A calendar invite popped up—an unexpected meeting. Strange, but nothing too alarming. It wasn’t uncommon for me to meet with leadership. I had just fought for, and won, more budget to roll out GitHub Copilot to our developers. It felt like progress. Then, just like that—poof. My email stopped working. I was locked out of chat. I had no way to reach my colleagues. I was gone.
For six years, I dedicated myself to helping developers build better software—learning Kubernetes, standardizing documentation, launching our API initiative, and eliminating friction at every turn.
Developer Relations to me is a unique role and it all started with my boss being fired. But before we get into that, let’s back up a bit so I can tell you the story.
I was running a small startup of about 20 people in the music industry as the co-founder and CTO. For around 3 years we toured with artists like Beyonce, Selena Gomez, Adele, Fall out Boy, and more to make it easier to buy and sell concert merch. You know those $40 t-shirts with tour dates and art work? Those.
It was pretty successful, but didn’t make a fortune. In fact, when we sold the company, there wasn’t much money to go around. It wasn’t ever about the money, I did it for the challenge. I cut my salary 1/3rd to do this, and it taught me a lot. After the “exit”, I took some time off to figure out how I wanted to spend my time.
I built a number of side projects, tried getting into realesate software, and played a lot of hockey. It was good for the soul, but I needed something more. So I made the decision: I’m going to join a company so I can identify gaps in enterprise and maybe that would inspire me to start something new. I had two offers on the table: a unicorn startup worth well over $1B, and a telephone company I never heard of called 8x8. I had zero connections at the company on LinkedIn. I knew the founders of the startup unicorn and almost all of their first 10 employees. But that wasn’t my goal. I wanted a new challenge, so I took the 8x8 offer precisely because I knew no one there.
Their offer was lower and the stock was decent. That mattered a bit less to me. It was the challenge and opportunity to learn that attracted me and this was worth the difference in compensation. And then I met my manager. A Frenchman who refused to eat, drank only tea, and forced this upon us. He wouldn’t let us eat our lunch on our first day. Not only was this a red flag, but we only had to deal with this for a few days. Before we knew it, he was let go and we had a new manager. We had only seen him in the office for a total of 4 days, and then after the holiday break, we never saw him again.
Fast forward a few months, and by now I’ve decided to pitch the company on Developer Relations. I noticed a tremendous amount of gaps that desperately needed fixing. Kubernetes was introduced to the org by our former manager, but almost no one knew how it worked. Projects were architected in complete different manners, standards were lacking, and docs were at chaotic mess. There was so much low hanging fruit in the early days of my tenure. In fact, there were teams emailing JAR files around to deploy manually!
So after pitching to the executives and other leaders: DevRel at 8x8 was born upon the charter I had tediously crafted and shared.
Throughout my tenure, we standardized our development platform, deployment platform, and documentation. I drove initiatives to lead our CI/CD strategy, public api docs and standards, engineering onboarding, lead multiple migrations, and so much more. I traveled to our offices to give tech talks, gather feedback, and improve the developer experience no matter how tedious it was behind the scenes. In fact, it was incredibly difficult behind the scenes and really tested my grit. I learned a lot about myself pushing these initiatives forward causing me to routinely feel like Sisyphus.
The timing is a bit weird. I just had an emergency root canal, begged and accomplished to get more budget for our developer AI tooling, and am getting married in a couple of weeks.
But that’s life! Now it’s time to find another mountain to move—whether in DevRel, startups, or something entirely new. Stay tuned.
-Matt