If you’ll ask me, “What would be a job you always wanted but never got”, I’d answered, “A Technical Evangelist for a large corporation”. I know how to do it, I like travel, I like meeting new people, and I can convince the IT crowd that the software I believe in is good to have. But. I know many great software developers who are working as technical evangelists for various companies, and I don’t like little tiny things they have to do.
Now I’m watching a recorded presentation of a person I know and respect. He presents a software of his company and compares it with another way of doing the same thing. His slide reads “Our product runs fast, but their product runs faster”. And this is why I never became a technical evangelist working for a corporation. I still can afford to say what I really want to say: “The product A is slow, and the product B is fast”.
This is not to blame technical evangelists that are always on the road working hard to feed their families. I will continue attending their presentations. But I really like the fact that I can afford to say what I really want to say.
yakovfain.com 
It’s very easy be a Technical Evangelist. These guys, (I know that I can’t generally), just shows some obvious code and CRUDs, compiles a small project and deploys it almost instantaneously and goes way to the next travel. But, when you decide use the “magic solution” which was showed before on your large scale enterprise application, this guys don’t answer our question or don’t give any feedback … just evaporates like magic!!! THAT’S INCREDIBLE! 🙂
Modern Technical evangelists in IT such as Christophe Coenraets, Andrew Trice or Holly Schinsky no longer fit your view Yakov. They do technical explorations. For example, between july 2011 and october 2012, I was exploring the mobile development field and notice that Coenraets was doing that too and he was so fast and thorough that at some point I used to check his blogs to see if he saw more techniques and frameworks than I did.
“Slow” would imply that performance is insufficient or below par. However, in the exact case/preso you are talking about (I’m assuming), “Fast” and “Faster” were appropriate adverbs, because both technologies offer adequate performance, and in many use-cases, indistinguishable performance.
Evangelists get to be honest (and are expected to be honest) and they get to ignore the marketing team when the marketing speak diminishes their credibility. But yes, we have to be careful about word selection because “slow vs fast” and “fast vs faster” create different messages.
Thanks!
I blogged about the smallest cup at Starbucks that they call “tall”:
https://yakovfain.com/2012/11/27/starbucks-and-programmers/
It’s the same thing.
Java is slow. Assembly language is fast. Does that sound fair? Slow and Fast are relative terms, but one sets a baseline expectation. Java is slower, but not “slow” if we consider that “slow” is a negative term when it comes to program performance. Just sayin’ 😉
…and by the way, I still order a “small” coffee. I refuse to say “tall” 😉
See! Great minds think alike 🙂