Developer Advocacy

Developer Advocates build GitLab’s technical brand with deep, meaningful conversations on engineering topics relevant to our community.

Welcome to the Developer Advocacy Handbook


Team Workflow

Team Resources

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:

  1. Will this work support, grow, and/or engage the GitLab community?
  2. 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.
  3. 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:

  1. make adjustments so we can take on the work
  2. find another team that is better suited to deliver the work
  3. 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:

What we do

Our developer advocate team can be summarized by the “Three Cs”:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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
Reddit 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.


Community Newsletter
Overview of the Community Newsletter We run a monthly Community Newsletter to share developer-focused content, keep community members informed about upcoming events, and promote contributions within the community. The target audience for this newsletter is aspiring and existing GitLab contributors in our community. This newsletter will not be used to drive or generate leads. Process The Community Newsletter is scheduled to send on last Thursday of each month at 10 AM PT / 6 PM UTC.
Content workflows for Developer Advocates
Content Library The Developer Advocacy team creates content that can be reused for campaigns. All contents and activities the team participates in are added to the team’s technical content plan sheet (search for Technical Content Plan in Google Drive) and epics roadmap. You can search for relevant content and contact the team in the linked content epics or in the #dev-advocacy-team Slack channel. Click-through Demos Click-through demos are product simulation demonstrations that can be used for self-guided training.
Developer Advocacy CFPs
CFP Resources Event call for paper submission forms differ: Some require 1000 character abstracts, others prefer shorter biographies, or require you to fill in the talk learning goals. The Developer Advocacy team uses Google docs for maintaining CFP abstracts, @dnsmichi also uses a doc for the biography and headshot URLs as SSoT. CFP template Google doc. Biography template Google doc How we manage CFPs (Call for Proposals) Our events list Every year, developer advocacy prioritizes key events in our ecosystem for which we run the conference proposal (CFP) process.
Developer Advocacy Community Response Process
How to engage developer advocates in community response Given the developer advocacy team’s familiarity with our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we regularly engage in managing situations that require GitLab to address urgent and important concerns of our community members. Our team uses the Community response board to organize tasks. Notification Upcoming announcement: To notify the developer advocacy team of an upcoming announcement, product change, or other news event that may elicit a response from our community, the DRI should comment to @johncoghlan in a relevant issue or notify the developer advocacy team in the #dev-advocacy-team Slack channel.
Developer Advocacy on Social Media
Introduction Developer Advocacy builds out their thought leadership through social media and community engagement. The tips and strategies shared here can be used by team members and the wider community to help build their own profile as an evangelist. Topics: Education and Learning: Tips from own experience. Workshops, slides, blog posts, videos, etc. Events live tweets / tweet storms. Amplify talks with screenshots and messages. Release Evangelism: Share feature insights with personal views.
Developer Advocacy Team Calendar
Team Calendar The Developer Advocacy Team calendar contains team member speaking engagements, important conferences, CFP timelines, and other important dates. Developer Advocates should add new speaking engagements to this calendar as they are scheduled. The Developer Advocate Program Manager will manage team-wide events such as industry conferences and their CFP timelines. If you need write access to this calendar, please contact a member of the Developer Relations team via Slack.
Developer Advocacy Tools
Overview The Developer Advocacy team uses tools to grow and analyse their thought leadership, improve written language and speaking experience and automate as much as possible. We use GitLab and build our own tools when there is no viable alternative, see projects. Buffer Developer Advocates use Buffer in the Pro tier to manage scheduled campaigns. Buffer acts as a queue with async publishing functionality. This allows to collect interesting URLs from your browser and mobile, add them to the queue and publish in different time slots throughout the day/week.
Developer Advocacy: Mentoring and Coaching
Introduction This handbook page documents best practices how Developer Advocates can help wider community members with mentoring and coaching. Mentoring Finding a mentor GitLab Developer Advocates actively engage with mentoring wider community members. The team’s time is limited with our many activities, please understand when we decline a request. Polywork and other platforms can help finding mentors. Resources Review the process and tips in Mentoring at GitLab How to be a mentor: 4 ways to change someone’s life Topics If the career path is to becoming a Developer Advocate, the Developer Advocacy handbook provides many resources.
Developer Advocate Team Workflow
Team Workflow Welcome to the Developer Advocate team workflow page. Learn how the team works and how to work with the team. We primarily use the Developer Advocate Meta issue tracker. We own the team label developer-advocacy and all of our other labels which are located at the gitlab-com group level. You can add the labels as necessary to any issue under this group for our team to track. How to work with the Developer Advocate Team Opening an issue is the best way to get a conversation started.
Hacker News
Overview Hacker News is an important social channel. Threads that mention GitLab’s structure, values, product vision, or other sensitive blog posts, articles, etc. should be treated as important, while posts about GitLab that land on the front page of Hacker News should be treated as both important and urgent. Hacker News posts are important because they can generate traffic for our website, backlinks to our content, and, most importantly, value feedback on our product and processes.
Join the Speakers Bureau
The Speakers Bureau is a group of GitLab team members and members of the wider GitLab community who are available to participate in events and deliver talks.
Learn Developer Advocacy
What is advocacy? Advocacy creates a human connection with buyers and consumers to technology way beyond typical content marketing, with a face and a name relaying the story, expressing an opinion, and ultimately influencing a decision. Many people believe Guy Kawasaki, the former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, to be the father of advocacy. Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/08/28/why-every-tech-company-needs-a-chief-evangelist/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism_marketing Who can be an advocate? Everybody in the wider GitLab Community can be an advocate.
Metrics Collection & Analysis
Team Impressions 2021 Twitter Impressions 2020 Twitter Impressions Metrics Collections We currently collect ONLY Twitter impressions and YouTube video views using KeyHole.co and the YouTube API respectively, which are then fed into Sisense and other internal reporting platforms like Data Studio. Impressions on blog posts created on the GitLab blog are collected using Google Analytics. Impressions on blog posts prior to May 2021 are provided by Big Query. Team members who consent to use KeyHole understand that these metrics are used only to measure team results and that they can opt out at any time.
OSS Contributions
Contributions to OSS The Developer Advocacy team believes in Open Source and wants to lead by example, contributing to GitLab and the OSS ecosystem. Our workshops, community activities and projects are documented in the projects overview. Projects maintained by Developer Advocates We organize our projects in the Developer Advocacy group. A few examples are: Docker Hub Limit Monitoring Exporter for Prometheus Monitoring Plugin CI/CD API Lint Git Hook Go Excusegen Contribution Examples GitLab GitLab CI/CD Pipeline Efficiency documentation sourcing from the CI Monitoring webcast CI/CD Templates: Support the default branch, shift to main Prometheus GitLab CI Pipeline Exporter Help with API requests Michael’s contributions HashiCorp Waypoint Documentation GitLab CI/CD integration PR Blog posts How to use HashiCorp Waypoint to deploy with GitLab CI/CD GitLab Integration Waypoint Images CI/CD templates Demo Waypoint AWS ECS example Community 5.
Projects
Introduction We maintain our projects in the public gitlab-da group. This group has access to an Ultimate subscription. The group organizes use cases, workshops, tutorials, maintained open source projects, demo playgrounds, thought leadership research, and more learning resources. Organisation Structure All projects are organized in sub-groups on the top level. No projects are allowed on the top-level namespace gitlab.com/gitlab-da. Group DRI Description playground all Test projects, simple demo cases, code snippets, etc.
Speaker Enablement
Speaker Resources The Developer Advocate team is always happy to help at any stage of talk preparation, there is also a speakers resources page where you can find helpful guides and tips. Speakers Lean Coffee Chats The Developer Advocate hosts monthly coffee chats where new and experienced speakers can join in to discuss ideas of stories they want to share, pitch talks for feedback and seek help with preparing presentations. These are Zoom sessions, open to the GitLab community and it will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube if they don’t contain any private information.
Writing Successful Conference Proposals
Writing good conference proposals is both an art and a science. The science is the details of the technical content. The art is presenting it in a way that appeals to the audience - the conference committee. If you are planning to speak at a conference of 500 people or more, feel free to create an issue and request help from the Developer Advocate team. Here are some steps to go through when writing a CFP: