History of developer evangelism

Josh: Thank you. Wow, that was a good, get me going. I feel like a WWF coming out here. So history developer evangelism. First I want to say this is really about our customers. Fundamentally, developer evangelism is about sharing something about getting something. So we don't really talk about the companies that we work for and I'm not going to talk about them now. I'm a little bit thirsty and a little hot. Okay, that's better. So history developer evangelism. This is a topic I want to talk about for a while because I kind of feel like that guy sometimes. Not only am I old and crochety and my back doesn't work as well as it used to, but I feel like all these kids are getting into the field and they don't know the history of it. But then I realised I don't really know the history of it either. I didn't go to school for this. I got a computer science degree, I was a coder and an engineer, and I just sort of fell into this as I imagine many of you did.

So let's just set with what is developer evangelism. For me, it's about creating and evangelising tools. And a tool is something that people use to do something else. So if you are selling a hammer to a construction team, it's not because the construction team cares about the hammer itself, it's because they're building something for somebody else. They're building a house. So that makes a very special form of marketing and bridges. It's a little bit of marketing, a little bit of sales, a little bit of engineering. But fundamentally it's about helping other people do good stuff with your tools and your technology. So I'd started researching, where did this come from? I'd heard of Guy Kawasaki and there were certain people in the field in the nineties and early two thousands that really inspired me. So I figured that was it. But the more I dug into it, I started falling down the rabbit hole and I realised that this goes back way, way back in time.

So let's go back in time a little bit to the 17 hundreds from pretty much the dawn of history until the 17 hundreds, we've had screws and screws were typically made out of clay or wood or very soft metals. And they were always created as one-offs. It was always this screw was created for this nut or this bolt or hole or whatever, and it would work pretty well with the thing it was created for and nothing else. There was no compatibility because it didn't really matter. They weren't used that much. They were very special applications. But that changed in the 1790s with the very first screw lights. This made it possible to create repeatable shapes and sizes for screws out of metal. And I also drastically reduced the cost. So all of a sudden the usage of screws exploded at the beginning of the industrial revolution and we were starting to make machines powered by steam.

So it was very exciting. And of course, if everybody can create their own repeatable screws, everybody created their own standards. And we know how that turned out. So by the mid 18 hundreds, there were tonnes of standards all across the country. Different parts of the country had different standards, different companies had different standards, different branches of the military had different standards, and it was chaos. And the machinists generally liked it because it gave them walk-in, but they were starting to feel like it was holding them back. So something happened. This guy, William Sellers. So William Sellers was one of the premier machinists of the day. He owned several machine shops, he was very well respected. They didn't really have engineering as a field, but it was called more like Applied science. And he became president of the Franklin Institute, which was the premier engineering society of the day.

And the first thing he did when he addressed the membership after he became president was this talk in 1864 on a uniform system of screw threads. And he proposed a standard, and it was a standard not based on technical excellence, though he did make sure it was very good. It was specifically focused on making the screws cheap and easy to produce in a reliable way. In fact, he designed it so they could do it with two tools instead of five. He took features from existing and put it together and talked about how not just that the screw was good, but that the value of standardisation in itself would benefit everybody. Now, a lot of the members were suspicious. They had seen previous technological revolutions greatly commoditize their field, and they were worried that their profits would go away and everything would be a commodity and a lot of them would be out of work, but he expected this.

So the first thing he did, some of his customers were the railroad companies. So he went and talked to them and got a few big railroad companies on board. Then he uses connections in the military to talk to the Navy, said, Hey, you should compare this to the new standard coming out of Britain. Wouldn't it be great if we settle on a US standard instead of a British standard who was, we were not on good terms with then. So he got the Navy on board and eventually this led to other branches of the government and eventually the entire country. And his belief was that if we could all standardise on this, then there'd be more profit for everybody and we'd be able to build more things and compete better with what was coming out of Europe. And he was basically right what was called the sellers standard became the United States standard and then became what today we call SAE.

And along with metric, it is the two major standards that are used around the world. So I would say that he was the first developer evangelist. He talked not only about the quality of the particular technology and the particular product, but the value of standardisation itself to the industry as a whole. Even it was benefiting his competitors, but it was important for the field. So I think he was the first developer evangelist. Now let's skip ahead to the early 19 hundreds. Now in those days, electrification hadn't really taken out over yet, and we were using a lot of gas lamps. And one of the problems with gas lamps is that they got hot and the lamps are made of glass and they exploded a lot. So some guys at Corning developed this new kind of glass where they mixed boron into it called a Bo silicate glass had a low thermal expansion, meaning as it heated up, it didn't expand as much as other glass was less likely to break.

And it did well in these niche markets for things like gas lamps. So they wanted to expand, and this was during World War I. And so there was a lot of money in the United States to fund new development, and they were trying to push into the burgeoning consumer market and get people to actually cook with this. But that was very difficult because everybody knew you can't cook with glass. So they had to do one of the first real technology marketing campaigns about yes, you can cook with glass. So the first thing they did was say, okay, Bora Silicate is a horrible name, so we're going to change the name to Pyrex and talk about how it's the modern way to cook. And you notice they're not actually showing food here. They're talking about the act of cooking. And this is one of their early ads, and they really show off.

This is glass on flames. They had to educate the consumer, but they also added some features that were, again, focused not on the food itself, but on the act of cooking and serving the food. In this case, it's a glass bowl that's a pot, but then you can take the handle off and serve it right to the table so you don't have to put it in a separate serving dish. And this was because they were selling to the housewife who was going to be doing the cooking and the serving to further push this into the public consciousness. So a guy named Hale hadn't received funding from the government to create what was at the time the largest telescope ever built. And they were trying to use some fuse quartz crystals. And that failed. So Corning came in and said, Hey, we have this really strong glass, let's make it for you.

And this was the largest piece of glass ever created at the time. So they created a 200 inch giant glass disc for the telescope and then did lots of publicity around it, and it was made on the East coast. So they shipped it by train and put all the signage on it. And as it went across the country, people would come to see the giant piece of glass and discover what Pyrex is. And amazingly, that telescope is still in use today and was the largest telescope still in the world until the mid seventies. So let's go up to the 1940s. We were developing during the wars a lot of interesting, not just weapon technology, but new food technology, freeze drying, food dehydration, and of course everyone's favourite spam, figuring out ways of using parts of food that we hadn't used before. So after the war was over, they needed to figure out a way to encourage people to cook using these new materials.

They're trying to change the way people cooked. So Laura Shapiro writes a book about the history of cooking, how we invented dinner in the 1950s. And she talks about how the focus was not on the food itself, but on how to improve the life of the person who is doing the cooking. And there's lots of talk about making your food, making more efficient, making your family happier, using less cost or more quickly producing food, which was great though the results didn't always result in better actual food. We got stuff like this. Don't you want to eat shrimp inside of Jello? It looks so disgusting. Okay, so it wasn't always great, but I think the advertising is really interesting. This talks about how this is the serving dish that serves you. It would make the person using the tool better.

So now we get into, Lucy Melby was, I believe she was a psychologist originally in school. And she joined Corning as the sales were slumping in the thirties during the depression. And she said, we've got to really change how we make these products to appeal to the consumers. We have to learn how people actually are using this stuff. So she set up an actual kitchen research lab she brought in, she brought in cooks to see how they actually cooked and watched them not just ask them questions. She had the male sales staff perform kitchen tasks, which was a big deal in the 1930s and forties. And to learn how the actual customers were going to use stuff and talking to customers, brought that information back into the product development teams. So I consider her the first developer advocate.

James Beard did the first webinar. So in 1946, he created this show called I Love to Eat. And he felt like the war is over. We should be changing how people eat and move into the future, and that anybody can cook fine fringe cuisine, fine gourmet cooking, not just people with all this elaborate training. So 1946, keep in mind television barely existed at all at this point. And in fact, we have no recordings because we didn't have the ability to record TV yet. They were these 15 minute live things. He started teaching people in 15 minutes at a time how to cook fine French cuisine that anybody can do it. So I'd say that was the first webinar. And then Pillsbury started the first hackathons. So they had these events all around the country, these baking contests where they encouraged people to bring their favourite recipes and compete against each other.

And the goal was, as long as you use Pillsbury flour somewhere in the recipe, anything goes. And then they heavily publicise these, getting the idea that cooking is advancing and that anybody can do this. So let's get into some actual computation. In 1951, Grace Hopper, yes, created what was essentially the first compiler, though we might think of it as a more of a linker today. And it was called a zero by 1953, a two shipped to their customers. And keep in mind the computers were hugely expensive and you're expected to write your own software. They didn't come with operating systems and apps, but she felt strongly they should come with at least sample code. So they provided the code on magnetic capes to their customers and encouraged them to take it apart and to submit patches essentially and send them back to the company to improve the next release.

So this was the first collaborative development IBM got in the game with their mainframe, and they weren't as excited about just giving away stuff to their customers, but their customers decided to take things in their own hands. So they started a user group swapping code back and forth between each other, which became this library called the Share Library, and eventually library go so big, it was an operating system for IBM mainframes called the Share Operating System. So it was the first open source r os. And this started in the mid fifties. Amazingly, they're still around today and they have over 20,000 members across 2000 companies who use the modern descendants of IBM's mainframes.

Now in the 1980s, this is the part that probably most of you are familiar with, this was a reunion of some of the early Apple developer evangelists. So one of the first was Mike Bosch. He was a developer evangelist at Apple. During the Apple two days, he went out and encouraged people to write software report software to the Apple two. And he met this guy named Mark Barton, who was a computer genius. He figured out how to do actual speech synthesis on an Apple two. And keep in mind, this was a computer with a one megahertz processor. He did actual speech synthesis. So when the Mac was still private in development, he showed it to Mark, convinced him, deport it, and then grabbed Mark and grabbed Steve Jobs, put them in a room and showed it to him. And Steve Jobs said, that's amazing, the Mac can talk. We need to buy that so that the Mac can be the first computer to actually introduce itself on stage. So they bought it and renamed it Mac and Talk, which has been built into every Mac ever since. So this was a case of the developer evangelist actually improving the product.

And finally we get to Guy Kawasaki. Guy is, I mean, so much has been written about him and including, he's written a lot of books about himself. He was from the Mac era and he did the legwork. He really kind of defined what we think of as the modern developer evangelist, including I believe the term developer evangelist or technical evangelist. And he did the legwork. He went out, found everybody who would be empowered by using a Mac, graphic designers, small businesses, people who could do things that they couldn't do before because of their product. And then he helped make them successful. Not only did he come teach them stuff, he would come talk to their boss to convince them to buy this. He would send them t-shirts, he would get Apple employees to speak at events. He was really a connector in the early Macintosh community. And he always said that evangelism is selling a dream. It's not about the product itself, it's about what you can do with a product or what you could do with a product in the future if it was better. It's the dream. And he's fortunately written a tonne of really good books. If this is your field, go read that book first. I mean, it's like the textbook. If we had a school for developer evangelism, that would be the intro textbook.

Now we're going to get to the modern era. I love Kathy Sierra. She started this series of books called Headfirst. I think headfirst Java was one of the first. And they were a very different kind of technical book. They were funny, they had jokes and puzzles in them. They were very visual and impactful, and she felt like teaching these things shouldn't be dry. It should be fun, and we should encourage people to be successful and talk about how using the technology can make them do better things. So I took this great picture from her website. The old way is you should buy our product because we kick ass and think that's kind of the IBM era. And the new way is buy this because it will help you kick ass, make you better.

So to make a long story short, which I did, this was originally a 40 minute talk, and when AU came to me and said, we love it, but it's got to be half the length. Okay. But I think it was good. Really help focus. So this is a long, illustrious field going back, spanning both engineering and marketing. We do have an amazing history, and I think we're also in a golden age where it's becoming not just understood and accepted, but actually essential to building modern products. The company I work at, developers are our customers. So DevRel essentially is marketing and sales. We don't have anything else. That's how we reach developers. So you're joining a field with a very long and illustrious tradition, so please go help people kick ass. Thank you.