Hello there! In this letter, I highlight the specialized experience I have as well as some explanation of developer relations goals and experiences.

<aside> 👋 I'm a developer relations and community expert based in San Francisco with 7 years of experience in the data industry. My focus for the past few years has been leading developer relations teams and fostering developer communities.

In the past, this has included creating creating technical content and launch events and fostering the community via setting up the community spaces, starting and supporting champion programs, hosting community meetings and events, and creating conferences, among other things.

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✨Special skills & experience:

<aside> 👩‍💼 I pride myself on being an experienced and empathetic manager who works to foster happy, collaborative, motivated, and productive multi-disciplinary teams aimed at solving user problems and growing the user base.

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<aside> 👷‍♀️ I have experience building up teams, organizations, and committees from scratch. The biggest example is the Data Visualization Society (DVS), which I co-founded in 2019 and is now a non-profit organization with 12 board seats, over 19k members, a publication (Nightingale), an annual conference (Outlier), and an awards ceremony (Information is Beautiful Awards). I love helping teams grow, whether starting from the ground up or growing existing teams.

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<aside> 📊 I previously worked as a data visualization engineer (Netflix, Observable, and with freelance work) where I created web applications for the purpose of showcasing internal data in order to supply a view of the data that increased understanding and directly informed business decisions. This makes me uniquely suited to decipher business data and metrics for decision-making purposes.

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<aside> ✨ I have a LOT of experience organizing developer community events. In addition to creating Outlier Conference (a global data visualization conference) from scratch and managing it for two years, I also created the Chicago Data Visualization Community Meetup, organized VisFest (aka D3.js Unconf), and have organized countless other smaller community events in the past decade. If you’re curious to hear more about these initiatives, you can check out the talk I gave that details some lessons learned in community building: If you build it, they will come.

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Developer relations

<aside> 📈 Developer relations differs from place to place, but I find that it often works towards the following goals:

• Growth and retention of user base; build and foster the resulting community
• Improvements to the product, fueled by user needs
• Developing and fostering relationships with external partners
• Ensuring users are supported and able to get their questions answered
• Creating technical product education materials </aside>

<aside> 🗣 As a developer relations manager at my last two companies, the roles involved tackling the following (not all inclusive):

• Set developer relations & community strategy and approach for the team
• Build and foster the developer community
• Gain an understanding of what frictions users were facing and work cross-functionally to ensure that we were solving the right problems for the users in the product
• Create product education materials (e.g. tutorials, blog posts, workshops, documentation)
• Host events (e.g. webinars, live streams, meetups)
• Speak at conferences
• Foster partnerships, both internal and external
• Staff projects
• Ensure a user support experience that felt good to both the users and the engineers
• And generally, work towards increased awareness of the product and continued adoption & growth </aside>

See also:

Portfolio

Resume

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