✨ Taught scuba, then English, then engineering. Led developer orgs, now teaching the models. Compile rates over registrations.
Portugal
Joined November 2014
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DevRel at Midnight is being eliminated, so I'm looking🫡
I run developer orgs: advocacy, education, docs, DX
I also ship: 16 Claude Code plugins that check AI code before a dev sees it
Previously: Polkadot, New Relic, Puppet, Vonage, Amazon
Director / Head of / VP - Remote
Reposts appreciated 🙏✨
ALT at DevRelCon, speaking about developer programs
I can tell you the exact night I first heard the words “developer advocate.”
I was a bootcamp student at RubyConf on an opportunity scholarship. A few advocates were incredibly kind to me. On the flight home, I wrote about whether that could be a job.
It could.
9 years later, I’ve built 4 of those teams. What pulled me in was their hospitality, and how willing they were to teach a newbie everything they knew.
That’s still the job.
medium.com/codeburst/31-thou…
Developer funnels assume people arrive in the order you listed them.
I measured every tier. 1,203 were shipping. 689 had finished onboarding.
The strongest builders came in sideways and never saw the front door.
The funnel is a sales metaphor. Developers never agreed to it.
I almost made this video private. It’s the first technical talk I ever gave, and watching it again had me in tears.
It’s my 2018 capstone demo from @adaacademy: an iOS app that helped teenagers find community service projects, and I taught myself React Native in the 3.5 weeks I had to build it.
And watching it now, I can see the moment I figured out how I learn best: by building. I also remember spending a significant chunk of that project on encrypting student data. It’s no coincidence that data protection mattered to me then, and that it still shapes the work I choose today.
And though I didn’t know it at the time, my hiring manager from Amazon was in the audience that night. Something in that talk convinced him I was the person from our cohort he wanted on his team.
That night helped me clarify something I'd been struggling with throughout my time at Ada. Yes, I wanted to become a software engineer, and I knew I needed real hours writing production code to earn the respect of the developer communities I hoped to serve. But I also wanted to keep teaching.
Amazon gave me those engineering hours. Meanwhile, I kept speaking at meetups around Seattle to build my skills and confidence, and eventually I felt brave enough to apply for a developer relations job, where I could do both.
To me, teaching is the core of Developer Relations. Even as the discipline, the way we serve developers, and the audience itself continue to change. In 2020, we wrote tutorials for developers. Now we also teach the AI agents those developers build with.
It’s funny, I recognize a lot of the speaking habits I still have in this 2018 version of me. Today I use them on purpose. Back then, they just came out of me.
Full talk, nervous hand gestures and all: youtube.com/watch?v=nfQDEmr3…
7 years ago, I sat on these letters under a banner I still believe: “We will change the direction of tech together.”
This week @AnitaB_org canceled @GHC 2026, citing sponsorship “significantly below” expectations.
Why sponsors should keep funding this work🧵
My two cents?
When budgets tighten, women-in-tech communities are usually the first line item cut and the last one anyone measures.
So measure them. Ours produced a hire and a steady stream of new developers for a fraction of a conference booth. That's an easy win.
Took some inspo from one of the best in the biz and refreshed my portfolio too: LoLoCoding.com
ALT screen shot of lolocoding.com landing page
We were seeing a significant cliff in our developer academy funnel.
Easy to chalk up to attrition. But then we actually looked, and almost half of the registrants were dropping off at the exact same step: setting up their environment.
That’s a bug. And that makes it an us-not-them problem. Which is much easier to fix.
The dev who hits a wall in the docs complains in Discord or files an issue.
The dev who hits a wall through an agent reprompts twice, decides your platform isn’t ready... and just leaves.
Same drop-off. Except only one of them is going to tell you about it.
Platform teams are about to get much worse data.
