What’s like being a Technology Evangelist?

Well I have been asked by many this question and then I though let me blog the answer so that next time anyone asking me this, I can redirect them to this page and increase my page hits ;)

It’s a big story of how I wished and dreamt of being an Evangelist, to tell in short: While I was doing my masters I got this craze of being an Evangelist while my classmates wanted to be Software Engineer, Business Analyst, Test & Quality manger, PM etc.

In one of my job interviews I was asked “What’s your dream role?”
I said “I want to be an Evangelist”
He smiled and said “Why and what do you think an Evangelist do?”
That was the point from where I started finding answer to this question:

- A Evangelist (E)is an inspiration for many
- E motivates people to gets their hand dirty into the technology/product
- E is a very close to salesmen but they will shares the facts of the product and technology with the masses
- E plays around the technology and then shares the learning with the world through a blog post, SNS like twitter or in respective technical forum.
- E works closely with the developer community.
- E is a link between a product engineering team and the outside community using and developing code based on the product.
- E shares the best practices and indentify the bugs around the product/technology
- E is a good predictor and has the perfect pulse which feels the market trends.
- E talks in the camps, meetups, and conferences and tries to reach out to max audience.
- E develops demos around the technology and judges the strengths and its weaknesses
- E has to answer all the technical questions and at times have to sit with the developers debugging the code and resolve technical issues.

Evangelist is born to learn, speak, share, sell and inspire the masses towards the technology or product they are passionate about.

My Grandma fails to understand all this and thus for here Evangelist mean being paid for doing social service in Information technology.
When my dad gets to hear a compliment, “I love when your daughter talks technology” then my dad in his heart would be saying “I would have loved to see her as a great classical dancer then a Technology Evangelist”.
So here’s my answer to my dad “I enjoy being an Evangelist, this birth as a Technology Evangelist but promise in my next birth as a classical dance Evangelist”.