First month at Datadog

It's that time again - 4 years have passed, and I'm moving onto a new role at a new company - technical advocacy @ Datadog!

Before I get into that, here's a lightning tour through my career so far to fill in the “how did we get here” part of the story.

A career lived, two paragraphs written

In my recent job changes, I've shifted roles along with companies. I started as a Software Engineer, focused on writing code and moving tasks across a board. Then I moved into solutions architecture, designing systems for others to build on, which gave me room to grow technically while staying hands-on.

At AWS, I kept the same title but the role changed. As part of the sales org, I was more like a Sales Engineer without sales incentives ^[1], working with customers to design and run systems on AWS. This involved a lot of presenting, whiteboarding, and developing soft skills, which I came to enjoy. However, I missed having much time to actually build things, leading me to...

A change in the air

After spending a bunch of time trying to work out what next, and where? - I landed on a developer relations role at Datadog. For the first few months of the year I hassled friends & colleagues in companies building interesting things about their cultures - “how is it to work at ${X}?”. Long story short, after hearing a pile of overwhelmingly positive feedback, I decided to apply at Datadog. The combination of a great, broadly-loved SaaS product built on a modern cloud-native platform, and an enthusiastic and driven team was too good to turn down.

An auspicious onboarding

I've been at Datadog for going on 2 months, with the first week spent in the office in the middle of Manhattan for onboarding with a bunch of other folk mostly based in New York.

As the advocacy team lives within the broader engineering team, we get to go through the engineering onboarding, although pushing commits to Datadog itself is unlikely to be a big part of an advocate's job. This part of the onboarding was particularly interesting - there’s a lot of very interesting “SaaS at scale” stuff to see behind this particular curtain. For instance - I’ve spent a lot of time talking to AWS users that have bought into the Kubernetes dream of truly multi-cloud deployments - but this is a heavy lift for most. Datadog has managed to pull this off at large scale, leaning heavily on Kubernetes not just for stateless app workloads but also for databases and all the “hard, stateful” bits - and the way it all works is truly exciting to dig into ^[2].

Something else that jumped out is how comprehensively everything that gets built gets enthusiastically dogfooded internally. Just added a continuous integration visibility product to the Datadog suite? - let’s make sure that all of Datadog’s own CI builds use it!.

So, what even is advocacy anyway?

I've talked about the company and onboarding, but haven't touched much on the role itself. So, what’s technical advocacy? It varies depending on who employs you, where the team sits in the business, and probably other factors I’ve not realised yet.

Titles differ too — Developer Relations Engineer, Developer Advocate, and Technical Advocate are common, but Developer Evangelist is fading due to its religious connotations.

Some advocacy teams are more like marketing, promoting the company's products to developers. This isn’t really the case at Datadog. Datadog’s advocacy team focuses on working with the company's various communities to stay in touch with developer needs, advocating externally for modern practices and tools, while advocating internally to the product teams to help pass back community feedback on the products. Advocates write, give talks, and code, and build with the company's own tools too to stay in touch with the product. This is essentially a job for nerds who like enthusiastically building and talking about buildings things.

Seen altogether - company, role, and tech - this seems like it'll be an amazing role - I'll be able to keep my hands on the tools of the trade, while building on the community work I came to love at AWS.