The Principal Developer Advocate Paradox: Scaling Impact Without Burnout
As a Principal Developer Advocate, you don’t own the roadmap, control the pipeline, set budgets, or dictate campaigns—yet your work influences all of them. Y...
Posts by Year
2025
2024
Hosting a (DevOpsDays) Tech Conference
In August 2024, we pulled off the first-ever DevOpsDays Halifax, and wow, what an experience! As one of the organizers, I’ve got a ton of stories, lessons le...
2023
Connecting the dots: Let’s get ship done!
Today I’m joining Harness as a Principal Developer Advocate. Harness is a complete software delivery platform whose mission is to enable the 30M+ software de...
Going Beyond ‘Do You Know Of Any Open Positions?’
I’m looking for a job in $SomeField. Do you know of any open positions?
Identity Crisis - A Tale of DevRel
Do you identify yourself as a developer advocate?
How to install PostgreSQL client psql on macOS, Linux (Ubuntu), and Windows?
The installation process for the PostgreSQL client, psql, may vary depending on your operating system. Here are the general steps for some popular operating ...
MeetUps - an underrated tech job board
Are you trying to find your first job in IT? Are you trying to switch to a better (paying) tech job? If you have tried to reach out to a professional on Link...
Markdown, Asciidoc, or reStructuredText - a tale of docs-as-code
Who writes the developer documentation for your product? During the early days of my tech career, I worked on a database replication product at IBM. My immed...
2022
Why are we paying these folks - a tale of DevRel
I don’t have a technical background, so I’m looking to apply for a project manager, product owner, or developer advocate type of role.
ripgrep - an extremely fast grep alternative
If you’ve used grep to search for text or patterns in files, you’ll love ripgrep - a command-line utility tool written in Rust. By default, ripgrep will resp...
Let’s NOT have a beer
For the first time, I won a major raffle at a recent conference. However, I had to give the prize back since it was a beer dispenser and I don’t drink. If yo...
StackConf 2022 Conference - Reflection
Last month I travelled across the pond to attend and give a talk at StackConf EU 2022 - an open-source infrastructure-focused conference. After two virtual e...
Coach yourself - how long should the resume be?
In the last 8 years, I have reviewed over 800 resumes as part of my free resume review service on LinkedIn. I’ve also followed dozens of hiring managers and ...
Principles and patterns - A tale of infrastructure as code
A few years ago, I wrote about common objections to infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and how stability comes from making changes. If your leadership is now convi...
Dewan learns Kafka - Let’s talk to Kafka
In this week’s blog, I try to make sense of Apache Kafka® ProducerAPI and ConsumerAPI. In an effort to do so, I use a simple Java program to produce some mes...
Dewan learns Kafka - architecture principles and recent changes
Last week, I learned the basics of Kafka and continued my learning journey this week with Kafka’s architecture principles and issues around stability and sca...
Dewan learns Kafka - Basics
I am NOT a Kafka expert. The fact is, I’ve just started learning this topic. I believe that the best way to learn something is to learn in public. In this fi...
2021
10 steps to a better Dockerfile
The journey to the cloud typically starts with containerizing your apps. One of the first challenges developers face is writing the blueprint for those conta...
Dear tech recruiters,
Are Developer Advocates the same as Developers? How do a Project Manager, Program Manager, and Product Manager differ in their roles? How about a UX Designer...
How to write an amazing resume summary statement
Seeking an entry-level software engineering role to begin my career in a challenging environment.
How to get involved with Open Source
Recently, a student reached out to me and asked: Could you guide me in terms of how I can get started with contributing to open source projects?
7 OpenShift Questions and 8 Answers
Few years ago, I gave an IBM-internal talk on OpenShift. During my favorite part of the talk (the Q&A), a number of good questions came up. I took away s...
2020
Stability comes from making changes - A tale of infrastructure as code
When mentioning code, it’s commonly understood as application code. What about the system your application runs on? Infrastructure as Code(IaC) applies the s...
How to make a GitHub issue creator follow your rules?
One of my friend sets up build infrastructure for his team and the process is initiated from a GitHub issue. Although the issue description states the requir...
Five reasons why YOU should consider a career in the software industry
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future (Yogi Berra)