though I was getting daily emails from Microsoft recruiters

Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire ANYONE that badly...

I sat there with my jaw on the floor–for those of you who don’t know what Cosmos DB is, it’s the first globally distributed, multi-model database service for building planet scale apps

Started doing the evangelism already I see! This whole blog post is just a PR puff piece! That line is pretty much taken verbatim from the CosmosDB website - "planet scale apps" indeed.

For those that were wondering what Developer Advocates do it's exactly this: write blog posts as if they're just engineers like you, but rave about how amazing their employers are.

FWIW I even like Microsoft, Azure is my cloud of choice, but this kind of marketing activity is pretty condescending in my personal opinion. I like to keep things on a pure engineering level, technical merits only, warts and all.

False. I can relate albeit not having that kind of attention, but had my current manager continually try to hire me for months and get me to interview (which I don't go out of my way saying either because it doesn't make sense to and I want others to think well of me because of my skills--which they often think higher of than I do myself) and she is much more knowledgeable and regarded in the community than me so I am not remotely surprised she was contacted so much and I know for fact that these daily calls DID happen--the ONLY reason she mentioned it was to explain why the process moved so quickly--not so she can go pat herself on the back because she is humble. Maybe you should go look her up on Twitter. She didn't amass a ton of followers for PR/marketing fluff. She's well known in the community due to the contributions she has made and has done a lot of great TECHNICAL things to help people learn e.g. https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/learn_to_code

Developer advocate is a widely used term and you can't assume a general definition. I am a developer advocate myself and part of my role is being a software engineer--I am in an engineering org, report to an engineering manager, and this means I code ON the project just like every other software engineer here, just not as my entire role. The difference is I also speak at conferences, make blogs/training material so that people in the community can learn more about how to use the product(s) (not market fluff). Whether it's coding on their team's project(s), coding on external open source software, or creating demo code, MANY developer advocates are partaking in the technical side themselves and they have to be very knowledgeable to be able to write the technical content in blogs independent of whether it's something they created or not.

You realize this is a post about why she joined, not a general thoughts on the company or a technical overview, right? Therefore it will be the positive things. Also, it can't be just technical merits when you are deciding to join a company. It takes interesting topics and good engineering of course, but also great managers, great team members, a vision, what you'll be working on, etc. She wrote this to explain to people why she switched to Microsoft, not as anything to do with her job.

I, and I am sure others, would appreciate it if you would please get off your high horse and go study up more on facts before you partake in condescending activity yourself by shitting on/slamming someone for something you haven't researched enough on. In this case it could include asking more of "what will you be doing?". And in general, it is best to avoid those types of things in general. Maybe give some technical feedback to posts instead with useful feedback/how to improve things and not dumping on it independent whether you agree with it or not.

Also, go look at some talks/blogs etc from Developer Advocates (and similar titles like Technical Evangelist, Principal Technologist) in the community that include plenty of technical (vs marketing) content and help people learn such as:

Francesc Campoy https://twitter.com/francesc at Google https://github.com/campoy/go-tooling-workshop

Abby Fuller https://twitter.com/abbyfuller at Amazon Web Services https://github.com/abby-fuller/ecs-demo

Scott Hanselman https://twitter.com/shanselman at Microsoft https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Arun Gupta https://twitter.com/arungupta at Amazon Web Services

Julia Ferraioli https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli at Google (formerly a DA) http://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2015/11/containerized-minecra...

Kelsey Hightower https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower at Google https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

And many others.