My journey as a developer advocate here at Kin has been a major learning experience. It’s ever-changing and has really challenged me to look at things in a whole new way. Initially, my role within the company was to help support our developers building with Kin, write tech-centric articles, manage our documentation and a host of other responsibilities. None of that has really changed, but I realized that the scope of my role was much broader. A single developer advocate cannot scale with the impending growth of the Ecosystem and the number of developers that will soon be on-boarded. I had to take a step back and look at my role on a macro level and it really opened my eyes to how I could create maximum impact within the company.

Here a few thoughts from my learnings:

Developer Relationships

Good relationships with your developer community is probably the single most important part of Developer Advocacy. These relationships build trust and allow you to really understand the needs of your developers, which in turn allows you help them achieve success. These relationships motivate us to be better. They motivate us to continue improving our SDKs, Documentation and Processes. They motivate us to keep doing better at our jobs every day. The relationships between advocates and the developer community should be a BIG win-win if properly managed. We help each other to be successful which is why it’s so important.

Expanding Our Reach

With each new relationship I would see certain developers that were here for more than just building apps with Kin. They would go above and beyond building apps. They wrote articles, they built tools and they began to take on the role of a developer advocate on their own time by helping others. This is when it hit me. This is how we grow and expand our reach rapidly. I began speaking with a few developers about getting more involved in the project by creating tutorials, building modules and much more. Some were understandably too busy to get involved, but others were keen to join in and help us grow. Teaming up with our already passionate developers can help to expand our reach as a company. As we continue to grow, more passionate developer advocates will begin to join us and start creating amazing content that will continue to spread.

Looking Forward

This new take on my role has allowed me to shift focus from working with developers on a micro level and begin organizing a larger strategic plan along side our developer advocates to create content that will have a major impact on a much broader audience. We’ve already begun to see this take shape in the form of our new Kin Android Development Tutorial created by the incredibly talented Luc Hendriks, the lead developer of the KinFit app. In the near future you’ll see additional tutorials created for our iOS and Unity SDKs and you’ll get to meet additional developer advocates who I’m extremely excited to have joining us.