# How to be a great developer advocate # Code with Beto ยท https://codewithbeto.dev/blog/how-to-be-a-great-developer-advocate # Plain-text export for AI agents and LLM tools # Source: Code with Beto ## About Code with Beto **Code with Beto** ([codewithbeto.dev](https://codewithbeto.dev)) is an online learning platform by **Alberto Moedano** (Beto, [@betomoedano on X](https://x.com/betomoedano)). It helps developers ship production-ready **React Native**, **React**, **TypeScript**, and **Git** apps through video courses, real project walkthroughs, and production codebases (not toy demos or slide-only tutorials). Members get structured learning paths (React Native, React with TypeScript, Git, LiveStore), optional **lifetime access** (Basic or Pro), premium templates such as **Platano**, technical blog articles, and examples from shipped products like **Inkigo**. The teaching focus is maintainable architecture, native-feeling UX, Expo and modern React Native tooling, and workflows that work well with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT). ## This document - **Title:** How to be a great developer advocate - **Canonical URL:** https://codewithbeto.dev/blog/how-to-be-a-great-developer-advocate - **Agents export:** https://codewithbeto.dev/blog/how-to-be-a-great-developer-advocate/agents.txt - **Author:** Beto - **Published:** October 29, 2026 - **Summary:** What I learned about developer advocacy from working at Expo, years on YouTube, and watching the best DAs up close. 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Keep code snippets, command sequences, and step order accurate. 5. For discovery of all blog exports, see [codewithbeto.dev/blog/agents.txt](https://codewithbeto.dev/blog/agents.txt) and [codewithbeto.dev/llms.txt](https://codewithbeto.dev/llms.txt). For pricing, see [codewithbeto.dev/pricing.md](https://codewithbeto.dev/pricing.md). --- # How to be a great developer advocate I spent time at Expo as a Developer Success Engineer, which is a developer advocate role with a different name. Before that, and since then, I've been making videos about coding, tools, and frameworks on YouTube. Along the way I've worked with a lot of developer advocates and followed the good ones closely for years. This post is what I noticed the great ones have in common. I'm writing it the way I'd say it to a friend who just got the job or wants it. And since I'm a developer too, everything below about developers is a mirror, not a complaint. ## First, the elephant in the room Selling to developers got extremely hard in the past few months, because AI agents got extremely good. A developer who needed your tool last year can now ask an agent to build a version that's good enough for them. Everything in this post still applies. What changed is the bar. Your product has to be more compelling than ever, and nothing a developer advocate does can fake that. Keep it in mind as you read. ## Developers don't care about you Most companies that target developers are trying to become their friends. They give away free stuff, run events, send swag. All of that is fine. But I've watched it turn into something that looks a lot like begging developers to use the tool, which is the opposite of developers asking to use it. Here's what I learned at Expo, and then again making content: developers don't care about you. They don't care about your tool either. They have a goal, and maybe your tool gets them there faster, cheaper, or in a better way. That's the whole relationship. So don't make it about your company or about yourself. Make it about what the developer gets. Sometimes what they get is status or looking cool, and that's real. But the successful projects I've seen win on three things: the developer makes more money, reaches the goal faster, or saves time and effort. ## Developers are cheap, and now they build their own tools Developers don't like paying for things. Indie developers especially. And AI made this worse, because now instead of paying for a solution, a developer can build their own. I'm doing it myself. After years of using Raycast, I replaced it with an open source project someone built with Claude. Social scheduling platforms look dead to me, because Codex with computer use can open a browser and post whenever it wants. Normal people will take a while to notice, but I'm bearish on that whole category. The only developer tools I pay for right now are databases. Everyone knows you don't want to self-host Postgres. I think that's part of why Supabase keeps growing and companies like Prisma are doing well. They save you from a nightmare. So here's the question to ask about the tool you're advocating: does it save developers from a nightmare? Be real when you answer it, because developers will be. ## Developers like candy, but they pay for vegetables I heard this line somewhere and it stuck with me, because it explains most of what works in developer marketing. Candy is the shiny free stuff. I'll use Expo as the example because I know it, but this applies to every company in the space. A new open source UI you can drop into your app, with a beautiful demo and the code right there. A guide for one specific feature that makes your app look amazing. A native integration that used to be hard and is now easy because of an open source tool. Here's the code, copy and paste it, or hand it to your agent. Candy gets engagement. Post about it and it does well, because it's free and useful. Developers love candy. They also never pay for it. Vegetables are the hard part of engineering, and that's what most of these companies actually sell: CI/CD, migrating and redeploying your Prisma database for you, building your iOS and Android app and submitting it to the stores so you never deal with that again. The service, the automation, the reliability, and the documentation for people running it in production. Nobody shares a screenshot of their CI config. But as a developer's project gets real, vegetables are what they end up needing, and they pay for them. The arc usually looks like this: a developer finds you through candy, and as their project gets bigger and more serious, they end up on the vegetables. Candy is the top of the funnel. Vegetables are the business. One caveat. AI also made it pretty easy to build your own CI/CD in-house in the past couple of months. Some companies still prefer to pay for it, and that's okay. The nightmare question from the previous section still applies. As a developer advocate, your job is to show the candy and sell the vegetables. If your content only does one of those, something is off. ## Developers want to be in control A decision you make about your stack at the beginning of a project can slow you down for years. Developers know this, so they're skeptical of new tools by nature. That's healthy. The best way I've seen to build trust and open the door for adoption is open sourcing the tool. And if we're being honest, the only people who actually self-host most of these solutions are big companies. Individual developers just love knowing that if their product takes off, they could migrate off and self-host. I know everyone wants to lock in clients forever. But having an open source version is what makes the tool compelling at any stage. And plenty of developers keep paying after they grow, because you earned it. ## When you earn them, they're loyal I've been pretty harsh about developers so far. Here's the other side, and it's the reason the job is worth doing. When a developer truly enjoys your tool, they're loyal. They pitch it to their boss or their company, which can turn into a huge sale you never had to make. They contribute to your open source project if it helped them, which can be extremely valuable. They recommend it to friends. They bring it up in conversations you're not in. Developers are very smart. They're also more humble and respectful than people give them credit for. They have a strong sense of what's real and what's bullshit, and they can spot someone technical from a mile away. They can also spot someone who works at the company but doesn't use the product. The flip side is just as true. When things go wrong, one developer's comment about your company can hurt you instantly, in many ways. Both of those set up the rest of this post. The loyalty is what you're working for. The flip side is why you have to show up. Everything above is about understanding who you're talking to. Here's what the job actually looks like. ## Remove the friction, especially for AI agents Supporting developers in what they're building used to mean documentation. It still does. Some developers genuinely enjoy reading docs. But now it mostly means giving developers the best possible experience using your tool through their AI agent. Developers don't like friction. They want the goal as soon as possible, and AI makes that possible. Sometimes they'll even skip your abstractions and go straight to what they're building. If your product is still compelling, and they want to use it, you have to provide a way to use it with AI. Nobody wants to do this manually anymore. That means docs an agent can read, skills, an MCP server, example repos the agent can copy from, and technical blog posts that solve one real problem. Open sourcing relevant tooling helps here too. ## Get comfortable being public If you're a developer advocate, you need to be comfortable on social media. Posting updates, posting fixes, posting what's new. And not only candy and good news. Social is also where you listen. Complaints, feedback, frustrated users. When there's a real issue, face it. Admit something is wrong with the tool when it is. Post a postmortem when it's relevant. A frustrated user gets pointed to the right documentation or the right solution if one exists. If one doesn't, and something is actually broken, you push to fix it as soon as possible. More on that below. {/* Beto: a short story from Expo about facing an issue publicly would make this section real. Two or three sentences is enough. */} The other half of being public is making videos and tutorials. Teaching developers how to be successful with your tool is part of the job, not a side project. ## Be a person, not a company If your company already has a big developer audience, you're in a great spot. They're going to point to you, and that's a good way to start building your personal brand. But don't give the credit to the company's follower count. This works because it's person to person. Nobody wants to deal with a company. They want friends. That's why personal brands beat company brands, and why the developer advocates you follow are people whose names you know before you remember where they work. As a developer advocate, you get to take advantage of that. Use it. ## Give, 90% of the time Developers want things for themselves, all the time. It sounds harsh, and I'm a developer, so I'm saying it about myself too. We care about what's in it for us. What do I gain? So most of your job is giving. Free stuff, more tools, more features, more options, more flexibility, and teaching people how to get the most out of what you build. That's the candy from earlier, and it's where 90% of your time should go. The other 10% is the vegetables. They're hard to swallow sometimes, but you have to talk about them, because that's what keeps the lights on. 90/10, maybe 80/20. Somewhere in there. ## Listen, dogfood, and push for the fix This is the half of the job the title is named after. A huge part of being a developer advocate is listening to feedback and dogfooding your own tool. The successful developer advocates I've seen are experts in their stack, or at least extremely fluent. They can point you to the right documentation fast. They can write a guide or a doc that covers a gap fast. You can't do any of that if you don't use the product yourself. In most cases your job is not to maintain the project. Your job is to get feedback from developers, who are the users of your product, and get it back to the team. Or, putting it nicely, open the pull request yourself and push for the fix when you know it's a real opportunity. You're the developer's voice in the room. You're the bridge, and you have to convey what developers are actually experiencing. This takes some humility. Developers ask for new stuff all the time, and a lot of it would be hard to maintain. You need a good sense of what's actually wrong with the tool versus what's just a wish, and then push for the real fix. Spotting those gaps is the skill. And it goes back to the nightmare question. If the honest answer is that your tool doesn't save developers from one yet, that's something you go tell your team. It's not something you spin. If nobody listens, friend to friend, that tells you something about the company. ## You're also the bridge to other companies One more thing people miss. As a developer advocate, you're often the way collaborations happen. Integrating an analytics tool into your project, making templates for a different backend or database, co-writing a guide with another team. These can be genuinely useful for developers, and they usually start with a conversation between two developer advocates. The rule is the same as everything else here. Do it because there's a real gap to cover for developers, not because you're friends with the other DA. You'll be friends anyway. The collaboration has to earn its place. ## The takeaway Be transparent and be real, because developers can tell the difference. The best way I can say it: be the developer's friend inside the company, not the company's friend among developers. You're the one posting what's new, teaching people how to be successful with the tool, carrying their feedback back to the team, and occasionally talking about the vegetables. The bar is higher than it's ever been. The fundamentals didn't move. And have fun with it. Developer advocate is one of the most beautiful roles in software engineering. It sets you up for success in a way few jobs do, and it compounds massively. If you're trying to land a developer advocate job, or you're already doing it, I hope this helps you position yourself more strategically, or at least spot one gap you can improve. If I missed something, tell me. My DMs are open on [X](https://x.com/betomoedano) and I read everything. I'm also thinking about a follow-up on how to actually create content for developers, which is the part of this job most people struggle with. If you want it when it's out, join the newsletter and reply to the first email with what you'd want covered. **Get the follow-up** **How to create content for developers** I'm writing the next post on this. Join the newsletter and reply with what you'd want covered. [Join the newsletter](https://cwb.sh/newsletter) And if you're a DA at a company building for mobile developers and you think there's a real integration to do with the things I build, reach out. That's the kind of collaboration this whole post is about. Let's keep building. Beto