Ep57: Developer Advocacy Realities + Conditional Logic in Cypher

In this episode of Breaktime Tech Talks, I share an inside look into developer advocacy, discuss the highs and lows of the role, and review new features in the Cypher query language.

Highlights:

• 🔎What it’s really like to be a developer advocate: the good, the bad, and the “meh”
• 🧗🏼‍♀️Common challenges: overwhelm, travel fatigue, balancing diverse responsibilities, and learning to say “no”
• 🏢Why developer advocacy is often a “departmental orphan” and how that brings unique value
• 🏆The rewarding aspects: variety, constant learning, connecting with the developer community, playing to your strengths, and prioritizing high-impact work
• 👩🏽‍💻Updates on Jennifer’s current projects, including work on Spring AI Advisors and an upcoming conference appearance
• ⚙️A deep dive into Christoffer Bergman’s blog post on Cypher Conditional Queries
•  🎊What’s new in Cypher 25: the WHEN THEN ELSE syntax and how it improves query readability and maintenance

Every tech role has its ups and downs, but I've found my place. Don’t miss my insights on Cypher’s latest features and stay tuned for more updates on my projects and events. Thanks for listening, and happy coding!

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
You are listening to the BreaktimeTech Talks podcast, a bite-sized tech
podcast for busy developers where we'llbriefly cover technical topics, new
snippets, and more in short time blocks.
I'm your host, Jennifer Reif, anavid developer and problem solver
with special interest in datalearning and all things technology.

(00:25):
I am testing a new microphonetoday, let's see how this goes.
As with everything, thereare positives and negatives.
I've had a few questions recentlyabout what developer advocates do and
whether I enjoy it, and I often rattleoff a few random bits in response.
Today.
I'll hit the highlights, the good, thebad, the meh parts to hopefully give you
a perspective from many different angles.

(00:47):
Then I'm a bit of a geek about data anddatabases if you haven't already learned
by now, and I was excited to learn alittle bit more about Cypher and upcoming
features in this blog I talk about today.
First, let's talk aboutdeveloper advocacy.
I always, when somebody asks me, do youwant the good news or the bad news first?
I always start with the bad news.

(01:08):
let's start there so wecan end on a high note.
First off though, Iwanna add a disclaimer.
I love my job, the tech, the content, thepeople, both that I meet and work with.
I love being a developer advocate.
This feels like a placethat I'm challenged.
I can learn.
I enjoy.
Now, it's not to say that there's not somestruggles, even with things that I love.

(01:31):
But overall, I consider this ahigh net positive for the job.
Let's start with the bad newsfirst is it's very easy to get
overwhelmed as a developer advocate.
It's easy to take on toomuch, to try to help out too
much, or to do too many tasks.
There are so many opportunities comingat developer advocates, at least from

(01:55):
my position and where we are right now,and lots of different types of tasks.
Hey, can you add to this?
Can you contribute here?
Can you respond to this?
Can you pick up and review this?
Can you, this and that?
And you have to pick and choose whatyou can produce high quality results on,
what is the most impactful for your job,because after all, developer advocates

(02:17):
are here to help other developers learntechnology and improve their solutions
and their understanding of things.
That means that I have to pickand choose the tasks that are most
helpful to my audience, that arethe highest impact to those people
and help them do things better.

(02:37):
Now the other thing thatcan be good, can be bad.
a double-edged sword is thenext thing on the list, which is
necessity of getting good at no.
going back to the previous point,you have a lot coming at you.
There's constant requests and asks,and it's a constant struggle for me
personally to find the balance pointof what you can fit into the schedule

(02:59):
and produce high quality output.
But this is also a bit of a movingtarget too, because seasons in your
life change, things in personalor other things going on change.
And you might be able to take on morethings at certain points in time, it's
a constant moving target for can Ihandle this extra thing, yes or no?
Do I think I'll be able tohandle this in three months?

(03:21):
it's a hard balancing act, but it alsoforces you to get good at drawing some
lines and some boundaries and figuringout, I can reasonably take this on.
I reasonably cannot take on this thingor any more things after this point.
The next thing.
Sometimes you end up with some gruelingtravel, whether it is too much or

(03:43):
there's a lot of admin that goesalong with it that gets old fast.
it does have its perks.
I like traveling for work, butthere's a lot of other things
that go along with it too.
Things like exhaustion, weird sleep andeating schedules, having to book all
the travel, run the expense reports.
Diet and exercise is really hard tomaintain when you're on the road.
And then realize too that when you'retraveling for business, you're traveling

(04:08):
for work, so there's a little bit of adifferent mindset when you go into things.
You, need to still get your work done eventhough you're traveling, which is often
hard when you're in planes and you're inhotels and you've got weird schedules and
odd meetings and things are all shaken up.
You have to still fit workin there and still be getting
things accomplished as well.
The other thing about Devereux is it'soften an orphan within an organization.

(04:33):
This will depend on your companyand the individual preferences, but
advocates often end up wearing a lotof hats, and it's hard to put them
under a single department umbrella.
We aren't typicallyresponsible for making sales.
We are usually more technicalthan marketing or community teams.
Things like events andtraining and et cetera.

(04:53):
We often also handle activities beyondtraditional development and support.
This makes us the odd duck out, butit also brings a lot of value to
both internal and external audiences.
Okay, there was all the bad.
Now, the meh thing is mostly forme, the administration of it.
And this is a necessary evil.
Because we tend to operate in alot of different spheres, there

(05:16):
are some processes that end upimpacting us differently than
other parts of the business.
because we end up travelingand doing a lot of content.
There's a lot of administration andrules and regulations for various
external bloggers when you submitcontent and all sorts of odd things.
Now the good things,which is my favorite part.

(05:36):
First of all, the good thing aboutthis is there's so much variety.
There are so many diverseopportunities for developing and
educating people about technology.
You also get to learn along the way, to godeeper on understanding in certain topics
so that you can better contribute and helpothers understand those things as well.

(05:58):
It's always good to develop yourown education and then to give
back and share that with otherdevelopers and other technical folks.
Now I mentioned travel as a negative.
It's also a positive.
I get to meet a ton of different peoplewith a variety of backgrounds and
experiences who are dealing with allsorts of different developer challenges,

(06:18):
creative ideas, and inventive solutions.
It's really cool to hear the thingsthat people are struggling with, the
things they often have questions about,or the things that they've solved in
a variety of different ways, and it'sjust really exciting and inspiring to
hear their stories and their strugglesand the things they're dealing with.
When they have a lot of questions orI keep hearing the same question pop

(06:40):
up from lots of different people, thattells me, Hey, there's a gap here.
This is something I might need tolook at and see if I can understand
better and help share some of thethings that I've learned through those.
The next thing along with the overwhelmingvariety is that this job is never dull.
There's always something you can pick.
Even if you have a choice between15 different things, and you don't

(07:03):
like two of them, well then focus onhigh impact things that you do like.
Or say, you do have one thing that'shigh impact you don't care for.
Get that one thing done and then focuson five other things that you love.
There's a lot of things you get to choosefrom and you can stack those priorities.
Now, another thing I love is thatI get to play to my strengths.

(07:23):
There are some things that areabsolutely required as there are
with every job, but I can tailor mycontent, my development and approach
to fit me, my audience, and whathappens to be going on in the industry.
Sometimes I have to get a little bitcreative to do it because some of the
topics may not be up my alley or I'mcoming at it from a new perspective
or something, but that also givesme a different perspective on those

(07:45):
topics because I might have somethingof an outsider's look on things.
But I do think that being able toplay to my strengths improves the
overall results for the thingsthat I do, the content that I make.
Last but not least, is I get to focusmy energy where I'm most impactful.
I love tech blogging, as an example.

(08:06):
While I love presenting and podcastingand business travel and whatever else
might go along with this job, I havea specific passion for tech blogging.
And while I sometimes need to presentcontent in other ways, I can lean in on
the avenues where I'm most passionate,which comes across to audiences, right?
And in my opinion, improvesthe success for my approach and

(08:28):
the audience's understanding.
I do have some other updates outsideof developer advocacy talk, so I'll
just hit those really quickly now.
I am working on an applicationand blog posts, hopefully
plural, on spring AI advisors.
So be looking for thatin the coming weeks.
And then I'm also prepping fora conference dev2next next week.
So if you're in the Coloradoarea, feel free to check that out.

(08:51):
I will be there, and I'm reallyexcited to join the event.
The content piece I want to outline todayis called Cypher Conditional Queries.
It's by Christoffer Bergman.
This is an excellent blog post.
I'm a bit of a geekabout data and databases.
I like query languages, and one ofthe things that I really loved about
this blog post is I learned somethingabout what's coming out in Cypher,

(09:13):
something we couldn't do before,but I also learned more about how
Cipher works and how it's designed.
First off, the article starts withthat it's a declarative language,
which means that imperative constructsthings like for and while loops,
and if constructs aren't included.
Cypher's alternatives are things likereduce and case to help provide some

(09:36):
of those pseudo conditional abilities.
However, sometimes those traditionalimperative programming language
constructs, like wanting one typeof processing for X and something
else for Y are cleaner and easier.
So this is changing now in Cypher 25.
The article walks through an existingpre Cypher 25 example of how you

(09:59):
would go about doing this typeof processing, something like a,
for while loop and if statements.
And then, because Cypher doesn't have theif else, if else, you have to process all
those conditional statements every time.
Plus the syntax is verbose.
In an if and if else, you only processone piece of that block typically, and

(10:20):
then you drop out of the rest of it.
That's not the case in Cypherbecause it is, declarative.
You have to step through all of those.
It's separate if blocks andit goes through all of them,
and that's frustrating.
The new syntax is called WHEN THEN ELSE,and it's wrapped in a CALL subquery.
The article walks through the new syntaxwith a couple of additional cleaner

(10:43):
features from Cypher 25 to go froma 59 line query to a 51 line query.
Now that still may seem long, butwhen you think about maintenance and
readability and looking at the twoqueries, it is much more improved.
And you're removing eight linesof clutter code, things that were
intermediate processing or justsyntax that had to be there in order

(11:06):
to pass results onto the next thing.
That all gets cleaned up, and it's mucheasier to read because most programmers
understand those imperative constructs.
Then the article tests the new syntaxwith the original problem, which was to
reorder a linked list and move an itemfrom one place in the list to another,

(11:26):
maintaining all those relationships.
I really loved this article because itstepped through each phase, explained
along the way and demonstrated notjust the syntax update, but how or why
the change is better for developers.
I also appreciated the quick call out toAPOC where this capability is available.
But now we have officially and hopefullynicer support within Cypher itself.

(11:50):
Every role has its perks and slogs,but I rattled off a few of the
low, mid, and high points for meabout being a developer advocate.
I also find query languages fascinating,and I was really excited to read
Christoffer Bergman's blog post onthe new Cypher conditional features.
Thanks for listening and happy coding.