It’s been about 8 months since I joined Flightcontrol as the Developer Advocate. Flightcontrol is a developer-first platform that lets you deploy and run applications on your own AWS account without having to use AWS yourself. It’s a little bit different from a startup I might have expected to join or start myself, as the focus is on DevOps, platform engineering, and AWS.

The position I have is probably a little bit different from what other people with a Developer Advocate title do - I’m really focused on customer success, and making sure that users who get started with Flightcontrol can deploy their projects! A lot of this is writing docs for the Flightcontrol web site, but a decent part of this is helping out our users directly on Slack or Discord. Usually if they run into a somewhat generalized problem, it’s a good candidate for the docs.

This position puts me much closer to the users than my previous developer educator position at Twilio (employee and contract), where users reached out to support first, and then things filtered into the docs team for action later. I also tend to identify a lot better with the Flightcontrol users than the Twilio users - I wasn’t the ideal customer for most Twilio products, so it was hard to figure out what the actual pain points were.

In addition to docs and customer success, I also enjoy being user zero for a lot of our new features, usually so I can write up a docs page, and ship them in our changelog. I’ve also gotten to attend some great conferences, such as React Miami, Write the Docs, Deep Dish Swift, and the last Strange Loop and talk to folks about Flightcontrol.

As always, reach out to me here, or over email, or on Twitter/X/Whatever as @jefflinwood