Moving Forward: KendoUI

Just over 2 years ago, I left the corporate life for the independent life. At that time I didn’t have many opportunities for work in my area and moving in to independent consulting was basically dropped in my lap. I couldn’t say no and I’m glad I didn’t. it’s been some of the best (and worst) parts of my career so far. But I’ve always left open the possibility that the right company would come along and make me an offer that was too good to turn down. And… well – you get the idea.

Beginning January 8th, 2013, I will be a Developer Advocate (f.k.a **Evangelist) with the KendoUI team at Telerik!**

**
**

KendoUI And Community

I’ve been a fan of KendoUI for quite some time now. I’ve used this UI framework in a handful of client apps and have actively advocated for other clients to use it. That’s part of what makes this position easy for me to step in to. It’s a product I believe in and have been recommending to people already. KendoUI has also been a huge community advocate and supporter on many fronts. I’ve seen them sponsor a number of conferences, user groups and other community efforts. This fits perfectly with my desire to give back and help the community move forward as well.

The role of ‘evangelist’ is somewhat new to me, though. I’ve unofficially and some-what officially held responsibilities and roles that are directly related to that of an evangelist, with previous jobs. My continuous efforts in helping the software community through blogging, Stack Overflow answers, screencasts, speaking, training, and everything else I do is also going to play right in to this position’s responsibilities.

One of the great opportunities that I have with this position, is the opportunity to define “developer evangelist” for myself and within the KendoUI team. My skills, my reputation, my experience set won’t be pushed in to a standard mold for “evangelism”. I won’t be asked to be a marketing person in disguise. I won’t turn this blog into a KendoUI advertisement. I’ll be reaching out to the community, doing the work I love, helping and working with tools and technologies that I love. And I’ll continue to model my own interactions with the community after some of the great evangelists and community leaders that I’ve looked up to for many years now.

Blogging With LosTechies And KendoUI

My blogging at LosTechies won’t take a back seat any more than it has in the last 2 years. It also won’t become a Kendo advertising ground.

I made a commitment 2 years ago to not let this blog become a marketing tool for my consulting and other services, and I kept that commitment. There’s an occasional link and reference to my products and services in my blog posts, but only when it makes sense – where it adds value to the post, provides more information for those wanting to dig deeper, etc. I will continue down the same path with blogging here, while working for KendoUI as well. I may make reference to Kendo at times, but only where it makes sense for the content that I’m writing about.

In addition to blogging with LosTechies, though, I’ll also be writing for the KendoUI blog – which I’ve already started doing. I’ve written a rather large post on integrating Backbone and KendoUI already, with a bit of MarionetteJS thrown in for good measure. There’s a lot more to write about the combination of these tools, though. I’ll be continuing down this path soon, and will be heading down many many more paths as well.

Moving Forward

One of the effects of this is that I will no longer be taking on consulting work with clients. My current client work will largely be wrapped up within December of 2012 so that I can focus on my new role starting in January. This is probably the thing that I will miss the most. I’ve very much enjoyed working with some amazing clients over the last 2 years. The friends I’ve made, the contributions I’ve been able to make to the community, and tools and technologies that I’ve been able to use – it’s all been great and I will miss that. But this position will allow me to expand on my existing passion and desire to move the community forward. I’ll be reaching out in to new and different technologies, frameworks and dev stacks – all with the focus on JavaScript.

I won’t be focused solely on Backbone related tools anymore, though this will certainly remain a part of what I do. MarionetteJS won’t be going away by any means, and I don’t intend on moving away from it. I will be adding to my experience and understanding by looking at and working with other tools and technologies. And that makes me all kinds of happy and excited.