Developer relations and advocacy teams focus almost entirely on communities of programmers. And rightfully so -- companies have DevRel groups to engage and enable developers interested and/or actively building on their platforms.
To achieve goals for growth and success, programs usually must focus all resources on those that are coding. While creativity can always be found among much of what developers build, through their innovation and experiences, there are select communities to look at that I find always so fulfilling to engage.
Many of the most inspiring technical communities are very creative in nature. In several industries, especially gaming, programmers and artists work side by side. So from time to time, for inspiration, perspective, and outright fun, it’s healthy for developer-focused programs to engage more purely creative groups.
My teams have always learned so much from creative technical communities – Some of the most fulfilling developer programs I’ve managed have involved platforms like Flash and Unity, where the community includes professionals like game developers, artists, and designers - and where the community can easily share their work and thoughts with people from a wide range of disciplines. However, DevRel naturally puts emphasis on engaging and enabling developers so it can be challenging to surface, showcase, share, and get inspired by the creative side of technical communities.
For me, the further “into” a technical platform I get, the more I observe and appreciate the level of design and interaction around it. I’ve gone deep into platforms to enable geolocation and mapping, media streaming, AI, augmented reality, and recently, cloud services. Through learning and teaching countless APIs and writing docs and examples to support them, what ultimately drives me is seeing the experiences and solutions that developers build. When I need to tap my own creative side, I always find my way to coding games or smart devices - lately using CircuitPython. This creative outlet has a big payoff for me. I love observing how others interact with what I’ve built and that motivates me to continue exploring what can be done.
Our team at Akamai supports a wide range of developers. Most use our services and solutions to deliver, optimize, and secure experiences and content for their customers. Within almost every developer is something, usually an interactive experience with technology, that set them on their path. To bring out the many talents and interests within the technical community, our team started to explore different creative outlets that people we know use to express themselves.
Back to gaming. It’s one of our most exciting industries and our entire team often celebrates games we love and we take pride in knowing that Akamai enables some of the most innovative features in gaming to be delivered worldwide.
In an effort to inspire the creative side of the technical community, and, really, because we all love gaming, we created a new GitHub repo with artwork from one of our favorite Voxel artists Zach Soares. Zach is a celebrated Voxel artist, teacher, and the creative director at Bunnyhug Games. In the new repo, we added instructions on how to use the files and how to get started. There are several Voxel tools to work with, including VoxEdit, Blender, Qubicle, Avoyd, and MagicaVoxel. You can download Zach’s artwork to inspire your own creation, or use them as building blocks for your own designs.
In Zach’s words, Voxel art is a “3D visualization of points of data in space.” Since seeing how flexible Voxel art is and hearing Zach’s passion for artwork, we wanted to see what the rest of the community would come up with, so Zach helped us put together a contest (running Aug 8 - 29) that inspires artists to revisit their favorite childhood video games and recreate scenes in Voxel. We partnered with the open source Voxel editor MagicaVoxel to host discussions during the contest so participants can discuss issues and share their work. Everyone has the chance to win prizes awarded by both Akamai and MagicaVoxel.
The relationship between artists and programmers within communities, especially gaming, is so significant to powering incredible online experiences. According to Zach, “Artists love it when the programmers make the thing move and then programmers love it when the thing that moves looks good.”
We hope this contest inspires the community and showcases the brilliance of the creative and technical communities that make gaming (and a lot more) possible!
Check out the contest, all the awesome prizes, and how you can enter here: https://github.com/Akamai-Community/inspiring-game-scenes
Watch Zach Soares as a guest on my Developer’s Edge show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RydidSdtlak
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