#006 – Developer Evangelism and Lessons from Musical Theatre with Chloe Condon

Chloe Condon, a former musical theatre actress and Hackbright Academy graduate, is a Developer Evangelist at Sentry. Perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet who has been in “Hairspray”, “Xanadu”, and “Jerry Springer: the Opera,” she is passionate about bringing people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face, yes, she’s the young woman giving the awkward thumbs up in the “What It’s Like to be a Woman at a Tech Conference” article (which she also wrote). A quick Google search of her will provide you with getting started with Docker videos, theatre reviews, tech blogs, and videos of her singing—enjoy!

In this episode, Derek and Ron chat with Chloe about her role as a developer evangelist as well as her background in musical theatre and what insights can be gleaned from comparing and contrasting tech and theatre as industries. Chloe also shares a high-level overview of Sentry, the cross-platform crash reporting and aggregation platform.

Where to find Chloe Condon

@ChloeCondon on Twitter

On the web at https://medium.com/@chloecondon

Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter.

Follow @ardentdev

Transcript

Ron: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast. I’m Ron Smith.

Derek: And I’m Derek Hatchard. Today we’re talking with Chloe Condon. Chloe is a former musical theater actress and Hackbright Academy graduate and she is now a developer evangelist at Sentry. She is perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet. I think the only one that I know who has been in Hairspray is Xanadu and Jerry Spinger the opera. She is passionate about bring people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face she is the woman giving the thumbs up in the what it’s like to be a woman at a tech conference article, which she wrote. I found that on Medium and there might be other places, Chloe can correct me in a second. And a quick google search for her will tell you that she has a series of getting started with docker videos. You find some theater reviews that she’s on, tech blogs and I think the hilarious videos of her singing after. So Chloe welcome to the show.

Chloe: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Derek: So Chloe, you’re a developer evangelist at a company called Sentry and some of us have bumped into plenty of developer evangelists in our time. But for those listening who don’t really know what that role is. Could you really unpack it for us? What is it? What do your days look like? Tell us a little bit about that experience is like.

Chloe: Sure, so it’s kind of funny. Usually when I tell people who aren’t familiar with the role they say “Oh is that a religious thing”? And my answer is usually well in a sense. But basically I call myself an extroverted engineer. The title I go by is developer evangelist. Other people go by DevRel, developer advocate. There’s a lot of different flavors and varieties of us. So personally I got into the evangelism space because I have a non-traditional background. I come from theater world. And when we were presenting our projects at Hackbright I discovered pretty quickly like oh wow nobody likes to do public speaking. This is very interesting. So that’s kind of part of what I do. So oftentimes I will go to conferences and I will speak about various thought leadership topics. Right now I’m doing a lot of stuff around the error blogging you know metrics space, in my previous role I did a lot of