According to job search site ZipRecruiter, a developer in this role is the voice of the developer community with ideas related to product improvement or change, listening to issues developers are facing, finding ways to solve them and providing companies with these problems. an aerator.
Becoming a Developer Advocate requires years of experience in application development and user experience. You also need to understand the challenges that developers may face when using a particular platform. Other than that, you need strong communication skills, the ability to listen to other people’s concerns and come up with action plans to resolve them.
To find out how to become a Developer Advocate, I spoke with Hubert Nguyen, Senior Developer Advocate at MongoDB, a database software company.
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Nguyen studied computer science for two years with an emphasis on databases at HEIG Marnes La Vallée, a private school near Paris, France. The US government recognized Nguyen’s French degree in 1995 as equivalent to a bachelor’s degree in computer science in the United States based on four years of work experience in France. “I discovered this while I was preparing to immigrate to the United States and was getting help from an immigration attorney with the translation and assessment of my degree,” Nguyen explained.
As a child, Nguyen was interested in architecture, but after his first encounter with a video game console, he was fascinated by the pixel graphics of arcade games and early consumer computers and consoles, and wanted to become a computer programmer. games. “I loved doing things,” Nguyen said. I’ve always drawn on paper, and the possibilities of computer graphics seemed promising, if not endless. It’s ironic considering how primitive those graphics are today.” Back then, high schools didn’t offer a lot of computer classes, and computers were still expensive.
Passion for 3D graphics
While studying at HEIG, Nguyen worked as a software engineer in the research and development team of Cryo Interactive Entertainment, a game developer and publisher. “Back then, there was no formal ‘game coding’ curriculum, so everyone had to learn on their own,” Nguyen said. I was part of a small R&D team writing a next-gen 3D engine, focusing on 3D rendering code in assembly language, a skill I learned in a coding contest.
In 1999, Nguyen joined computer hardware company 3DFX Interactive as a senior software engineer. After spending several months working in developer support, I joined the Developer Technology Group to demonstrate the power of the 3DFX GPU. “The PC graphics business was booming, but the competition was fierce,” Nguyen said. The day before the holidays, 3DFX went bankrupt and all of its intellectual property was to be acquired by rival Nvidia. It was the start of a truly wonderful vacation,” he recalls.
But while Nguyen was on vacation, Nvidia offered him a job as a graphics engineer on the demo team. As I did at 3DFX, my job was to research and develop next generation 3D graphics rendering technology. Nguyen explained that 3D graphics rendering technology is driving game developers to adopt new 3D GPU features in upcoming games, which in turn leads to the adoption of new GPUs. “It’s been a great way to accelerate the adoption of new hardware when general computing isn’t possible with GPUs,” he said.
My job at Nvidia was the same type of work I did at 3DFX, but I could use better and faster 3D hardware. A few years later, Nguyen was appointed developer training manager, managing the creation, production, and distribution of computer graphics training materials such as the NVIDIA developer website, publications, and conferences.
