2018 was a pretty good year. Jesse loves 2nd grade, Jen earned a new car (her 10th?), and it marks my first full year at Mozilla. Professionally I feel like I’ve been all over the place. I’ve tried lots of new ways to reach people, some successful and others less so. The teams I serve are happy so I guess I’m doing things okay, but I want to prune in 2019. I want to stop doing things that have not been effective and double down on the things that seem interesting. 2019 should be a very interesting year for WebXR, but before we get to those plans, let’s review 2018.
This essay is adapted from a talk I did in 2016 at DevRelCon. This is a topic I've wanted to talk about for a while. Sometimes I feel like the old guy from Up. Not only am I old and crotchety and my back doesn't work as well as it used to, but I feel like all of these young kids are getting into the field and they don't know the history of Developer Evangelism. But then I realized, I don't know the history of it either. I just sort of fell into developer evangelism from engineering. I didn't go to school for this. I got a computer science degree and spent many years as a coder and engineer. I came into this field by accident, as I assume many other people have as well. When I joined Sun Microsystems in 2005 I didn't mind speaking on stage about technical topics, so boom.. I became the developer evangelist for my team. So now I'm thrilled to be able to actually talk about the history of our field.