Having skills is only part of the game. Because life is a team sport, connections matter too!
Then you’ll want to catch this online panel, State of The Tampa Tech Scene, where you’ll find me and other organizers behind Tampa’s influential startups and meetups talking about the current state of technology and the tech industry, as well as how you can get involved and grow your network. Find out more on the event’s Meetup page.
If you are:
…then you’ll want to catch this online event next Monday, August 9th at 2:00 p.m.: An orientation for the paid training and work experience you can get from ACE, the Apprenticeship to Career Empowerment program!
ACE provides training and paid experience by partnering people age 18 through 24 with local employer for paid apprenticeships in areas including:
This orientation will cover the details of the ACE program, show you how to apply, and give you a chance to ask questions. If you’re looking for work in fields that provide lots of opportunity, good pay, and great prospects for your future, you don’t want to miss this — make sure that you (or a young person whose future you care about) sign up for this event!
You might know that I hold the position of Senior Developer Advocate at Auth0 (see my article about out how I landed the job). What you might not know is that there’s an opening for a similar position on my team, and you might be my newest teammate!
The official job title is Senior Developer Advocate. This job has two main areas of focus, namely:
The job also involves working with related teams and programs, including:
What qualifications will a successful candidate have? The job page has a bulleted list, and I’ve taken those bullets and turned them into the handy table below:
| General skill | Details |
| Software development | 3+ years experience as a developer. It can be front-end or back-end (or hey, both!) in a programming language that’s either in wide general use (JavaScript, for example) or up-and-coming (say, Go and Rust). |
| Education | You should be an educator at heart who loves teaching developers how to build amazing things. You must be comfortable taking complex topics and making them accessible to developers of different experience levels. |
| People skills | You must enjoy serving the community and helping fellow developers get better at their jobs. The job will involve speaking in front of groups of developers at conferences and meetups, or online. |
| Content creation | We need strong independent contributors, who also enjoy collaborating with teammates and multi-functional teams. Writing and research are important for this job — you’ll be the first to try new APIs and products, write code snippets and sample applications, and articulate ways they can be improved to make all developers’ lives easier. |
| Work skills | You are comfortable learning multiple skills simultaneously and managing multiple projects at once, while working remotely at an organization that’s undergoing some big changes. |
This is a community-facing job, which means that there’ll be travel involved once it’s safe to do so. It may take up to 30% of your time.
Candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don’t apply unless they meet all the job criteria. Let me make it clear right now: We’re not using a checklist and considering only those people who can check every last box — instead, we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences. If you think you’d be a great fit, apply!
Yes, it is! Better still, Auth0 has a home office expense and reimbursement policy that allows you to expense items for your home office so that you can do your job effectively. Simply put, Auth0 paid for my Autonomous adjustable desk and ergonomic office chair, pictured below:
I often get asked “How are things going at Auth0?”, and my answer is always the same: They’re going very, very well. But don’t take my word for it — take it from the Forbes/Great Place to Work survey, which put us in the 100 Best Small and Medium Workplaces for Millennials.
According to the results of our most recent survey (in which I participated), the general feeling at Auth0 is that it’s a great place to work. 99% of Auziros (our own inside term for “Auth0 employee”) say so, which is well above the U.S.-based company average of 59%.
Here are some other stats on what Auziros said in the survey:
Go to the Senior Developer Advocate job page, read the job description to make sure it’s the job you want to apply for, and then fill out the form on that page.
Super secret helpful hints: Everything you need to know to land the job, if you’re really up for it, is in my article How I landed my job at Auth0.
Want some insights on the job from actual Auth0 Developer Advocates? Check out these interviews on the Thunder Nerds podcast with these team members:
Yes — lots of them. Check out our Careers page to see them all.
Feel free to ask in the comments, and I’ll happily answer!
Some of you who know that I joined Auth0 in October have been asking what it’s like now that Auth0 has been acquired by Okta.
These headlines should be an indicator:
I am a Senior Developer Advocate at Auth0, and there’s an opening on my team for the same position.
Here’s a quick description of the job:
As a Developer Advocate at Auth0, your job is to empower developers to innovate and secure their apps with Auth0. Developer advocates have two main focuses. The first is to educate developers about Auth0 and identity through speaking at events, creating live and recorded video content, writing, appearing on podcasts, and other creative mediums. The second is to serve the larger developer community by answering questions and listening to feedback on forums, GitHub, social media, and Slack and Discord servers. You’ll then take that information and share it with other marketing, engineering, and documentation teams at Auth0 to help improve our developer experience. These two objectives also include working on programs like Auth0 Apollo Program, Auth0 Ambassadors, and Avocado Labs, collaborating with engineering teams, working on open source libraries, and building internal tooling and reporting applications. For all of these tasks, you will measure your impact both quantitatively and qualitatively and adjust course as needed.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
The position is a remote position, but since it will involve travel within the US and Canada, we’re looking for someone who lives in either of those countries.
Want to know more about this opportunity? Check out the job listing, and if you’re interested, drop me a line.
Were you able to answer all the questions above with a definite “yes”? If so, you might be the very person we need to fill the role of Senior Developer Advocate at Auth0!
Every month, Auth0 processes 4.5 billion login transactions.
I’ll let this video — which is only 1 minute and 33 seconds long — explain in a little more detail:
Simply put, we are in the business of digital identity. In a heavily-networked world with processing power everywhere, knowing who every user is and what they’re allowed to do on a given system becomes fundamentally important.
In this role, you would split your time between two major categories of activity:
You would be part of the Developer Marketing group, which in turn is part of the Marketing department.
This is a high-performance team that does publicly visible technical work for a high-profile unicorn (as in “privately held startup company with a valuation of $1 billion or more”). It means that each member not only has to excel individually, but also that we truly shine we we combine our skills to produce results. Even though we’re spread over Europe, North and South America, and Australia, we stay in close contact, communicate regularly, and deliver work consistently and reliably.
It’s also a high-trust team. We listen to each other, help each other out, hand out the high-fives freely when one of us succeeds, and the condolences and offers of assistance when one of us doesn’t. We have each other’s backs.
Simply put, it’s a “two beers and a puppy” team.
For each and every person on the team, I would answer “yes” to both these questions:
It’s great. In spite of rapid growth over the past three years, we’ve taken great care to maintain their culture, philosophy and “feel”.
Auth0’s works hard at maintaining three key values:
As an employee, you’ll get good work equipment and swag…
…and we’ll cover some of the costs for improving your setup with their home office expense and reimbursement policy, which I used to upgrade to a standing desk and ergonomic chair:
Also:
Luckily for you, there are a number of articles on exactly this topic:
Drop me a line and let’s start a conversation!
Welcome to the second week of March! Here’s your list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, March 8 through Sunday, March 14, 2020.
This is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog, Global Nerdy! For the past four years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bat and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
For the time being, I’m restricting this list to online events. We’re still deep in a pandemic, and the way out is to stop the spread, however we can. In the age of broadband internet, smartphones, and social media, it’s not that hard. Stay home, stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!
Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.
Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
If you’ve wanted to learn programming and web development through Suncoast Developer Guild’s excellent bootcamp, but couldn’t take 12 weeks off work to do so, they’re launching a new program that might work for you. It’s called Night Shift, and it’s their bootcamp program, but as a part-time after-hours course that you can take while keeping your day job!
Suncoast Developer Guild’s 12-week, full-time immersive coding bootcamp is an excellent program. I know the folks at SDG. I’ve done guest presentations at their classes. I’ve met many of their students, and have even worked with their graduates (and yes, by and large, they’re good).
But not everyone can drop their job to devote 12 full-time weeks to a course and cover the costs of tuition. Night Shift allows you to keep a full-time job and still learn take part in SDG’s well-regarded course by stretching the course over 36 weeks, with online lectures on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and lab work in your spare time.
Think of it as more than just learning while still being able to cover the rent or mortgage. Think of it treating your day job as an angel investor in your new software development career.
I can tell you that having programming skills — especially in combination with other talents — is valuable. They can future-proof your work, open opportunities unavailable to many people, and help you weather seismic job market shifts like the ones COVID-19 is bringing about.
And now, the warning. In addition to devoting time to participating the Tuesday and Thursday evening lectures, you should expect to devote a couple of hours on most nights to your lab work. If you’re new to programming, you’re not only going to learn a lot of new concepts; you’ll also have to apply them in order to make working software. You’re also going to have to be creative, because you’ll have to come up with an idea for your end-of-course capstone project.
Simply put: Your spare time will vanish. You will work on a code editor and do Google searches for hours, and you will see them in your dreams. You will spend inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out higher-order functions, wondering why there are so many ways to create objects and functions in JavaScript, trying to understand the difference between == and === and experiencing all the other joys of working with a programming language whose original version had to be cobbled together in 10 days.
On the bright side, if you have a Netflix or videogame addiction, Night Shift is an effective (and productive!) way of quitting those “cold turkey”.
The folks at Suncoast Developers Guild aren’t just capitalizing on our software-driven economy to run a coding school. They’re key players in and supporters of the Tampa Bay tech scene. They support their students beyond just the coursework. If you think you can handle both your job and night classes (and a lot of time on your computer),Night Shift might be your first step into the world of software development.
Find out more in Suncoast Developer Guild’s press release for Night Shift.