Martin Splitt is a developer advocate on the Search Relations team at Google Switzerland. In this role, he helps developers and content creators to build great content on the web. He is involved with the W3C as well as the global web and JavaScript developer community, working to keep the web open.

Find out more about Martin and his bubbly personality in the following interview and stay tuned for his keynote – Technical SEO for web developers – on November 17 at DevCon Live, Web & Mobile Week.

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Can you introduce yourself in a few words?

Hi, I’m Martin Splitt, Developer Advocate at Google’s Search Relations team from Zurich, Switzerland. When I’m not writing code, documentation, recording videos or giving talks, I’m either cycling or diving!

What is a day in the life of a Developer Advocate at Google Switzerland?

Martin Splitt: Weird, every day is weird. We usually work with the internal team around Google Search and the community, so we write docs on upcoming features or changes, we fix bugs, we debug things – but we also answer questions, do conference talks, record videos and so on. So there is no “typical day”, really…

Tell us about the tools you use, your methodology and workflow.

Martin Splitt: We’re pretty free in how each team organises themselves. In our team, as we work with different stakeholders, everyone has their own way of organising themselves. We use Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and lots of internal debugging tools. To organise my work and make sure I don’t slack off too much or overwork myself, I have a personal Kanban board to keep track of things and improve my workflow.

My friends usually call me to…

Martin Splitt: Go diving, whee!

At school, I was famous for…

Martin Splitt: Being loud and being able to hold entire presentations without any preparation whatsoever, yet getting a good grade for it.

I’d rather keep it a secret, but..

Martin Splitt: I know I live in Switzerland, so I should love chocolate… but I don’t.

What about your work-life balance?

Martin Splitt: Life is too short to spend it all at work. Do good work efficiently and use the time savings to spend time with friends and your loved ones.

Please give us a short overview about your keynote at DevCon 2020.

Martin Splitt: I will talk about the developer perspective of SEO (search engine optimization), because I think it’s sad to build a fantastic webapp only for nobody to know it exists. If you play your cards right, you can get free traffic from search engines – so in my talk, we’ll have a look at how that works and what us developers can do to make that happen.

What is your message for the Romanian IT community?

Martin Splitt: Continue to build cool stuff and bet on the web!

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