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Joe Karlsson is a software engineer turned Developer Advocate at MongoDB. He comes from the frozen tundra of Minneapolis, Minnesota (and yes, it does get really cold here, and no, not everyone here has the accent from the movie, Fargo).

Joe has been primarily a Node and JavaScript engineer. He has been writing, teaching, and talking about code his entire career. Sharing what he knows and continuing to learn about programming is truly the thing he loves doing the most.

Most passionate about

• I\\u2019m most passionate about Developers Advocate. I work for a database software tech company called MongoDB. As part of my job, I get to hang out with developers all the time. I make cool tools for them, or documentation, I speak at tech conferences and I make videos at Twitch stream.
• Whatever developers need, I make that for them.
• I still consider myself a software engineer, but I'm just better at engaging with developers.

Joe\\u2019s career and story

• I first started learning how to program. I started learning it out of fear of not making money when I was a professional.
• I actually was an art history minor, and then I switched over to computer science for fear of being poor.
• I went to school during one of the last financial collapses. Then I worked as an engineer and programmer for years. I hated it. I was so bad at it.
• I was ready to quit programming, and I moved to Hawaii to become a surf bum. Then I met some hacker punks down there, who were making fun stuff, making art. It got me very excited about making stuff just for fun.
• That changed the way I looked at programming. I've been trying to share the joy that I felt ever since.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I feel like it would be best if I spoke about how to engage the developer's perspective. That\\u2019s the primary customer of many businesses, and I feel like even if your direct customer isn't the developer, most entrepreneurs are now engaging developers as either employees or contractors or building out a product.
• I get calls from business people and entrepreneurs all the time, asking if I would be willing to join them for their startup. It basically ends with them just calling me and giving me a 15-minute pitch without allowing me to talk at all about the product. That leaves me completely unimpressed and uninterested in their thing.
• Developers are more interested in learning and growing and playing, I think.
• Entrepreneurs need to figure out what developers are interested in and know that that's going to be something different from what another customer is going to be interested in.

How you managed to speak with developers

• My primary development market is JavaScript and Node. It's like the language of the web.
• I'm trying to provide lots of interesting content for developers, like career advice, learning stuff, tips and tricks, that sort of thing. I sprinkle product information in there, too.
• Authenticity is super important. That's what doesn't work with business people. Sometimes it feels inauthentic. It feels sales-y. It feels like a pitch. It feels like a commercial.
• I try to be an authentic human being with feelings and fears and anxieties, while also talking about a product.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I've been a technical lead at several large tech companies. I feel like a couple of them didn't quite understand my need to teach and grow, to help out the developer communities. That caused friction with them.
• Today, speaking at conferences or streaming and engaging with developers is my full-time job. However, in the past, I was doing that on nights and weekends. Sometimes I'd miss work to do it. I caused some friction with the..."