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Scott Spence

Six Months as a Developer Advocate - a retrospective

3 min read
Hey! Thanks for stopping by! Just a word of warning, this post is over 2 years old, . If there's technical information in here it's more than likely out of date.

Six months ago today I started a new job as a developer advocate for GraphCMS. This has taken me by surprise as if feels like I’ve only just started still!

I think now is a good time to reflect on what I have done in this time.

April recap

I was onboarding for the first two weeks I was there this was mainly me getting to know my immediate team and key people in the business. Many one to one video calls.

May recap

After my onboarding one of the first things I did was create a SvelteKit example project that used the GraphCMS eCommerce example project. All the examples in the GraphCMS examples repos use the GraphCMS eCommerce example.

My Svelte love story begins!

Soon after that I was asked to talk with Brittney and Alex about GraphCMS on the CodingCat.dev podcast. This was released in July

I was well on my way down the Svelte and SvelteKit rabbit hole by this time and started to put out some more written content. Data Binding in Svelte was a refreshing look at how two way data binding worked with Svelte and how little code you have to write to get it to work.

I went a bit further toward the end of May with a SvelteKit Starter Blog with GraphCMS, using the GraphCMS blog schema template.

June recap

Back to the GraphCMS examples, I created an explainer video to accompany each of the examples in the GraphCMS examples repo.

Twenty odd videos between two and six minutes each, this is when I started taking video editing seriously.

These videos took up a lot of time and effort to make for something so short!

July recap

A brief blog post on the GraphCMS Examples video series.

Then a quite lengthy blog post on Building a Personal Timeline with GraphCMS and SvelteKit. What I learned from this is that some content doesn’t quite fit written format.

I was on a family holiday for the last week of July.

August recap

I was away on holiday for the first half of August.

The first couple of days back from holiday Jamie and I came up with the idea of creating a full Jamstack Linktree clone that could be created with one click.

Then I started on the Jamstack explorers mission

September recap

Busy month from what I can recall!

First up was a nice chat with my Twitter buddy James Perkins

https://zencastr.com/z/TARGseQu

Then I released a SvelteKit crash course video on YouTube.

I was asked to do a live stream with Eddie Jaoude where we made a full stack CRUD app with Svelte.

The Jamstack explorers mission was announced by Netlify and I followed up with a blog post on the GraphCMS blog.

Conclusion

So now I’ve listed off what I’ve done in the last several months, I can see I have been quite busy!

I have had periods of overwhelming imposter syndrome, at points like this I have had colleagues like Pranshu Khanna highlight some of my past achievements, which is one of the reasons I’ve put this post together.

Which brings me to my team! I’m thankful for is a really supportive team and manager (Jamie Barton) that believes in me and the content I’m producing. Before I started at GraphCMS I never thought I’d be putting out the amount of content I have produced.

What I have listed here is actual content and doesn’t include all the planning and co-ordination with the rest of the team. Helping out with the community in the public Slack, speaking with other companies and individuals about collaborations and partnerships.

The GraphQL ecosystem and the Svelte ecosystem is a big part of what I’m doing now. I really feel like I’m only just getting started!!

There's a reactions leaderboard you can check out too.

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