Tell us a bit about yourself.

I like to think of myself as someone who loves to take chances on myself and try new things. Yes, it is always scary ALL THE TIME, but I’ve learned it’s better to give something a try than to give it a try a few months or years later.

My name is Edidiong Asikpo and I recently transitioned from web development to the cloud native development ecosystem. I love writing technical articles, building developer communities and sharing knowledge about the things I learn.

What do you feel is the most important part of your job?

Effective communication! Why would I say that you may ask? In my role as a developer advocate, I’m either trying to inform the engineering team about feedback from the community, sharing knowledge about my company’s product through articles, videos, code demos, etc, empathizing with our users and helping them answer questions.

..and if you look at all these things critically, you’d realize they all revolve around communication. If the communication is done effectively then it is a win-win for me, the developers I interact with and the company I work for.

What is something you’re struggling with?

As weird as this may sound, it is actually building relationships with people. Yes, yes I know that’s what developer advocates do. But as an introverted person, kickstarting conversations and building relationships is something I struggle with.

I do love meeting people and getting to know them, but every time I do that, it’s me getting out of my comfort zone.

I would say I have significantly improved on this over the years, but I’d love to do even better at it as it is a critical part of developer advocacy and is also really dope to be an outgoing person.

Tell us about a time you were inspired by someone or something in DevRel.

I was so inspired and impressed when I heard that the Test Automation University started by Angie Jones of Applitools reached 100k students. To think this was something that started as a DevRel initiative but turned out to be so big and impactful to the lives of over 100k+ people. What? I was blown away.

Another inspiring scenario for me is when I see Developer Advocates who not only share knowledge ( through technical writing, speaking and content creation on social media) about their companies tools but also share knowledge about different technologies or what they’ve learned in their career. - These type of Developer Advocates are rockstars in my book!

What’s one change you’d like to see in DevRel?

I’d love to see the folks in developer relations be more public about the code-related things they do. There’s an untrue myth across the ecosystem that Developer Advocates are not technically sound and that’s very untrue.

So, I’d love us (including myself) to share the technical impacts we are making in our various companies. For example, I wrote an article titled “Overcome Kubernetes Application Integration Testing Challenges with Telepresence” which highlighted the challenges of integration testing and how a CNCF tool called Telepresence can help to solve those challenges. - The fact that I knew about these challenges is because I’ve actually performed integration testing with a number of microservices, meaning that I do know the technical bits of Kubernetes.

As much as we (Developer Advocates) try to talk about our companies products or frameworks we love, we should always remember that we are not marketers but people who interact with other developers and these developers we interact with are technical people so we need to share the technical bits and let them know we actually understand their pains and are trying to help them build better products, and supercharge their productivity amongst other things.