I know a few people who are Developer Evangelists but few are as passionate as Christian Heilmann (@codepo8), Mozilla’s Principal Developer Evangelist (developer.mozilla.org), about the open web, specifically things like HTML5. He was a speaker at our ConvergeSE conference earlier this year and we had a quick discussion about what it means to be a Developer Evangelist for a company like Mozilla.

What is “Developer Evangelism”

Chris is really a leader when it comes to defining the role of Developer Evangelist. With his job to keep Mozilla open and pushing forward with things like HTML5 for instance, he has a pretty big role to fill in keeping things interesting and pushing the envelope where he can with new technologies that Mozilla gets behind (and showing them what to get behind at the same time.)

A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and both its technical staff and outside developers. – From developer-evangelism.com

Chris has also written the book on what Developer Evangelism is, which is where the above quote is from. Like everything he does, it’s out there for you for free.

I for one feel a lot better knowing Chris is out there helping to keep Mozilla straight!

About: Christian Heilmann

Chris Heilmann has dedicated a lot of his time making the web better. Originally coming from a radio journalism background, he built his first web site from scratch around 1997 and spent the following years working on lots of large, international web sites, spent a few years in Yahoo building products and explaining and training people and is now at Mozilla. Chris wrote two and contributed to 4 books on web development and wrote dozens of articles and hundreds of blog posts for Ajaxian, Smashingmag, Yahoo, Mozilla, ScriptJunkie and his own blog wait-till-i.com. He also uses Twitter obsessively as @codepo8 (Seriously you can almost keep up to date on our industry entirely from his twitter stream).