Pat Patterson, Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze
I'd say twenty years now. When I started, there wasn't even that title. I think there was probably one evangelist in the industry and it was Guy Kawasaki at Apple, probably, at that time. I think my title was something like technical architect, and I was working on single sign-on at Sun Microsystems, God rest its soul. We made a decision to open source that project, and the director of engineering pointed at me and said, "Pat, you're good at talking to people. You be the community guy." There was a bit of learning from other projects; Open source was a big thing at Sun at the time, and you had Glassfish and these other projects, OpenSolaris, but there was a lot of just making it up as you went along, building a community around an open source product; that was 2004. So that's really what I've been doing for the past 20 years, educating hands-on technical professionals on how best to use a particular platform, technology, you name it.
