New path to take...

The year starts with an article I was not expecting to write.

I have spent just short of four years as a JBoss Technology Evangelist (Integration & BPM) for Red Hat's Middleware Business Unit.

I have told countless stories about products like JBoss Portal, JBoss SOA Platform, JBoss EAP, JBoss messaging (several products), JBoss FSW, JBoss DataVirt, JBoss Fuse, JBoss Developer Studio, JBoss BRMS and JBoss BPM Suite.

I have helped to support multiple product launches across the JBoss middleware portfolio, created the jbpmmigration project and watching it fold into a product. I worked through technology acquisitions like Makara, Polymita, FuseSource, FeedHenry and more as they were folded into the JBoss product portfolio. I have showcased our technologies around the world at a multitude of conferences and events.

New year, new challenges!

I had a lot of fun helping to grow and mentor the JBoss Technology Evangelist team as it grew to four members covering the JBoss middleware products. There will be two remaining, Christina Lin and Thomas Qvarnstrom, both very smart and knowledgeable resources you should be following closely.

I was lucky to be able to spend the last few years working with amazing people in and around Red Hat.

But now the time has come.

 I am leaving... well, to be honest, I am moving onwards in my Red Hat journey.

Last month I was offered and accepted a role within the Integrated Solutions Business Unit, as a Technical Product Marketing Manager.

The role is similar in nature to a JBoss Technology Evangelist, but now look for my focus to move from strictly middleware to application development leveraging integrated solutions involving the full Red Hat portfolio. Think of the tying infrastructure, storage, cloud, OpenShift, mobile and middleware products as full solutions as we move forward into 2016 and beyond.

I am excited to have a new challenge before me and at the same time a bit sad to move on from my love of middleware products (especially rules, events, planning and processes). The future is now, the technology is amazing and you can expect to hear all about it from me soon enough.

Stay tuned, there are more stories to tell... 

JBoss Technology Evangelist - 3 keys to becoming an evangelist

A questions I often get is, "What is it that a JBoss Technology Evangelist does?"

After spending a minute on a short overview, the next question is almost always, "How can I get a role like that?"

Leaving it to the reader to research the background of the word 'evangelist', we will instead outline the key characteristics that every effective JBoss Technology Evangelist has.

JBoss is a community of middleware community projects that are then leveraged by Red Hat to produce a full range of JBoss middleware products. While Red Hat employs Developer Advocates to promote these community projects and foster developer focus on JBoss technologies, it is the products Red Hat sells that receive a more focused attention. This focus is provided for each product by a JBoss Technology Evangelist,

 What is it that they do exactly and what can you do to align your efforts so that your path leads to a role as a JBoss Technology Evangelist?

1. Teaching core

The JBoss Technology Evangelist is worldwide actively promoting, creating and delivering technical marketing assets that drive technical audiences to purchase or influence purchase of Red Hat JBoss Middleware Integration products & services. The JBoss Technology Evangelist will try to focus efforts towards results that are highly leveraged, but may also be required to help in more specialized efforts such as helping close a specific customer. The JBoss Technology Evangelist has significant technical sales enablement responsibility and also helps influence JBoss Middleware product direction by internally communicating requirements and opportunities learned through prospect and customer interactions.

The bottom line is that if you peel back the outer layers of a JBoss Technology Evangelist, the core will always be that of a teacher. They need to have a desire, no a passion, to want to teach what they know. 

This might start with an audience of just one as they mentor a junior colleague and eventually range into audiences of thousands as you present sessions live on stage at an event. This teaching can be structured, such as getting experience as guest teacher in formal schools or universities or it can be through teaching technical classes for an employer. It can be through hosting workshops after working hours to pass on knowledge to your colleagues or it can be as simple as posting articles showing the reader how to do something.  

The bottom line is that if you are not a teacher at heart, then this role is not for you.

2.  Storytelling

A JTE has a proven understanding of what it takes to motivate technical audiences and ability to translate that understanding into impactful execution that converts developer awareness and preference into revenue. 

There is nothing you can teach if you can't bring it across to audiences. This might be to a single person, a small group or large diverse audiences that come from culturally diverse backgrounds around the world.

It is more than presenting slides, it is the ability to bring across your enthusiasm for the topic(s) you are trying to teach. It is not enough to stand up and demo a new technology and talk to a few slides. You need to have a way to understand and reach the audience, reading their reactions, adjusting your story if the audience that turns up is not the one promised when you designed your talk.

You need to practice your storytelling and spend time researching how others do it. Look into styles like PetchaKucha with stores told in 20 slides each auto advanced every 20 seconds, no control by the presenter. Expanding your horizons on how to tell your stories will make you a better storyteller.

You also need to reach more than just an audience sitting right in front of you, so producing content online in the form of articles, video content and maintaining a social media presence are all essential extensions of how you apply storytelling. We tell stories in books, papers, articles and by covering our topics online with social media.

Each form of storytelling requires different abilities and needs to be demonstrated before you can obtain the role of JBoss Technology Evangelist. You should have at least one, if not more, places online where you publish your articles. You should have an online social media presence to push out your content and start discussions around your topics.

Storytelling is an art and you have to constantly refine your approach, but the bottom line is can you reach your audiences and have an impact?

3. Technology skills

A proven ability to create high-quality, compelling technical marketing content proven charismatic ability to energize and excite technical audiences for middleware product offerings.

You can't be a technical evangelist without some sort of skills, but it is not just being able to code. You need to understand the organization required to create content and demos that are both repeatable and easy for your audiences to use.

With the myriad of platforms that your target audiences are using, you need to make your demos accessible and reusable as the main point of these are to replace you doing them yourself on site. Remember, you are the expert and you don't scale!

The technology content you provide has to not only be interesting, cover the topics or issues desired, but it also has to be so easy to use that any attempt to redo what you have just done live on stage does not end in a call to you for help. If you have to answer questions around how to use your content, you have failed.

Previously posted is this article on how to use a framework and template that has been successfully used for JBoss demo projects hosted on JBoss Demo Central for years.

Summary

If you can take these three keys and work on them in your daily roles, you too can reach out for the next opening as a JBoss Technology Evangelist. Remember, you have to teach, you have to be able to tell stories, and you have to leverage your technology skill set in a way that is easy to both understand and consume.

Looking to Automate your business?

This is not the all encompassing guide to becoming a JBoss Technology Evangelist, but in my experience they are the top three things that make someone effective and successful in the role.

They can be learned, they can be refined and if you are serious about moving into the role, they are the three things you should focus on starting right now.

JBoss Technology Evangelist - How to create simple, consistent, repeatable demo projects

This is a series of article that give you a glimpse behind the scenes of how JBoss Technology Evangelists do what they do.

It is not a blueprint, but more of a series of tips and theories that have been accumulated through years of telling the JBoss stories we tell.

This first article will tackle the mystery of how JBoss Technology Evangelists are able to consistently create working, easy to use and repeatable demo projects.

When standing on a stage or doing a live demo in an online session, it all looks so easy but of course there is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to get a project into that perfect looking state.

It is not only the story you want to tell, but the technology in a project that must support that story without failing. As we often have to setup different JBoss technologies it became a necessity to tune some sort of generic framework or template to put these demo project into.

Over the last three years the goal has always been guided by three principles:

• KISS (keep it simple stupid)
• Consistency
• Repeatability

These stem from our supporting anyone who wants to explore and get started with a JBoss technology. Note that while these are listed in an order that does have some significance as to what is most important, they all have to balance against each other.

If one must be weighed more heavily than any when using technology, it is KISS, so you will find that this is followed almost religiously when deciding how to solve anything within this demo project template.

Simple

They need to have a simple setup taking almost no effort to get them started, or more realistic, the least amount of effort as possible.

Each project requires but three steps to get going:

1. Download and unzip the project.
2. Add products to installs directory in the project.
3. Run init.sh (for Unix) or init.bat (for Windows) to install project.

That is it, just watch the install output to continue with the project as you see fit.

This setup also relies on the very smallest or basic set of dependencies that are physically possible for unix & windows based systems; Java and Maven, nothing more than that.

It is all about learning what the project in front of you does, so it must be clear and offer the possibility to explore how it was setup, configured and runs. Based on your feedback over the years, full automation is not desired as it takes the project out of the learning sphere for the user.

There is a balance offered when installing a project with auto configuration and setup, but there are still some steps that allow you to pause, consider and explore what has been done.

Consistent

The only way to be able to jump between all the various JBoss technologies and products is to have some consistency in our demo projects. A customer, partner or interested party needs to be able to recognize a simple and clear form of project setup.

This is done with a simple and clear project template structure:

• docs/
• project documentation and screenshots.
• installs/
• where you place needed JBoss products.
• projects/
• sources for services, clients, or other project based code.
• support/
• all other configuration, setup or other needed files / utilities.
• init.{sh|bat}
• installation scripts to setup project.

That's it, every single time it will look like this.

Repeatable

Nothing is worse than having to provide a demo project and spending a large amount of time on it to only be able to have it run one time. There is often a factor that rushes the completion of a project so that one has little chance to bring some sort of order into it.

This template allows you to develop your project while saving the repeatability of the project. Note that all setup is done in a new directory called target where you can then throw it all away and just setup the project again (with the initial init script).

This is a golden rule, that every demo project it should be repeatable in minutes, if not less.

JBoss demo template project

You have seen amazing demos done by JBoss Technology Evangelists, but you want to create your own awesome demo to convince your friends, team and boss that your project is exactly what the doctor ordered?

This template will provide the tools to setup simple, consistent and easily repeatable demo projects like those found on JBoss Demo Central.

Getting started with this template

1. Download and unzip.
2. Run init.sh to populate a project, see REAME files that are generated for how to use:

$ ./init.sh PROJECTNAME

This will fully populate a project directory with all you need to get started. Just add you project code, modify the init.{sh|bat} to your needs and launch your project.

Here is a sample run of when creating a new project:

$ ./init.sh newproject

Now you can start by adding your project sources to the projects directory and modifying the rest as needed.

Stay tuned for more in the JBoss Evangelist series.