The Art of Landing a DevRel Role | daily.dev's Francesco Ciulla

**Nathan Harvey** (0:00)
Hi, this is Nathan Harvey. I'm a lead developer advocate for Dora and Google Cloud. Dora is the DevOps research and assessment group. And as you may have seen in the Dev Interrupted newsletter, we need your help this year with the Accelerate State of DevOps survey. This survey is brought to you by Dora, Google Cloud and LinearB. The survey itself takes just 15 minutes to fill out, and your anonymous input helps the entire industry understand how to make the software world better. There are no right or wrong answers. We just want to hear about how you and your team develop and deliver software. And you know, considering some of the questions might just help your team identify some areas to improve starting tomorrow.
You can fill out the survey at bit.ly slash 2023, Sodor Sponsors. We'll put a link in the show notes.
Really appreciate you taking those 15 minutes to share your insights with the entire industry.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:08)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host, Conor Bronsdon.
And today, I'm delighted to be joined by Francesco Ciulla, Developer Advocate at daily.dev. Francesco, welcome to the show.

**Francesco Ciulla** (1:19)
Thank you so much, Conor, for inviting me. And I'm super excited to be a guest in a podcast. So I am a Developer Advocate at Daily Dev, and I'm also very active on social media, especially Twitter and YouTube.
And yes, I'm super excited to share something about me. Let's see if this can be helpful for someone. So thank you.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:38)
I think we can manage to make it a little helpful for a few folks, particularly because you have a ton of experience both as a guest and a host yourself. You had a circuitous past of becoming a Dev Advocate, and you didn't really start your career as a programmer until you were 32, despite knowing how to code.
But in short order, you complete your CS degree, got hired by the European Space Agency. To your point about Twitter, you took it from zero to 35,000 followers in just seven months. Today you have nearly 170,000 followers.
And you've also leveraged that to start a successful YouTube channel talking about the issues facing devs and the tooling, the processes, everything that makes developers successful. One of the things that I really loved and that caught my eye first about you is that when you were starting that YouTube channel, you interviewed 100 tech leaders in 100 days. You've now interviewed nearly 200 And this has all been accomplished at really lightning speed. You've been in the industry for less than 10 years, really five years here now professionally. So today we want to give our community that opportunity to learn from you, like you mentioned, where you've done this incredible work community building at daily.dev and elsewhere. And I know you have advice for folks who are either trying to talk to developers, be DevRels, or looking to replicate some of that career success themselves. So I think this is a great opportunity for those folks who are looking to level up their external promotion game and their ability to kind of do this sort of stuff and the content creation side. So let's start with how you got there first.
I understand you were a volleyball coach before you made the switch to programming and DevRel full time. What prompted that career change?

**Francesco Ciulla** (3:13)
Well, that was a great introduction. So I always loved computers. My first computer was a Commodore 64, but we don't have time to hear all my story, but just to give you an idea.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:23)
Classic.

**Francesco Ciulla** (3:24)
I was also the first person in my class to have the internet connection. So when I was making 12, so it's very hard to explain to someone. Also what internet is, but let's go fast forward. So I became a volleyball coach at 15 and I've always been that. So for 17, almost 20 years.
But in the meanwhile, I always loved math and science we can say. Maybe because I have two parents who are both teachers. One is a math teacher and the other one is a gym instructor. So probably I'm getting something from both of them.
But I found that staying at PC for coding, it was super boring. So I preferred, of course, to stay in a gym. So except for games, this could make me sit for a lot of hours. But coding for me, I always found it like very, very good. So that was a blocker for me. That's why I say no, I can't do this for a living. This is way before Twitter and developer advocacy.