In the run-up to Christmas, I took part in the Developer Adventcado - it's a fun project from the Developer Avocados website 🥑 a way to share and get to know other folks in the Developer Relations space. Five questions, and the answers to them: introducing who I am, what I do, and who and what has influenced me.
I'm not going to re-post the whole thing here, as you can read it in full on the Developer Avocados website, but I've copied the answer to the first question below, which fills in my background.
If you are interested in Developer Relations, you can also sign up to the Developer Avocados Weekly newsletter, and "meet" many other folks from the 2021 Adventcado, over on their site.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
Oh, hi! 😀 I am @andypiper, a Developer Advocate at Twitter. I live in the UK. I’m self-taught in tech - my education was primarily in Arts subjects (History), but I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities for technologies to improve society. I grew up on British 8-bit computers, and learned BBC BASIC.
Jumping all the way back, I got my first job after university in the UK Post Office’s IT division. After that, I worked as a technical consultant for 10 years at IBM, before some folks noticed me building community and giving talks around a technology called MQTT (which they picked up via my Twitter profile). Through that, I moved into a full-time DevRel role as one of the first advocates for Cloud Foundry. After 2 years in the cloud, I was invited to join the DevRel team at Twitter… and I’ve been here nearly 8 years. For me, it’s the ideal combination of a technical role, on a platform that is all about social - connecting people. In total I think I’ve been doing DevRel activities for 13 years or so, out of ~20 years in tech.
Other things I’ve done - I’ve been an Open Source project lead and admin, I’ve worked with the Eclipse Foundation, I’ve contributed to Ubuntu and was an occasional guest on the Ubuntu UK Podcast, back in the day. Oh, I also currently contribute to a fun weekly podcast called Games at Work, looking at future tech and gaming technologies, with a pair of friends I’ve known since my IBM days - it keeps my curiosity active!
I also love LEGO!
related content on DEV -- Handling change as a Developer Advocate (with video, from DevRelCon Tokyo 2019)
Top comments (1)
I's really awesome to hear your origin story, Andy. You've bounced around to a lot of interesting places doing DevRel type stuff. Thanks for sharing!
And seriously love hearing that you're a LEGO fan!! I just read your post on your personal blog and it definitely resonated with me. I also love LEGO and am currently working my way through building the Batman Tumbler set.
Not to mention, LEGO is doing a great job with their customer relationship/community building! I've been loving their LEGO IDEAS sets that allow fans to participate in competitions where they can propose their own fan-made sets to potentially be made into official sets. Such a cool idea! Not to mention, really digging their blog where they highlight a lotta this stuff! 😀