My Time As Developer Advocate At Akuity

How It Started

Two years ago, a sales engineer contacted me about Akuity, the company founded by the creators of the Argo Project. As always, I ignored the sales pitch. However, it prompted me to check out their website and careers page. I saw the open Developer Advocate position and immediately applied. I couldn’t pass up the chance to work with the world-class engineers behind Argo CD, a tool I use every day.

The thing was, I had no DevRel experience. Sure, I had a few blogs on my site (morey.tech). I also gave a couple of talks and hosted some lunch-n-learns internally. But I had no conference-level public speaking, video creation, or technical marketing experience. What I did have, however, was the right aptitude.

After chatting with Hong and completing several interviews, I conveyed my technical skills and passion for understanding and teaching others. I created a content proposal outlining the topics, the audiences, the problem statement, and the distribution of the resulting blog post. By this point, I had made my case as to why I would be a great fit as Akuity’s first Developer Advocate despite my lack of experience. And, I was persuaded to speak and write about Argo CD and the broader cloud-native ecosystem rather than being an infrastructure engineer and dealing with on-call (see my post from a few weeks ago).

How It Went

By the end of the first 90 days, I had written a technical blog post on a critical challenge that every Argo CD user faces and a central factor to the advantage of the Akuity Platform (which at the time was mainly Argo CD as a Service). I attended KubeCon for the first time, and it was also my first time working a booth at a conference. That week at KubeCon, I quickly learned how to ask the right questions to learn about how engineers were practicing GitOps (or not) in their organizations and how to pitch the value proposition of the Akuity Platform to suit their needs.

After 6 months, I developed an introduction and advanced workshop centred around Argo CD and GitOps. I had the privilege of presenting the intro workshop at SCaLE 20x and the advanced workshop at the Cisco headquarters in NYC the same week. Again, I had never given a workshop this formal to a group of strangers, yet I left both thrilled for the next time I could host one. From these workshops came new friends and a drive to do more training and education.

At 9 months in, I had created a few YouTube videos with over 30,000 views. I hosted several webinars about Argo CD, both in the open source and for the Akuity Platform. I designed a self-paced Intro to Argo CD course with quizzes, a hands-on lab with a series of challenges, and a proper certification badge for students. The course has now been taken by over 2,000 students and it continues to help new engineers get up to speed on Argo CD.

Rounding out my first year, I had the privilege of delivering my advanced GitOps workshop at the Red Hat HQ in Raleigh. Out of all the workshops I gave, this was my favourite. The students were highly engaged, asking fantastic questions that showed a great understanding of the challenges organizations face implementing GitOps at scale.

Around the same time, I spoke at ArgoCon NA in Chicago. I presented alongside Carlos Santa about the GitOps Bridge for Terraform and Kubernetes. The same day, I gave a workshop on scaling cluster management with ApplicationSets. It was an absolute pleasure to teach and connect with peers from the community. This ArgoCon was a highlight for me. A career goal of mine was to give a talk at a major conference, so getting to do two on the same day was unbelievable.

My second year feels like a blur because I had fully ramped up as a Developer Advocate by this point, and now it was time to deliver. I’m incredibly proud of my work on the Rendered Manifests Pattern. Between the blog post and my talk at ArgoCon EU in Paris, over 10,000 people have learned about the risks introduced by hydrating manifests during reconciliation.

I had the opportunity to visit Denmark in partnership with AWS, meet with the platform teams of the largest organizations, and deliver a workshop to some of the country’s best platform engineers. While not strictly developer advocacy and leaning more towards the work of a Solutions Architect, this was some of the most exciting and interesting work I’ve done. Diving deeper into the barriers to implementation at these organizations was very rewarding for me.

Other notable highlights include:

• Serving as the GitOps SME for Akuity’s largest customer
• Developing the Certified Argo Project Associate exam for The Linux Foundation alongside a team of world-class open-source maintainers
• Establishing the Scalability Special Interest Group (SIG) for the Argo Project
• Delivering multi-day remote training to engineers at Fortune 500 companies.
• Serving as a program committee member for the last 3 ArgoCons.

How It Ended

In my two years at Akuity, I have grown more professionally and personally than in any other career role. I experienced so many firsts that it’s hard to count. I travelled to over 12 new cities across the US and Canada and to 5 new countries. I had experienced a ton of new foods, like Hot Pot and Korean BBQ, for the first time, sitting alongside my team at Akuity. I met people from various organizations and backgrounds that I would have never had the privilege of meeting outside of my role at Akuity.

The people are what I’m most thankful for. None of this success would have been possible without the fantastic team I worked alongside at Akuity. Their encouragement, feedback, and patience were vital to everything I accomplished at Akuity. Not to mention all the lovely people from the open-source community and partnerships. They made it fun to contribute to the broader community and kept me grounded in providing education to anyone that was willing to learn, customer or not.

That said, I have made the difficult decision to end my time at Akuity and pursue a role closer to home. With all I’ve accomplished over the last two years, I have also learned much about myself and what I need to thrive. I’ve come to understand where I want to focus my time and energy. And for that, I will be moving into a new role and company next week!