Timothée Bourguignon

Josh Long found his place in the world as a developer advocate with the Spring team... and other things I learned recording his DevJourney

Tim Bourguignon -

This week, I published Josh Long's #DevJourney story on my eponym Podcast: Software developer's Journey. Among many other things, here are my main personal takeaways:

  • Right from the get go, Josh described his love for software development as a "pain". Coding is fun, coding is what he loves, but developing software has only partially to do with coding... especially when you are searching for a job right in the DOT.COM burst. So his beginnings were torn between joy of coding and pain of the rest.
  • For about 10 years, Josh did the job, but didn't really enjoy it. He learned a lot, going from one startup to the next. He wore many hats, enjoyed the flexibility of startups to get his hands dirty, but it is when he joined the Spring team that his professional life really flourished.
  • After a while, Josh realized that getting to production is the only thing that matters. We are not paid to write code. We are paid to create solutions to customer problems.
  • Josh came to working for Spring via his open-source contributions. He was already visible since he had been speaking publicly for years, but on his own time at that point. He then got approached by the Spring leadership to do advocacy and has been loving the Freedom of being an advocate at Spring for the past 10 years.
  • Developer advocacy IS communication. Talking WITH the community, of the product and the experience of the users.
  • Josh is full of admiration for the dependency management of Spring Boot, and still loves to participate in the development of plugins and integrations for it even though it is not his day-job per se.
  • Josh hopes that coding will become a commodity, something everyone can do

Advice:

  • Don't hesitate to join our industry, it is fantastic, come change the world
  • Embrace the Spring community, it's one of the friendliest communities out there

Quotes:

  • "I love software, I would do it for free if I could"
  • "They could have punished me and said 'if you work more than 40 hours, we're going to take some money from you', but I still would have worked more (for Spring), it is so much fun"
  • "Young people, with their imagination can literally change our industry"
  • "My superpower is: 'I don't know much, but I know who knows'"

Thanks Josh for sharing your story with us!

You can find the full episode and the shownotes on devjourney.info.

Did you listen to his story?

  • What did you learn?
  • What are your personal takeaways?
  • What did you find particularly interesting?