A month ago, I joined Auth0 as a Senior Developer Advocate. Before that, I worked as a backend engineer in a product team. I’m learning a lot in this new role, and I wanted to summarize the 3 main things I’ve learned so far.
✍🏼 With flexibility comes responsibility.
I’m part of the Content Team at Auth0, so my main task is to create content. This comes with a lot of flexibility and a bit more responsibility.
Content creation is a creative process; as such, the inspiration and ideas don’t necessarily come up when we sit down and tell ourselves, “time to be creative!”. There is a lot of flexibility in deciding what I want to talk about and when to deliver it. You might think this sounds great, a “no deadlines” situation, but it’s not true. One of my team’s goals is to create a certain amount of content. I can manage my tasks and decide when the piece I’m working on will be ready. Still, I can’t just overestimate and give myself more time because otherwise, we won’t meet the team’s expectations.
📚 You are the master of your learning, the captain of your knowledge.
This one caught me off guard, and I feel silly because it makes total sense. As mentioned, my role comes with a lot of autonomy, and it’s crucial to dedicate time to learning. When writing a piece of content, you must research, build demos, and learn new things. Apart from that is critical to set time to grow in the other areas that are important to you. In my case, I want to keep learning about software architecture, and so I try to think of ways to integrate this into my learning path.
🤪 No more breaking production
I’ve broke production multiple times in my career. The most recent one, not only did I break it, but it was reported by the VP of Technology of the Business Unit I was part of. I didn’t get in trouble because I was lucky to be in a company where failure isn’t punished; I know what it is like to feel the pressure of these incidents. In my new role, “going live” means publishing content or presenting a talk. There will still be something facing our customers, but nothing that will make their user experience bad.
Conclusion
After 1 month as a developer advocate, I’ve learned that even though you have the flexibility to manage your tasks and time, you still need to be responsible and deliver. Also, you need to have a learning plan and include the things you want to learn about. Finally, unlike being a software engineer, there’s no breaking production, only publishing new content for more developers.
Thanks for reading! 👋