DEV Community: Myrsini Koukiasa (she/her)

Meet The First Voyagers Crew (Part 3)

Myrsini Koukiasa (she/her) — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 14:26:38 +0000

So far this month we’ve met six of our inaugural Voyagers crew members in parts 1 and 2 of this series. Vonage Voyagers is a one-year program for developers who want to get their hands on new communication technologies first and be part of a community of like-minded peers who support and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity for us to reward and recognise the valuable contributors in our community. You can become a Voyager by applying directly or nominating a colleague, friend, or another community member.

This week, we’re moving over to the other side of the Atlantic to highlight yet another group of Voyagers and learn more about them and their interests. Please meet Mary Jo Staebler, Matthew Groves and Hector Zelaya.

Where are you based?

Mary Jo: Bellevue, WA, USA

Matthew: Central Ohio, United States

Hector: I am from El Salvador, a small (and beautiful) country in Central America.

Tell us about a project you worked on recently.

Mary Jo: Lately, I’ve been helping projects for Hacktoberfest and implementing changes and features needed for them.

Matthew: I’ve been working with Azure Functions to help automate forum reporting and event announcements.

Hector: Recently, I’ve started working on setting up a web application by myself, taking care of frontend and backend development, UI/UX design, DevOps, QA and planning. It has been a very challenging experience that has allowed me to see things from each role’s perspective and understand all the details that are involved in web development.

What are you most looking forward to doing as a Voyager?

Mary Jo: As a Voyager, I am looking forward to meeting other great developers, learning new features put out by Vonage, and being a part of a fantastic community.

Matthew: I’ve enjoyed hanging out with other Voyagers and Vonage developer advocates, and I look forward to when we can do that more in-person!

Hector: I want to contribute to the adoption of technologies that allow people to connect beyond geographical boundaries.

What do you think is an exciting part of working with communication APIs?

Mary Jo: I am excited to work with voice and text APIs by Vonage and how they can be used to connect people and drive change in the world.

Matthew: I like the idea of delegating some of the hard work of communication behind a simple API. It gives me more time to focus on business logic.

Hector: The most exciting part of working with communication APIs is how easy it is to be able to interact with multiple communication channels: SMS, Video, Voice and also social media like WhatsApp and Facebook.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself!

Mary Jo: I’m a Twitch streamer who loves to code on stream and help others learn about how to develop, learn new technology, and do so in a fun way.

Matthew: I have dabbled in stand-up comedy, I used to work as a cable guy (climbing ladders and crawling through cellars), and I met my (now) wife in a church puppet troupe!

Hector: I enjoy learning new things. Whether it’s the latest trend in programming, the chords of the newest pop hit or the reasons why the chicken crossed the street, it is always exciting to discover and understand how things work.

Join Mary Jo, Matthew and Hector by applying directly or nominating a colleague, friend, or another community member to become a Voyager. Stay tuned for more Voyager spotlights to come!

The post Meet The First Voyagers Crew (Part 3) appeared first on Vonage Developer Blog.

Meet The First Voyagers Crew (Part 2)

Myrsini Koukiasa (she/her) — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 15:37:25 +0000

Last week we introduced you to the first group from our inaugural Voyagers crew.

Vonage Voyagers is a one-year program for developers who want to get their hands on new communication technologies first and be part of a community of like-minded peers who support and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity for us to reward and recognize the valuable contributors in our community.

You can become a Voyager by applying directly or nominating a colleague, friend, or another community member.

This week we’re highlighting yet another group of Voyagers and learning more about them and their interests. Please meet Joe McAlister, Michael Owolabi, and Henry Shepherdson.

Where are you based?

Joe: London, United Kingdom

Michael: I’m based in Lagos, Nigeria. The most populous state in the most populous black nation on the globe! Yes, we have the best Jollof!

Henry: Johannesburg, South Africa

Tell us about a project you worked on recently

Joe: An online version of a piece of playable theatre. We integrated Vonage video calling, meaning participants could see and talk to each other throughout the show. We had people from 12 different countries join us over the two weeks of shows.

Michael: I like to take note of my daily/weekly activities. I mostly do this with pen and paper but it was becoming a headache as I lose my personal journal from time to time. So I started working on a simple web app called “My Diarium” to directly take account of my activities where it’s safe and I can be sure of not losing it anymore. It’s not completed yet but I’m happy to be doing this for myself.

Henry: A work project I am busy with is a web application built on Laravel. It is a property rental application for short and long term lease. I’ve used Laravel Nova for the backend as well as Algolia search on the front-end. This project is a great example of what I love to do best—collaborate. We have a UX designer, a digital designer, and me (the developer) working on it. My experience has shown me that the best projects are collaborations and I generally cannot achieve on my own what I can do with a team.

What are you most looking forward to doing as a Voyager?

Joe: Meeting other developers working in this field and helping to create fun educational content.

Michael: Learning more about the various array of product offerings and their right applications by Vonage and learning from the experts behind these amazing APIs. I’m also looking forward to meeting and networking with other amazing Voyagers from around the globe.

Henry: What I am most looking forward to is learning more about the global developer community and creating content!

What do you think is an exciting part of working with communication APIs?

Joe: In my particular field of digital art/playable theatre communication APIs open up such a possibility for breaking down barriers between interaction and enabling people from all around the world to experience interactive shows which used to be geo-specific.

Michael: With the remote first culture becoming more popular and expedited by the pandemic, there are now endless opportunities working with various communication APIs and I am even more excited to be in on this with Vonage. Take for example in the education sector, as e-learning is becoming more popular so is the Video API. I can’t wait to see what other levels of awesomeness will be unlocked as remote becomes more and more popular and I’m super pumped to get started now.

Henry: There is so much development that has to take place to build a communications feature in my applications, never mind keeping up with the latest technologies. The fact that I can plug into all of that already with an API is most exciting to me.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself!

Joe: I run 5k a day

Michael: I dance a lot in my head. I’ve got some next-gen dance moves up there but how that translates to my actual dancing is what I don’t want to get into now ! I love adventure too.

Henry: I love domestic agriculture! I think that every household growing a significant portion, themselves, of the food they consume, would go a long way to improving the world.

Join Joe, Michael, and Henry by applying directly or nominating a colleague, friend, or another community member to become a Voyager. Stay tuned for more Voyager spotlights to come!

The post Meet The First Voyagers Crew (Part 2) appeared first on Vonage Developer Blog.

Meet The First Voyagers Crew (Part 1)

Myrsini Koukiasa (she/her) — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 14:23:03 +0000

Back in July, we announced the launch of Vonage Voyagers, a one-year program for developers who want to get their hands on new communication technologies first and be part of a group of like-minded peers who support and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity for us to reward and recognise the valuable contributors in our community. You can become a Voyager by applying directly or nominating a colleague, friend, or another community member.

The time has come to meet the inaugural Voyagers crew! Each week throughout November we’ll highlight a group of Voyagers and learn more about them and their interests. First up, please meet Naomi Pentrel, Victor Steven and Omer Geva.

Where are you based?

Naomi: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Victor: Lagos, Nigeria

Omer: I grew up in Boston. Currently based in Tel Aviv!

Tell us about a project you worked on recently

Naomi: Recently I played with the idea of creating MongoDB-related comics (https://www.deviantart.com/npentrel). I love visualizing technical concepts and I love giving all the components a face.

Victor: I was recently given the challenge to use a crypto library in Golang to encrypt and decrypt data. Took me a while, but through reading documentation and lots of reading, I got it working!

Omer: I have started and been maintaining a React-based coffee blog, with different features like quizzes.

What are you most looking forward to doing as a Voyager?

Naomi: I’m looking forward to meeting the other voyager crew! Developing some blog posts is also at the top of my list!

Victor: Developing content for developers.

Omer: I’m very excited to learn about the products while being able to get to know the people who made them. I’m also looking forward to collaborating with other developers and learning during the process. I think this experience is very valuable!

What do you think is an exciting part of working with communication APIs?

Naomi: One of my internships during uni was at Skype and I remember how excited I was to work on something that connects people and that me and my family had used to stay in touch when one of us wasn’t home. I think communication APIs are the next level – they allow app developers to build communication into everything easily – and that’s really powerful.

Victor: The thrill of seeing something work on real-time with little effort. For example, using the SMS API and getting a real-time notification on my phone. Connecting to an API that does all the work for me without having to reinvent the wheel.

Omer: What’s exciting about communication API’s is that they allow us to communicate with users in very creative ways, and Vonage’s APIs are great with that. Each user has a different lifestyle, and a wide range of communication APIs allows us to cater products to each one.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself!

Naomi: There are about 30 spider plants in my home!

Victor: I love networking and meeting new people. Given I’m not an extrovert, it’s amazing how easy I find it to strike up conversations.

Omer: I’m a big sports enthusiast, and I love to run long distances!

Join Naomi, Victor and Omer by applying directly or nominating a colleague, friend, or another community member to become a Voyager. Stay tuned for more Voyager spotlights to come!

The post Meet The First Voyagers Crew (Part 1) appeared first on Vonage Developer Blog.

Introducing the Vonage Voyagers Developer Champions Program

Myrsini Koukiasa (she/her) — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 06:16:59 +0000

We’re so excited to announce the launch of our new developer champions program, Vonage Voyagers.

Through our community and event support program, developer education activities, and online platforms, we’ve had the pleasure of meeting many developers from around the globe who use our APIs. We’re constantly amazed by the ways they use our products to build communications into their applications and inspire their communities to do the same. We decided it was time to build a deeper connection with our community as well as reward and recognise our valuable contributors.

Who Are Vonage Voyagers?

Voyagers are enthusiastic members of the Vonage developer community. They use Vonage APIs to build awesome applications across various platforms and languages, that impact their teams and communities. They keep up to date with the latest API developments, and they’re eager to share their learnings with others.

Vonage Voyagers is a one-year program for developers who want to get their hands on new communication technologies first and be part of a group of like-minded peers who support and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity for us to reward and recognise the valuable contributors in our community; those who write or stream content, provide feedback on our documentation, help others on online platforms, and do many other inspiring things.

To become a Voyager, you can apply directly or nominate a colleague, friend, or another community member.

What Do Voyagers Do and What Benefits Do They Get?

As an official member of the Voyagers crew, you can participate in online hackdays to provide product feedback, create content showcasing how you’re using Vonage APIs together with other technologies, contribute to our Open Source projects and provide feedback on developer documentation and more. We also want Voyagers to let us know how we can support their developer communities.

In return, you’ll get access to:

Pre-release products
Mentorship and learning opportunities with Vonage developer advocates, product managers, engineers and more
Training to improve your content creation skills and access to our platforms to expand your reach
Cool limited edition swag
An invitation to an exclusive Voyagers Summit

This is just the beginning, who knows what other opportunities may come about in the future.

What Are the Requirements to Participate in the Program?

To participate in the Vonage Voyagers program, you must:

Be fluent in written and spoken English (we’ll use English in all program communications, but other languages are, of course, a plus!)
Be over 18 years old and have a Vonage API account
Show how you’ve used Vonage APIs to create content for your peers or to build communications into your projects
Demonstrate expertise within a specific developer community
Display empathy and understanding when trying to help others grasp technological concepts or solve issues

Want to Learn More?

If you have any questions about the program or want to learn more about becoming a Voyager, please get in touch at voyagers@vonage.com

Interested in applying? Submit an application form!
Have someone in mind you’d like to nominate? Submit a nomination form!

Supporting Communities to Go Online

Myrsini Koukiasa (she/her) — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 16:29:19 +0000

In our effort to support developer communities around the world, we’re excited to announce two ways in which we are helping groups host events and engage with their community members online:

The ability to host an event on our Vonage Virtual Event Space on Remo, an online networking event platform
Social Cafe, an open-source demo for communities to build their own online environment which we also host an instance

Both answer a core challenge in running online events – having meaningful conversations between attendees instead of just broadcasting.

Hosting Events in the Vonage Virtual Event Space

Remo is a platform that does a great job of creating a conference-like experience. We’ve called our Remo account the Vonage Virtual Event Space.

As well as broadcasting to your room of attendees and interactive Q&A sessions, it supports face-to-face conversations between your guests through video calls. On the virtual floor-plan, people can move around tables and drop in and out of different video calls. This way, you don’t miss the hallway track!

With the Vonage Virtual Event Space, we can host up to 800 attendees at no cost. Our team will run the event from a technical and moderation standpoint, so you can just focus on bringing your communities and speakers together. We’ll also publish your event on our Community page and promote it through our social media.

What we ask from you is to have a Code of Conduct (CoC) in place for your online event and that the event is free of charge to your attendees. If you don’t have an existing CoC we ask that you use the Vonage Developer Community one.

If you’re a developer event organiser, community leader, or member and want to host an event on our Vonage Virtual Event Space, please complete this form at least two weeks before your event, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Using the Social Cafe Demo

We also wanted to offer a scalable solution to every community, as we may not be able to host all event requests for our Vonage Virtual Event Space.

The Social Cafe Demo is an open-source project ideal for communities wanting a social space or study groups. You could use it to run a networking event for your tech community (or after an online event), host study groups for your educational community, or simply host separate conversations for your local community who still wants to talk in a time of isolation.

Every event lobby has several tables, with each table being a video call, powered by the Vonage Video API. People can freely move between tables to chat with different community members.

You can submit a pull request to our repository to add your event to our hosted version at no cost or follow the steps to host your own version in five minutes. We’ve also written a tutorial if you want to know more about how the Social Cafe demo was put together or build your own from scratch.

Have questions? You can send us an email at community@vonage.com. We are continuously inspired by the work done by our community and hope to support you in moving your activities online.

My Journey in Tech as a Noncoder

Myrsini Koukiasa (she/her) — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 00:44:10 +0000

In a Previous Life...

I was very lucky to grow up in Athens, Greece, with parents that were not afraid to let me tag along to almost everything they did. Movies, book fairs, concerts, and, weirdly specific, environmental awareness campaigns that involved sailing across the Aegean sea and handing out flyers to tourists. But more about that later.

My first big event was a Stevie Wonder concert. Sadly, the only thing I remember is that I ate a chocolate eclair (apparently that’s the type of snack you got at stadium gigs in Greece back in the day) before I started crying for reasons unknown and had to be dropped off at my grandmother’s who lived nearby. You’d definitely not see me cry ten years later when you’d find me organising concerts and events at my high school as part of my student union duties. I loved switching up the school to provide an immersive experience for my fellow classmates and other students from our community. I gave them what they wanted, which made them and subsequently me happy.

Later on in life, my love for all things planning and events led me to do a Masters in International Events Management in Leeds. I learned a lot during my time there; from building strategies to operational execution and from creativity to health and safety, we examined events simple and complex, from corporate meetings all the way to the Olympics.

Before we continue, let’s make a detour back to my childhood. My parents were, and still are, active in the environmental activism community in Greece. When I was 5 years old, they co-founded The Mediterranean SOS Network; an organisation focused on raising awareness on issues like water conservation and climate change whilst encouraging dialogue amongst communities across the Mediterranean and Europe. Volunteering from a young age introduced me to the feeling of reward that community work provides. It also helped me develop a sense of empathy after seeing how people that believed in a common cause were able to come together feel empowered to spark change.

Fast forward to my return to Athens after completing my Masters and I’m the Events and Campaigns Manager at said NGO, managing to combine my two passions and support and organisation I’ve volunteered for all my life. I worked on scientific conferences, national awareness campaigns and environmental education programs. What I most enjoyed was tackling global topics and translating them into actionable tasks organisations or individuals could do to impact their local communities. I was no longer just a participant but a facilitator. I won’t forget a series of challenging yet influential events we run in Crete to encourage dialogue between farmers, government officials and teachers as part of an EU-funded program for the installment of a pioneering olive grove irrigation system. As I completed my fourth year at the NGO, as rewarding as my job was, I kept feeling the time had come to tackle new challenges.

How I Ended up in Tech

I decided to move to London with the goal of finding a job within the UK’s thriving event industry. I slept on airbeds at friends houses and applied to so many jobs I lost count. A couple of weeks into my search, I came across an event specialist job listing from PayPal. They were looking for a creative, geeky and community-oriented person to work on their global hackathon series, BattleHack. At the time, I had no idea what a hackathon was but it sure looked cool. Coupled with the fact that PayPal - later Braintree - Developer themed BattleHack around social good, I was hopeful I had a shot based on my non-profit experience and innate inclination to geekiness. So I put my geeky hat (metaphorically) on and wrote the best cover letter I had ever written.

Turns out experience in tech wasn’t necessary, and within a month of moving to the UK, I miraculously landed a job planning global events and campaigns for developers and startups! I joined an ops and comms team of five dynamic women and got the chance to help plan hackathons across three continents, create experiences at large tech events, work on special video projects and more.

Working in developer relations (devrel) was the job I’ve always wanted but never knew existed. The camaraderie and support between my colleagues and the relationships we built with tech communities had me hooked. Although I couldn’t write a line of code other than some HTML, I felt I could understand the needs of our community and help address them. To see the impact we made through hackers’ ideas coming to life at hackathons was enormously gratifying.

For the next step in my journey, I decided I wanted to apply and share the knowledge I’ve gained with a specific audience in tech - students. I joined Major League Hacking (MLH) to help run hackathons and thought leadership events for students in the US and EMEA. As the official student hackathon league, MLH empowers more than 65,000 students each year to join anything from technical workshops to weekend-long hackathons while encouraging innovation and community building. Needless to say, I felt quickly at home and inspired by the passionate and active student tech community. I met amazing young people who ran computer clubs at their schools, organised 2,000-people hackathons, promoted inclusivity and diversity and had the maturity and confidence to share their learnings with the community at events such as Hackcon.

What I’m up to Now

Following MLH and after a short time working as a communications and tech event consultant, I felt the itch to get back into devrel. Which is what led me to join Nexmo, now Vonage!

I’ve been part of the Community Engagement team that sits within devrel for about a year and a half. We look after both our external and internal communities. We work with our developer advocates to support tech communities around the world by, amongst many things, sponsoring events, delivering training workshops on our communication APIs and funding scholarship opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech. This has probably been the role where I’ve had to keep my empathy mindset switched on at all times, as this is our team’s core value. And it’s been greatly rewarding. I’ve never before been part of a team that supports each other and their communities quite like I see our team does.

One thing I’m proud of helping run is an internal hackathon series our team organises, called OneHack. We run hackathons across Vonage office locations with the help of many incredible colleagues across the company. The aim is to encourage innovation, promote teamwork and help us get much more hands-on with our own products while contributing to the company culture. We’ve now had around 40 projects created at OneHack events. I feel as if I’ve gone full circle to my high-school days, but instead of concerts, I help plan two-day long hackathons for my colleagues.

What I’m Looking Forward to This Year

I still can’t write code, however, I’ve recently worked on reshaping some processes for our team and got to use Zapier for integrations between apps we use. It was unexpectedly satisfying! This year, I’m looking forward to working on an ambassador program to help build even better connections with our developer community. More to be revealed in the upcoming months...