Michael Hausenblas - Academia to Dev Advocate at AWS, Red Hat #55
Michael started his career in academia as a PhD academic researcher.
These days, Michael is a Developer Advocate at AWS. He is part of the container service team, focusing on container security. Michael shares his experience around cloud native infrastructure and apps through demos, blog posts, books, and public speaking engagements as well as contributes to open source software.
Before AWS, Michael worked at Red Hat, Mesosphere,
MapR and in two research institutions in Ireland and Austria.
Episode Summary
“I found that industry overall is way less stressful than academic research. If it’s weekend or if I’m on PTO or whatever, I’m offline.“
“I’m a developer advocate. Basically, its kind of like a guinea pig. We’re the first ones who get to play around with software and give feedback. It’s like, the UX here is great or here the UX sucks. So we are guinea pigs representing for the customer.”
“I just love to be on site with customers discussing things, trying things. The greatest part is being with actual users of the software that you’re producing and going over that in 400 level details.”
—Michael Hausenblas
Key Milestones
- What led Michael into academia and academic research at the start of his career?
- After about 4 years doing research focused work, Michael left for a startup and took a role doing pre-sales work. That’s a pretty far cry from doing research. What led to that change and what went into his decision process?
- What does a sales engineer do?
- Now Michael is in a dev advocate role, how does that compare with being a sales engineer?
- What attracted Michael to more public-facing roles like developer advocacy?
- Who is Ted Dunning? And why was he such a big influence for Michael?
Additional Resources
Connect with Ted Dunning on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/teddunning/
Support Us at Develomentor - https://develomentor.com/support-us/
