Dan Moore- Building a Blog, Start-ups, and Developer Advocacy
By: Matthew Weeks
Tags: Networking, Content Strategy, Podcast, Software Development, Writing

In this week’s episode of ‘Work in Programming,’ we have Dan Moore a seasoned web developer, CTO, start-up founder, and now Developer Advocate at FusionAuth. Dan’s journey began with him establishing a mail merge system for his parent’s insurance brokerage in eighth grade.

Dan graduated with a physics degree and started an internship writing software for physics concepts, which later converted into a full-time job. He later entered a digital agency, where he worked on several products, including the original vitamins.com, and a Yahoo clone. An important lesson he learned by working in small companies is that as a developer you should set boundaries about the amount of work you put in as a company will never value your time as much as you do.

You can watch the entire interview here, or read the summary below 🙂

Advice for Co-founders of Start-ups

Dan eventually started his own company where he was the co-founder and CTO. Food Court is a SaaS application for commercial kitchens. He gave advice that start-up founders or CTOs should test their co-founder as you are giving up many opportunities to join the business. Ideas are easy to come by, but the execution is the real deal. A non-technical co-founder should be able to convince people about your idea, talk to customers, create no-code solutions, and manual processes. More importantly, the vision to identify the market and create the product. He attributed these efforts to his business partner, all of which made it easier for him to decide to join the company.

During his time with the start-up, he learned that as a developer you assume a certain level of quality that the product should have, however it is not always the case. There were times that a product or feature that Dan wasn’t proud of was launched, but the customers loved it. The solution simplified things for them than how they were operating before.

The Spectrum of Developer Advocacy

Dan is currently working as a developer advocate, and in his role he gets to work on various facets ranging from customer support, fixing bugs, coding example applications, writing blog posts, and documentation, and videos. He loves being able to have customer interaction, then takes a step back and work on documentation that will help people find out about their product.

Maintaining a Community

Dan also organizes meet-ups and social events with the local community to maintain professional relationships even online. They are helpful and valuable to kick start some new opportunities. He has found this to be an effective way to communicate with the online community, especially during the pandemic. He also encouraged developers interested in conducting a talk around Ruby on Rails to reach out to him as he is looking for speakers. The meetup is remote now, so you can be situated outside the Denver area!

Blogging and Content Creation

Building your brand is essential, but creating a balance with work can be tough. Dan advised that discussing this with the company you are working with always helps. Dan blogs alongside his work, and in his opinion, it is necessary to have a network and presence as a developer advocate.

Dan has recently authored a book titled “Letters to a New Developer” that is now available. The book is based on his blog by the same name. Think Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans but for Letters to a New Developer. He previously wrote an e-book on the hybrid mobile app framework Cordova. He had written numerous blogs about it, and he later converted them into an e-book. He self-published the book, and the experience taught him a lot about marketing and that being an author is not a get rich quick scheme. Moreover, he learned that if you are committed to a certain technology, only then, write a book on it. He moved on from technology later and has not updated the book.

The next time he decided to write the book, he started a blog titled Letters to Dan and later combined it into a book. The book has some new letters and revised versions of the ones that are already on the blog.

The blog posts were letters to his younger self about things that he thought were true but weren’t or lessons that he learned in the field over the years. He also has guest authors who write content that can help a junior developer or those entering the field.

For his blog, he also has an email newsletter that is set-up with WordPress and Mail Chimp. Dan shared that online groups and communities like Reddit and Hacker also help with marketing blogs. To reach people start with the audience in mind. For Dan, speaking at boot camps has been a great way to market his blog.

How to pick the content that works?

Persistence in sharing content

Quality of the writing

Putting yourself in the shoes of your audience

Queries online can often be converted into a blog topic

Commit to the blog for at least six months to see the results

Advice to Younger Self

Dan’s advice to his younger self is that it is better to build assets that can provide passive income when you are young and have free time, take risks, and take opportunities when they are coming your way. A solid piece of advice for anyone unsure and looking for answers.

If you enjoyed this, please check out the entire conversation on your favourite podcast player of choice!