My Journey into Developer Relations

Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash

My journey as a software engineer has always been centered around the goal of being able to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical people. When I was in college and had the choice to study Engineering, Computer Science, or Management Information Systems (MIS), I chose MIS. I chose MIS because I felt like it would be a good mix of learning technical skills like software development including creating projects from scratch, as well as working within teams. It also provided me an opportunity to work with people outside of the field I was going to be in, including Accounting, Finance, and Business majors. Different perspectives are always something I've valued along with technical skills.

As I've gone through my journey as a software engineer, I've always been mindful of the people I interact with. Moving from a junior developer to a senior software engineer includes talking to people from technical and non-technical backgrounds, but also includes technical people of different skill levels, which I learned is a different skill altogether. All these experiences helped me grow as a developer, but at the end of the day, I am more interested in helping developers of different skill levels be successful.

When I started contributing to open source software (OSS) through the NgRx project, giving conference talks, and spending more time interacting with other developers with the purpose of helping them be successful, I knew that is what I wanted to focus more time on. I also didn't know this was a thing you could do as a job until I discovered the space of Developer Relations. Everything I've done since then has been with the goal of moving into this area and continuing to grow as a developer who communicates effectively and reaches other developers where they are to help them be successful.

I've been fortunate enough to work at Narwhal, where working on the things you're passionate about is encouraged. Whether it be writing blog posts, creating videos, or collaborating with other developers, it's all baked into the work that goes into building and maintaining the open source project Nx.

Developer advocacy is a part of everyone's role who works on Nx and the surrounding ecosystem. The opportunity arose to help build and grow Narwhal's developer relations team, and I'm excited to announce that I'll be moving into a new role as Developer Relations Manager at Nrwl!

What does that mean? For me, it means I get to spend more time helping other developers in open source with Nx through content creation, advocacy, strategy, and communication within the developer ecosystems.

There are too many to list, but there are many fantastic people already in this space that I learn from directly and indirectly:

Brian Douglas

Angie Jones

Michael Jolley

Scott Hanselman

Kim Maida

Mark Techson

Sam Julien

Do I know all of what I'm getting into? No. Do I know everything about DevRel now? Also no.

But I'm excited to learn and build along with you.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Twitch, and GitHub!