I'm two months into my new job as a Python Developer Advocate at JetBrains and realize there is a lot of confusion in the general public about what exactly a Developer Advocate does.
Defining the Role
Conversations with friends and family are typically along the lines of:
Them: Congratulations on the new job! So what do you do?
Me: I'm a Developer Advocate.
Them: So what do you do day to day?
Me: It's a mixture of content, marketing, and community. I help developers learn and, where possible, feature our tools (primarily the PyCharm IDE in my case).
Them: So are you writing code or doing marketing?
Me: Both, but I'm not in marketing and I'm not a programmer per se.
Them: Ok (eyes glaze over and move on to another topic)
The History of the Developer Advocate Role
In fairness, the concept of a Developer Advocate is pretty foreign outside of the tech ecosystem. It is a role that sits between product, marketing, and community. The earliest forms of developer advocacy emerged in the 1980s, when companies like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM who had "Evangelists" promoting their platforms. In the 1990s, Microsoft had "Platform Evangelists" who helped developers build applications on top of the Windows operating system.
But it is in the 2000s when the term "Developer Advocate" really picked up speed. Google is often credited with formalizing the role with employees who focus on developer experience (DX), APIs, and open web standards rather than just sales. Companies like Mozilla and Twitter also adopted Developer Advocacy positions to help engage better with developers building on their platforms.
A big reason for the role is that developers do not like to be marketed to. It is hard to sell products in traditional marketing ways to a group of superusers who are likely skeptical, full of questions, and want a domain expert to engage rather than just read or watch marketing materials.
By the 2010s, Developer Advocacy had become a standard role in cloud, API-driven, and developer tools companies like AWS, Twilio, Stripe, GitHub, Docker, and JetBrains (my employer).
These days, almost every developer-focused company--ie. selling products and services directly to developers--has Developer Advocates.
Company-Level Developer Advocate Differences
Part of the difficulty in defining what a Developer Advocate does is that the role varies widely depending on the company. It is always a hybrid of content, marketing, and community, but that balance varies depending on the company's goals. For example, DAs (Developer Advocates) at large companies like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon/AWS are often product-centric, focused on advocating for specific cloud and developer products. That means deep dives into their APis, SDKs, and integration guides. DAs at other companies like Stripe or JetBrains, might be more developer-centric, writing tutorials, making videos, building sample apps, and helping developers integrate the product into their workflow.
It really depends upon the needs and size of the company itself. In an enterprise-focused company like SalesForce, Oracle, or IBM, a DA works closely with B2B customers, hosting webinars, training sessions, and working with sales teams. Whereas a startup-focused company would often have a DA do community-driven work, open source contributions, live streaming, and quick iteration on documentation and developer experience.
What does JetBrains Do?
My company, JetBrains, makes tools for developers, most notably IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), that make it much easier to write code in a variety of programming languages. It started off with one product, IntelliJ IDEA, which is an IDE for the Java and Kotlin programming languages. And soon developed multiple other products with a similar focus, including PyCharm, focused on the Python ecosystem.
The company just celebrated its 25th birthday and is privately held, which makes it somewhat unusual in a tech landscape dominated by VC-funded startups and established public companies such as Microsoft and Google. We have around 2,000 employees, which makes us not a small company, but again orders of magnitude smaller than our competitors, who typically have trillion-dollar market caps. And as a final point of differentiation, the company is based in Europe, whereas most of the tech industry is in the United States. JetBrains was originally formed in Russia and later established its headquarters in Europe, where there are large offices in Prague, Munich, and Amsterdam, as well as small regional offices around the globe. There are also remote employees, such as myself and most of the ~30-person Developer Advocacy team.
IDE Landscape and AI
The big change across all of technology, and especially developer tools, is AI. Everyday users have seen glimpses of its power through Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and developers are increasingly hooking into LLMs to power different products. For example, why pay a legal assistant to review thousands of documents when you can run them all through an LLM to pull out insights, find specific references, and so on? LLMs can also reason and increasingly find their way into medical contexts, where they can assist nurses and doctors reviewing patient information. And it turns out LLMs are quite good at writing code, which means every IDE out there is focused on integrating these capabilities into their product.
The most recent Python developer survey, from 2023, showed the following distribution of IDE/Text Editors:
As you can see, VSCode and PyCharm dominate. The big difference between the two is that VSCode is free and relies on community-driven plugins for Python-specific support. In contrast, PyCharm is paid (there are free and Professional editions, but 68% of respondents use the Professional one) but has built-in support for Python and the broader ecosystem.
VSCode is, therefore, the obvious competitor to PyCharm. It has a different value proposition and is backed by "an infinite competitor" in Microsoft, which makes buckets of money elsewhere and does not have to charge directly for VSCode. On the other hand, relying on community plugins has risks and the integration is often not as good as in a paid product, like PyCharm, which handles all of that for the developer.
But the big, big change is AI. JetBrains has AI Assistant whereas VSCode has Copilot. And there are even newer coding agents, such as Junie for JetBrains being released as we speak, that handle even more tasks directly for a programmer.
And there a host of VC-funded startups focused on AI integration such as Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, and many more.
So it is an exciting time. It is clear that AI tools can and will help developers write code, but the details of that remain to be seen.
A final point of interest is that the landscape for LLMs themselves is rapidly shifting. Simon Willison has an excellent overview of things as they stood at the end of 2024. Among the main points, LLM prices are dropping, there are ever-more open-source models that can run on a local laptop, and the costs of training next-generation models are falling, as demonstrated by DeepSeek, which claimed to match leading performance benchmarks for a fraction of the cost.
All of which is to say, will LLMs become a commodity soon? And if so, does that mean the integration of them is more important than the underlying LLM itself? We shall soon see.
My Role at JetBrains
So what do I actually do as a Python Developer Advocate at JetBrains? It's a mixture of things and the balance will change over time, but here are my current goals:
Content: Creating content is a big area, which means videos and guides on topics relevant to the commnunity, highlighting PyCharm-specific features where relevant. This is all in the works but something I'm very excited to release. I am giving a keynote at DjangoCon Europe this year and hope to also do a talk at DjangoCon US in the fall.
Community: This is a squishy topic to define but basically means being out-and-about in the Python ecosystem, listening to developers and learning about their current needs. I will be attending a number of conferences this year, including PyCon US, EuroPython, and PyTorch, as well as the two DjangoCons noted above. I also continue to produce the Django News newsletter and Django Chat podcast, which serve as community resources within the Django community.
Open Source: I'm excited at the prospect of contributing directly to Django, since JetBrains are big contributors in both dollars and time, to the Python community. There are open Django tickets to my name around documentation and user authentication that I plan to tackle this year. And I continue to maintain the awesome-django repo and the lithium Django starter project.
Product: The PyCharm IDE is the primary product I support, so I have regular meetings with the product team there, evaluating new and proposed features, providing feedback, and learning about what's coming out soon so that I can create content around it. I also work directly with the PyCharm Product Manager, helping to escalate certain issues, sharing insights from the community, and so on.
Marketing: PyCharm has a dedicated marketing department and as a DA I'm marketing-adjacent, meaning I work closely with them on specific things. That can mean reading over blog posts and other materials produced by the team there, to ensure they are accurate and appropriate. Or creating videos for PyCharm marketing pages and YouTube Channels, and directly highlighting new features.
Final Thoughts
So far I'm really enjoying my job at JetBrains. I have a great direct boss, helpful colleagues, and a wide variety of goals to tackle. I also appreciate working at a European company (a first for me), where everyone works quite hard but also values time to rest and recharge. That is somewhat new to me given my past experience at U.S. startups, but I know it is ultimately more productive for me personally and I think companies as a whole.
It is also a very interesting time to be in the developer tools space, given the rapid changes brought about by AI. JetBrains is well-positioned, ultimately, given that the focus is on solely on providing best-in-class tools for developers. There are no other ulterior motives or products to sell. We may lack some of the resources of larger competitors, but I think that makes us focus more on the task at hand.
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