Davey Shafik has continued his series of posts with advice about growing a community around your product/open source libraries. In his first post he talked more about how to engage the community. In this latest post he talks about the role of "evangelists" in community relations (and why he dislikes the term).

The role of the Community Builder is to sell you on the idea of the company and the product. Not necessarily to sell you the product. Often times what we’re selling are not bought without some decision making process behind them, so a sale is not going to happen then and there anyway. Provide the education, and build the trust, and the sale will happen.

Davey then talks about why he hates the term "evangelist" and how it seems to relate more to "fanatic" than "advocate". He then gets into what he sees as the role of an advocate, including the role honesty plays and selling the customer on the right product. He then turns it around and talks about the other side of the role - advocating for the customer back to the rest of the company. Finally, he talks about two other kinds of advocacy that should also be included in the role: advocating for the community/their input and for yourself (finding a product you can be passionate about selling).

The Free the Geek podcast has posted an episode where host Matthew Setter talks with Jack Skinner about the life of a developer evangelist.

In this episode I have a fireside chat about what it’s like to live the life of a developer evangelist with Jack Skinner, otherwise known as @developerjack, whilst he was at the first BuzzConf. He talked with me about the crazy hours, random locations, shared some stories from the road, such as having a conference call whilst walking down the boarding gate to catch a flight.

If you don’t, yet, know Jack, he’s a developer evangelist at MYOB, which is an Australian Software Accounting firm, the market leader I believe. He shared so much gold in this chat that I’m itching to share it with you.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3. If you enjoy the show and want to keep up with more episodes, be sure to subscribe to their feed and check out some of the archives linked from the main page.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted the latest in their special conference-recorded "It's the Booze Talking" series of episodes (this time it was at ZendCon 2014). In this new episode Cal Evans talks with guests Jeremy Mikola, Mike Stowe, Derick Rethans and Beth Tucker-Long.

They discuss the life of a developer evangelist including travel experiences, what it's like working conferences, and how it has an impact on their family life. They also all share their worst travel story in the course of their work and what they really enjoy about their roles.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show and want to hear more episodes like this (or their usual community interviews), be sure to subscribe to their feed

On 7PHP.com today they've posted the latest in their series of community interviews, this time with Maarten Balliauw, a technical evangelist with JetBrains, maker of the popular PHP IDE PHPStorm.

In this edition I talk with Maarten Balliauw who is the technical evangelist at Jetbrains (the php ide PHPStorm is one its product you can recall). @maartenballiauw is of those few programmers who is indulged closely with both PHP and .NET worlds - meaning this interview will also have questions on both worlds. I now invite you to learn from his experience and get to know his personality.

They talk some about Maarten's background in PHP, some of the "good" and "bad" he sees in the language and some of the tools he uses daily to get his development done. There's also some suggestions of resources, tools and frameworks he finds useful. There's also a big chunk of the interview dedicated to his current work with JetBrains and some of his previous work with Microsoft and related technologies.

Rafael Dohms has a recent post to his site, a republishing of an article of his from a previous php|architect magazine suggesting that we, as users of PHP, are all evangelists for the language and its community.

Every PHP Developer is at core a PHP evangelist, someone who is ready to raise the PHP flag and defend it. This does not mean your answer to everything is PHP, as a true evangelist you know the strengths and shortcomings of your own language, and when to just say “don’t use it”, but you are also ready to defend it and prove its worthiness when its misjudged or just plainly misunderstood.

He includes an example from the Brazilian PHP community, an incident where a local TV newscast got their facts wrong and noted that "most things ending in .php were a virus" and should be avoided. The PHP community, of course, got up in arms about it and, thankfully, the news station realized their mistake and made a retraction about their comments.

So why the tale? Well this is what being a PHP Developer is to me, its more then just being a member, its like a family. And like any family you need to be there for the bad and the good, and watch out for each other. That means you must really embrace the language, learn about it.

On 7php.com there's a new interview with a member of the PHP community - this time it's with Rafael Dohms, formerly of the Brazilian PHP community, he now lives in Amsterdam and is active in the European PHP scene.

In this edition I talked with Rafael Dohms ( @rdohms ), The Brazilian PHP Evangelist. He is to the PHP Community and specially to The Brazilian PHP Community, what Brazilian Ronaldo is to the Football World! He has founded two PHP user-groups and is seen as an AWESOME active member of the PHP Community; he is also an active contributor to some conspicuous open-source PHP projects as you will found out for yourself in this interview. Rafael is very passionate about helping out fellow developers generously; you can read more about him on his personal website/blog.

In his answers, Rafael talks about things like:

• Some of his first experiences with PHP (including a CounterStrike clan website)
• His recommendation of the book "The Art of Readable Code"
• His favorite conference (hint: It's in Chicago each year)
• His recommendation for less arguments in the community
• Thoughts on PHP 5.4 and its features
• Some of his experiences with both starting and being a member of various PHP user groups

You can read the full interview here.

New on his blog today Brian Swan has an interview with Zach Owens, a technical evangelist with Microsoft, about his involvement in Microsoft's SQL Server, Azure, IIS and PHP projects.

I work closely with the product groups developing SQL Server, SQL Azure and IIS understanding what features and changes are coming the next versions and what impact this may have on developers. Then I get share what I’ve learned by blogging, presenting at conferences, building demos and labs, and by working directly with developers.

Zach talks about how he got started working with PHP on a project for a local business - a database for a non-profit organization and what he learned from the experience.