#006 – Developer Evangelism and Lessons from Musical Theatre with Chloe Condon

Ardent Development Podcast

Chloe Condon, a former musical theatre actress and Hackbright Academy graduate, is a Developer Evangelist at Sentry. Perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet who has been in “Hairspray”, “Xanadu”, and “Jerry Springer: the Opera,” she is passionate about bringing people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face, yes, she’s the young woman giving the awkward thumbs up in the “What It’s Like to be a Woman at a Tech Conference” article (which she also wrote). A quick Google search of her will provide you with getting started with Docker videos, theatre reviews, tech blogs, and videos of her singing—enjoy!
In this episode, Derek and Ron chat with Chloe about her role as a developer evangelist as well as her background in musical theatre and what insights can be gleaned from comparing and contrasting tech and theatre as industries. Chloe also shares a high-level overview of Sentry, the cross-platform crash reporting and aggregation platform.

Where to find Chloe Condon

@ChloeCondon on Twitter

On the web at https://medium.com/@chloecondon

Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter.

Follow @ardentdev

Transcript

Ron: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast. I’m Ron Smith.

Derek: And I’m Derek Hatchard. Today we’re talking with Chloe Condon. Chloe is a former musical theater actress and Hackbright Academy graduate and she is now a developer evangelist at Sentry. She is perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet. I think the only one that I know who has been in Hairspray is Xanadu and Jerry Spinger the opera. She is passionate about bring people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face she is the woman giving the thumbs up in the what it’s like to be a woman at a tech conference article, which she wrote. I found that on Medium and there might be other places, Chloe can correct me in a second. And a quick google search for her will tell you that she has a series of getting started with docker videos. You find some theater reviews that she’s on, tech blogs and I think the hilarious videos of her singing after. So Chloe welcome to the show.

Chloe: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Derek: So Chloe, you’re a developer evangelist at a company called Sentry and some of us have bumped into plenty of developer evangelists in our time. But for those listening who don’t really know what that role is. Could you really unpack it for us? What is it? What do your days look like? Tell us a little bit about that experience is like.

Chloe: Sure, so it’s kind of funny. Usually when I tell people who aren’t familiar with the role they say “Oh is that a religious thing”? And my answer is usually well in a sense. But basically I call myself an extroverted engineer. The title I go by is developer evangelist. Other people go by DevRel, developer advocate. There’s a lot of different flavors and varieties of us. So personally I got into the evangelism space because I have a non-traditional background. I come from theater world. And when we were presenting our projects at Hackbright I discovered pretty quickly like oh wow nobody likes to do public speaking. This is very interesting. So that’s kind of part of what I do. So oftentimes I will go to conferences and I will speak about various thought leadership topics. Right now I’m doing a lot of stuff around the error blogging you know metrics space, in my previous role I did a lot of Docker evangelism. So it’s a combination of a couple of things, it’s speaking, it’s writing content. So a lot of the times and you see tutorials or walkthroughs on different websites that’s often made by me and our content person. Doing everything from case studies to writing code examples for different integrations and features that we have. I’m organizing our meetup that’s going to be a monthly meet up starting in January. So it really depends what I like about it a lot is my role changes every single day. Just looking at my calendar next week I’m like breaking it down and seeing OK I’m writing this thought leadership blog and then all day Thursday we’re filming all around the city for our meet up, we’re doing a promotional video for our meet up. We just published The 12 Days of integrations gif blog posts where we call ourselves very gif positive here at Sentry every new employee gets a welcome gif. e featured all of our integrations over the 12 days leading to the holidays which involved having our different engineers hold up different ornaments with the logos of our integrations on them. So there are some really fun kind of theatrical aspects of my role. But a lot of it requires this pretty deep understanding of technology and our product and being able to code. So I definitely went in more non-traditional route as a first role in these software engineering role or world, I should say. But I felt that it very much aligned with with my past. So yeah now I’m now I’m here.

Derek: So the very first developer evangelist I ever met was a guy at Microsoft, years and years ago. And at the time he didn’t even he wouldn’t use, even though that was his job title he wouldn’t use the term developer evangelist when he was going out around Canada because everyone would look at him like What are you talking about? What does that even? But what’s interesting is that there is. I mean there is a fair bit of showmanship involved in it so I can see how such a good fit given that you have a performance background I think that’s really cool. Do you run into the misconception that because you’re a developer evangelist or you work in developer relations or developer marketing that you know you’re not technical or you’re not a real engineer. Do you run into that bias?

Chloe: You know I think a lot of it is mental for me since I am in a sense still very junior because I only graduated from my bootcamp a year ago. No one’s ever blatantly said that to me but I think the voices in my head say that. I usually do not recommend to the bootcamp grads to jump right into evangelism just because I think it’s very valuable to get the time in the trenches and get that time to really understand the pain points and the workflows of engineers. So I really had to put it on myself my first year to make sure that I was coding everyday that I was doing some sort of technology be that writing about it or blogging about it. Obviously in my last role it was very Docker focused and now I’m learning all about this new space of you know error tracking and metrics and logging. So I think that a lot of it is mental and imposter syndrome. There’s always so much to learn. With Sentry in particular, we support basically every language. So my bootcamp, the curriculum was mostly python and Javascript. So when I go to something like Rubyconf or if I go to something like php conference I obviously know how to code and I can build my own. But I haven’t touched a lot of php so a lot of that is I spend a lot of my free time kind of dabbling in those languages. Use a lot of resources like code school and teen treehouse. But yeah I would say there are definitely evangelists out there who are very technical. My role sits on the marketing team...