Her point was that marketers are hiring people as "developer evangelists" (hint) to show up at conferences in plain clothing, attract male attention, and sell products.
This is a pretty basic marketing technique used by probably every brick-and-mortar on the planet. Look at the way that clothing stores hire employees.
The author's issue is that before this became mainstream, she was easily identifiable as not a marketer. She wasn't in a bikini, and wasn't obviously selling anything. She was just in plain clothes attending a conference.
So while she was, in her words, a curiosity, people could reasonably assume that she was attending because she was a dev, not because she wants to "evangelize" at them.
Now that "hire a pretty, bubbly girl to talk to people for you" has become common in tech, people can reasonably assume that the "curiosity" in the crowd is probably there because she was paid to be there.
Her point was that marketers are hiring people as "developer evangelists" (hint) to show up at conferences in plain clothing, attract male attention, and sell products.
This is a pretty basic marketing technique used by probably every brick-and-mortar on the planet. Look at the way that clothing stores hire employees.
The author's issue is that before this became mainstream, she was easily identifiable as not a marketer. She wasn't in a bikini, and wasn't obviously selling anything. She was just in plain clothes attending a conference.
So while she was, in her words, a curiosity, people could reasonably assume that she was attending because she was a dev, not because she wants to "evangelize" at them.
Now that "hire a pretty, bubbly girl to talk to people for you" has become common in tech, people can reasonably assume that the "curiosity" in the crowd is probably there because she was paid to be there.