As I finish writing a piece on the 70 platforms who are looking for an API evangelist or developer advocate currently, sharing the wisdom of leading evangelist I follow in the space, I am also working to gather up my own wisdom so that I can share. While i am not an evangelist for a single API, I was at one point in my career, and I also practice many of the same techniques in my own work, evangelizing for all APis.
Out of my lists of advice for existing, and new API evangelists, one stands out: take care of yourself. Make sure and find balance in what you do, or you will burn out. You can ask anyone who has been in the scene for a while, and they'll tell you the same thing. However my message is ringing my ears right now, because I hit a wall last year with evangelism, and part of it was due to a fairly scary health concern.
In 2015, I finally settled down long enough to get health insurance (thanks Obama, jeez ;-), and made it to the doctor, who told me my liver wasn't functioning as expected, was fatty, overloaded, and sending out some pretty bad signals to the rest of my body. When you look through my timeline on Twitter or Facebook, it is pretty easy to understand why this is---no surprise here.
Anyways, luckily the liver is (hopefully) a pretty resilient part of the body, something that will recover now that I'm NOT drinking, not traveling, and getting more exercise. Anyways, I just wanted to take the opportunity to caution other evangelist out there to be careful, and make sure that finding balance is a priority, or you may find yourself in a situation where you might not be able to recover. I hate being the old dude of the bunch, but please take care of yourself, the work we do is important.
