Kirk's experience of technical glitches

Kirk Pepperdine: I had one failure where I just couldn't get the screen to work on my laptop and I had all my demos set up on it. It was a very demo-heavy talk, so it was a real problem.

We had a late start and then things just went downhill from there, and there was nothing I could do about it at that point. It was just a case of apologizing to the audience. That was a bad one. I had another one where we just couldn't get the projector to recognize my laptop. I had no slides and they were working really hard trying to fix it. I said, "Okay, I'm just not going to have enough time for this talk if it keeps going this way."

I talked without the slides. I was hand-waving and making shapes. I actually got a lot of positive feedback on that one. Everyone was sort of upset when the projector started working and I could return to slides! They said the explanations were clear because I wasn't relying on the slides at that point in time.

Geertjan Wielenga: Imagine that you're a student at a college or university and you find this whole developer advocacy story interesting. How would you get started in this?

Kirk Pepperdine: If you want to be an advocate towards developers, the first thing you have to do is be a developer. If you want to be accepted by developers, you have to be a person who they respect. You have to be someone who has put the miles in.

You need to contribute, whether it's contributing to open source or not. Apache NetBeans is a great project. There are a lot of advocates around the Apache NetBeans platform, but they're putting the miles in in terms of helping the project to move forwards.

I guess, to be authentic, you want to be talking about what you do because that's what's going to make you accepted. That's how you're going to get your message across most effectively. Again, you need to develop street cred. You can't be a marketing person and be accepted by this particular group of people.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you travel a lot? What are the pros and cons of that? How do you deal with the side effects of that?