Since all the conferences have been cancelled or moved online you'd think advocacy teams would be less busy right now. But that isn't how it works. I'm working harder than I have in a long time.

Advocacy isn't just about conference speaking. That's a relatively small part of our job. My model of advocacy has always been that it is about 50/50 internal and external.

The internal stuff hasn't gone away.

We're still dogfooding products. Advocating for users to get bugs fixed or workflows improved or features added. We're still writing code to fill in the gaps between use case and product. We're reviewing design docs.

And most of the external stuff hasn't gone away either.

Conferences have moved online. We're still making videos and podcasts. We're still writing blog posts, tutorials, labs, documentation, and whatever else needs writing. And there's things like Twitch and office hours.

Conference talks are the most visible part of the advocacy iceberg, but the real job is the rest of it. And the rest of it is still happening.

And the parts that are still happening are the hard parts.

Conference talks are much easier than video. We expect way more polish on a video than we do on a talk.

Blog posts require editing and they live forever so people expect that they're always exactly correct.

Anything that requires collaboration is harder because people are taking care of kids and family members and aren't always reachable. Or they're just going to the store or exercising during the day to reducing crowding.

I'm grateful to still have a job but I'm *busy*. My team is *busy*. We aren't just sitting around eating Girl Scout cookies and waiting for in person events to be a thing again.

*end rant*