Developer Advocacy
Welcome to the Developer Advocacy Handbook
QuickLinks
Team Workflow
- Team Workflow
- Metrics / Reports
- CFP Issue Template
- Team General Issue Board
- Team Activity Type Issue Board
- CFP Issue Board
- Team Calendar
Team Resources
- Team Projects
- Team Tools
- OSS Contributions
- Action Template for Announcement Responses
- CFPs
- Content creation
- Team Shared Drive
Want to work with the team?
Mission
To support, grow, and engage the GitLab community through collaboration, content, and conversations.
Strategy
Developer relations and developer advocacy is an evolving, complex field.
Our team focuses on areas aligning with the company’s areas of interest including:
- DevOps: We want our work to speak to not only developers but all team members involved in the DevOps lifecycle to deliver working code to production: Product Managers, software engineers, designers, test engineers, security engineers, operations engineers, and SREs
- Enterprise: Developers and DevOps professionals in the enterprise have special constraints and needs. Often these are glossed over with easy “throw out your architecture and use this new shiny thing” - we won’t do that, we’ll acknowledge real-world challenges, legacy code, and enterprise constraints and help people solve those problems as well. When applicable, we switch roles into consulting and support.
KPIs
The FY25 Marketing Strategy (internal only) shows a Customer Journey with five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Expansion, and Evangelism. While our team can influence people at each stage, we are primarily focused on Awareness and Evangelism.
Awareness is our primary focus though we impact each level of the funnel through the content we create, the events we support, and the other activities that help us reach more developers. The KPIs we use to measure our impact on these two stages are:
- views from content published across owned and earned channels
- developers engaged through webinars, workshops, and industry events
We recognize these KPIs don’t capture the impact of the diverse range of work that our team does but understand that tradeoffs can be necessary to effectively communicate our impact within GitLab.
OKRs
What fits in our strategy
When we are reviewing opportunities or requests for support, we must be able to answer yes to each of these questions to move forward with the work:
- Will this work support, grow, and/or engage the GitLab community?
- Is there a measurable impact against one of our team’s KPIs? Because of GitLab’s global optimization subvalue, we’ll also consider requests that influence a company KPI or contribute to progress on an OKR.
- Has an issue been created with to define the work and assign a DRI?
If the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, we ask the requestor to take one of the following actions:
- make adjustments so we can take on the work
- find another team that is better suited to deliver the work
- come to an agreement that the work should not be done
Team members and focus areas
We are members of the Developer Relations team.
Team member | Focus areas | Language skills | Projects | Technologies | Speaker Portfolio |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Abubakar Siddiq Ango Developer Advocate |
Program management, team content creation and repurpose. DevSecOps with a focus on the Cloud Native Ecosystem | English, Yoruba, Hausa | DevRel Bot, Campaign Manager | Kubernetes, CI/CD, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Rust | Website |
Cesar Saavedra Senior Developer Advocate |
DevSecOps with a focus on CD, GitOps, Kubernetes | English, Spanish | Kubernetes, GitOps, CI/CD, Java | ||
Fatima Sarah Khalid Developer Advocate |
Community Engagement, DevSecOps | English | Beyond Code Series | CI/CD, C++, PHP, JavaScript | |
Fernando Diaz Senior Developer Advocate |
DevSecOps with a focus on Security and Compliance | English, Spanish | Security and Governance tutorials | Security, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Python | |
Itzik Gan-Baruch Senior Developer Advocate |
DevSecOps with a focus on CI/CD, Remote Development/IDEs and Value Stream Management | English, Hebrew | Remote Development, CI/CD, Value Stream Management | ||
John Coghlan Director, Developer Advocacy |
Strategy and Planning in Developer Advocacy | English | Website | ||
Michael Friedrich Senior Developer Advocate |
DevSecOps with a focus on AI and CI/CD efficiency | English, German, Austrian | CI/CD components maintainer | DevSecOps, AI, CI/CD, Observability, Python, Go, C/C++, Rust, Ruby | Talks, Portfolio |
William Arias Senior Developer Advocate |
DevSecOps with a focus on AI/ML, Sec and Data | English, Spanish | CI/CD, AI/ML, Kubernetes, Security, Python, C |
Stable counterparts
Inspired by GitLab’s collaboration value, the Developer Advocate team has chosen to align ourselves as stable counterparts with divisions outside of Marketing. The alignment is as follows:
Division | Stable counterpart | Activities |
---|---|---|
Alliances & Infrastructure | Abubakar Siddiq Ango | Infrastructure Meetings, Alliances |
Product | Michael Friedrich | AI-powered, Dev, CI: Monthly CI Section Field Sync (internal), Ops: Monitor:Observability direction, Sec section: Secure, Govern |
As stable counterparts, Developer Advocates are expected to actively engage with the divisions to identify collaboration opportunities and act as the primary point of contact for requests for Developer Advocate support from these divisions.
Collaboration examples in FY24 and FY25 that source from stable counterpart activities:
- Support the GitLab Duo Code Suggestions launch
- Support the GitLab Duo Chat launch: Internal, Beta, GA
- Support the Explain/Mitigate this Vulnerability GA launch - GitLab Duo
- Support the CI/CD Components launch
- Support the CI Steps launch
- Support Observability feature launch in GitLab
- Blog/Videos - Remote Development awareness in FY24
- Support Web IDE Beta Launch, 2022-12-19
- Support the Flux integration into GitLab’s GitOps feature (configure stage, agent for Kubernetes)
What we do
Our developer advocate team can be summarized by the “Three Cs”:
- Content creation: This is what many often think of when thinking of the traditional role of developer relations: writing blog posts, delivering technical talks, participating in podcasts or panels, and sharing ideas and thoughts on social media.
- Community engagement: Our team regularly engages with the wider GitLab community when they have questions, concerns, and feedback. This typically happens on GitLab issues, the GitLab Forum, Hacker News, Twitter, Stack Overflow, and other social media sites but also happens during in-person and virtual events.
- Consulting: Within GitLab, our team represents the voice of the community. When other teams are working on changes or decisions that will impact the community, we will educate them on our community, advocate for community interests, and work to ensure that any potential impacts to the community are clearly understood and addressed when communicating such changes. Our team also shares our knowledge of industry trends, emerging tools, social media strategy, and other skills to support our teammates in achieving their goals in alignment with GitLab’s Global Optimization subvalue.
Social media
We build our thought leadership on social media. See Developer Advocacy on Social Media to learn more about our strategies and become an evangelist yourself.
Content creation
We build out content to help educate developers around best practices related to DevOps, GitLab, remote work, and other topics where we have expertise. Content includes presentations, demos, workshops, blog posts, and media engagements.
Please read the Content handbook to learn more about the content workflow, library and distribution with UTM tracking.
Corporate event support
The Developer Advocate team plays a key role in supporting events. We work closely alongside Corporate Event Marketing to provide strategic content and assistance for both corporate and third-party sponsored events. This collaboration ensures the success and seamless execution of various gatherings. To learn more please refer to the Events page.
Spokespersons
Developer Advocates are subject matter experts (SMEs) in their focus areas, and collaborate with the Corporate Communications team to provide media coverage in the form of interviews, podcasts, content by-lines, etc. Developer Advocates are GitLab spokespersons and are required to take relevant training as determined by the Corporate Communications team.
Community Engagement
Our team regularly engages with the wider GitLab community. We do this organically on social media when prompted by our social media team or other GitLab team members and by monitoring GitLab and other selected keywords on Hacker News. We also manage a few social media platforms ourselves.
The Developer Advocate team is the DRI for questions and strategy on the platforms below:
Platform | Description | Workflows |
---|---|---|
Discourse | The GitLab Forum is a place to ask and respond to questions and share projects or snippets of code. | Forum Workflows |
The GitLab Subreddit r/gitlab is a place to ask questions and share interesting use cases of GitLab and related workshops and tools. | r/gitlab Workflows | |
StackOverflow | Use gitlab tags for programming questions related to GitLab or the GitLab API. | GitLab on StackOverflow |
Discord | A GitLab Community Discord is a place to connect with the community, join pair coding sessions and live streams, and discuss all things GitLab and contribution. | Community Discord Workflows |
Meetup | Our GitLab Virtual Meetup includes Office hours, GitLab deep dives, Hackathon calls, project specific office hours, and more! | GitLab Meetups, GitLab Meetups Checklist |
Common Room | We use Common Room to aggregate and review insights from our community engagement. | Common Room Workflows |
Community Engagement Initiatives
The Developer Advocate team is dedicated to building, supporting, and retaining a strong and engaged community through initiatives, including newsletters, mentoring, badges, and sharing resources.
Community Response
Given the Developer Advocate team’s understanding of our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we regularly engage in the response of situations that require intervention to address urgent and important concerns of our community members. We have a documented process for how we manage these situations.
Community Newsletter
We run a monthly Community Newsletter dedicated to sharing relevant developer content, highlighting contribution opportunities, and updating community members on upcoming events. We aim to keep our contributors involved and connected with the wider community.
Mentoring and Coaching
We make our practices and processes publicly available to foster a diverse and inclusive community. We also offer mentor and coaching opportunities to share our expertise, encourage professional growth, and promote a welcoming environment.
Release Evangelism
Developer Advocates should always be prepared to promote our monthly release and engage in community response on release days given the historical performance of release posts on Hacker News.
Tools
Our team uses different tools to grow and analyze our thought leadership, automate workflows, and improve written and presentation skills. See Developer Advocate Tools for a list of all of those tools.
Projects
Our team maintains many projects to help show off technical concepts, engage with communities, provide examples of using GitLab with other technologies, and automate our team processes. See Developer Advocate Projects for a list of all of those projects.
OSS Contributions
We actively contribute to OSS projects and share our technical expertise. You can learn more about our ideas and visions in our OSS contributions handbook page.
Metrics Collection and Analysis
Measuring what we do is very important to understand our impact and how we are able to reach our OKRs. A key metric is the Developer Advocates’ cumulative Twitter impressions. Learn more about the our tools, data collection and how to access the data sources for integrations.
How we work
Find us on Slack
GitLab team members can also reach us at any time on the #developer-advocacy-and-technical-marketing Slack channel where we share updates, ideas, and thoughts with each other and the wider team.
We use developer-advocacy-updates for content shares and other updates that don’t warrant generating noise in the larger channel. Many updates are automated using Zapier workflows
Calendar
The Developer Advocate calendar provides insights into speaking engagements, important events, CFP timelines, and other dates. Learn more in our CFP handbook.
Content workflows for Developer Advocates
Developer Advocacy CFPs
Developer Advocacy Community Response Process
Developer Advocacy on Social Media
Developer Advocacy Team Calendar
Developer Advocacy Tools
Developer Advocacy: Mentoring and Coaching
Developer Advocate Team Workflow
Hacker News
Join the Speakers Bureau
Learn Developer Advocacy
Metrics Collection & Analysis
OSS Contributions
Projects
Speaker Enablement
Writing Successful Conference Proposals
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