

Ray Tsang: I've been in the industry for a very long time, through all the Java days, starting with Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 2.0. I worked in consulting for large companies for a while as well.

In every role, what I ended up doing was introducing new tech and techniques, and bringing that to the team of developers to make their lives easier. This meant that we could streamline some of the boilerplates and the whole development process.

Then I joined a company called Red Hat and there I was a solution architect. I helped people and taught them about the tech that we had.

That's how I got to meet quite a variety of people and that made me think, "Oh, this is an interesting thing to do." Developer advocate, to me, is not a position: I think it's a mindset. Anybody can be a developer advocate and it doesn't have to be a specific job.

I remember at Red Hat, I'd seen many of the engineers working on the...