All the paths we did not take

All the paths we did not take

We've been on this road a while, and its still day 0!

Ekene Eze's photo
Ekene Eze
·

4 min read

Table of contents

Hello, I'm Ekene - A fullstack JavaScript/TypeScript developer, and dev advocate building on the web and helping developers succeed with Devtools. In my role as a developer advocate, I've had the opportunity to work in a highly visible public setting, yet often encountered challenges in showcasing the breadth of my work. Here's an overview of my journey in the DevRel field, spanning various industries over the past few years.

Flutterwave

Starting at Flutterwave, I began as a developer advocate in a small team, focusing on enhancing the developer experience with our API products and aiding in integration strategies and developer support. After a year, I was promoted to manage the developer experience team, which I expanded to 10 members. My team's scope grew with the company, leading to some of our most significant achievements such as launching v3 APIs, the Flutterwave Developers program, and developing an enterprise integrations and support approach, among others.

Netlify

My tenure at Netlify saw me diving deep into the Vue.js community, where I developed specialized templates, documentation, and tools tailored to help Vue developers succeed on Netlify. My promotion to senior developer experience engineer expanded my responsibilities to encompass the broader Jamstack ecosystem. In this role, I played a pivotal part in shaping the Jamstack narrative and forged key partnerships and integrations with various headless CMSs and SSGs.

Throughout my career, I've consistently engaged in activities I'm passionate about, such as speaking at conferences, blogging, creating courses, contributing to open-source projects, and community management.

smilies and selfies with friends at different conferences

Plasmic

At Plasmic, as the Director of Developer Relations, I focused on product education and community management, heavily involving content creation and strategic planning. In that time we launched a ton of features and worked with our community to influence the direction of our products. Content creation was a key component of my work here and setting the vision for where we wanted to be and how we'll get there was crucial. However, my time there was cut short due to layoffs.

Collab.Land

I then explored the web3 space with Abridged - The makers of Collab.Land to help open up our API product to developers. As the sole developer advocate, I overhauled the developer documentation and prepared the necessary resources needed in readiness for the launch of our token gating APIs. We also built a marketplace to showcase the apps built by developers to all the communities on Collab.Land as a way of providing distribution to developers and bringing extra value to the community admins. To further the developer experience of the platform, I managed the creation of the LWC Flow, a feature that allowed developers to integrate Collab.Land login into their projects with ease. We followed it up with a developer portal that streamlined the process of requesting and managing API keys for developers which also provided utility for the $collab token after we launched.

While these are all high-level overviews of some of the things I was directly responsible for, it is not exhaustive of the daily activities of these roles. Often, I've also had to:

  • Speak on podcasts

  • Cross-team collaboration initiatives

  • Build and maintain open-source projects and templates

  • Be a first line of support for developers

  • Host weekly office hours

  • Help partners set up integrations

  • Manage communities and onboarding flows

  • Mentor direct reports and manage teams

  • Record courses and maintain a YouTube Channel

Working through different industries (fintech, core web, web3, no-code) and in different capacities (developer advocate, senior developer experience engineer and Director of developer relations) has equipped me with a ton of DevRel experience and skills that I leverage to succeed in my next adventures in this space.

New interests

I recently started getting my hands dirty with AI technologies. I added an AI-powered search tool to the Collab.Land docs and started taking the Introduction to Generative AI course by Google which is the inspiration behind my last two blogposts on Gen AI and LLMs.

At the moment I'm focusing on grooming the next cohort of the DXMentorship program where I help new and early entrants get started in DevRel the right way. If you're hiring or just want to get in touch, you can email me or simply grab a time on my Calendar for a quick chat. You can find a lot more activities on my website and Linkedin