What made you want to stop coding?

Oh, you’re a developer advocate, what made you want to stop coding?

Someone first asked me this question at CascadiaJS 2022. I put an answer in my first 6 months recap, then it came up a few more times over the years. Now I think it shouldn’t be buried in that article.

This is part of a perennial set of questions in the industry: How much do developers advocate code? How much coding you should know before becoming a Developer Advocate?

Anyway, this is my answer.

I definitely didn’t stop coding. I feel like I code more as a developer advocate than I did as a front-end/software engineer.

It’s not true in the absolute, because going to events and writing articles lowers my total output. But, I spend more time thinking about code.

One of my responsibilities is to create tutorials and code samples that help developers use a product. Because of that, I have to be aware of how people code. That means keeping up with the latest developments in frameworks, runtimes and new features coming to programming languages. (Sveltekit had a major breaking change while I was building a starter, for example.)

Maintaining code samples and starter kits is also my responsibility. It’s a crucial part of a company’s developer experience and it requires you to keep yourself up-to-date.