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What does your current job involve?
I'm a senior developer advocate on the OpenSearch team here at AWS, specifically working on the open source OpenSearch project rather than the managed service.
What were you doing before DevRel?
I started my career as an analyst at a call centre while completing my CS degree. The role involved running reports in Excel, which was a time-consuming manual process. Using my Python skills, I automated these reports, scaling from 10 to 60 automated reports. We went from overseeing about 100 people to managing 550 people's schedules and call centre metrics, all through automation without adding team members.
How did you start to learn about DevRel?
After about three years, with my computer science degree completed, I felt I should move into "real" programming work. I found a job doing C# development for Dynamics 365 at a broadcast studio. However, I quickly realized I didn't enjoy the work. Around this time, I discovered the term 'developer advocate' on Reddit and became fascinated with the role.
How did you build DevRel experience?
I started a blog, publishing 18 posts in the first six to seven months. While most posts had limited reach, I noticed that posts about solving specific technical problems gained consistent traffic. For example, my post about fixing SSL verify errors on Windows corporate networks still gets 50-125 views daily.
I also became a moderator for a 500,000-member Reddit community. This experience taught me valuable lessons about community management, particularly the importance of clear rules and consistent governance to build trust.
What was your path to AWS?
In my role as a network automation and DevOps engineer, I worked with various monitoring tools like log.io, Datadog, Rapid7, SolarWinds, and Log Insight. Seeing the need for consolidation, I began researching solutions and discovered the ELK Stack an