A New Journey as Head of Developer Relations at Appwrite

#devrel #appwrite #baas #dx

Today, I start at Appwrite as Head of Developer Relations, a role tasked with advocating developer success and experience in addition to growing the open-source community.

After over three years at Cloudinary, which I joined as a senior developer advocate and advanced to be director of developer advocacy, the start of this new adventure is bittersweet. It was hard to walk away from that wonderful company, team, and opportunity. I’ll miss the people I worked with and will for sure keep tabs on what the future holds for Cloudinary.

I'm so excited to be joining Appwrite. Appwrite’s founder and CEO, Eldad Fux, is a software engineer at heart who has worked closely with developers in the open-source community for years. He aims at making Appwrite a developer-first company and building the best developer experience. This aligns with my values and beliefs of what constitutes successful open-source projects, not to mention my lifelong dream of being part of an up-and-coming startup. Which is why I’m thrilled to be joining the DevRel team, not only to work with very talented individuals, but to scale and grow the team.

Appwrite in a nutshell

An Open Source Firebase alternative, Appwrite, was incorporated soon after its Seed Round after September 2021. Appwrite provides developers with all the core APIs required to build any application. Appwrite provides REST and Realtime APIs for Database, Storage, Authentication, and Functions with support for over ten coding languages.

Key milestones:

As of April 2022, Appwrite’s open-source community, which is the fastest growing project in GitHub’s history, has almost 21,000 GitHub stars, an 840% increase in two years.
Appwrite has over 150,000 developers in their community, along with 550 contributors to their codebase.
Appwrite now boasts almost 8,300 Discord members, all of whom joined in the last two years.
Appwrite recently announced its Series-A round with plans to expand product development and further support the open-source community.

My open-source roots

Open source is a key part of my "origin story" and my calling. Shortly after joining the tech industry in 2011 as a developer building web applications with open-source tools, I attended my first open-source conference called “Joomla Day NYC” where I met a contributor who invited me to join the team. I learned about testing bug patches and the process of submitting a Pull Request to an open-source project. I also had the opportunity to work with the Extensions Directory team, Production Leadership Team, and the Board of Directors. In addition, I’ve been a bit part of many different open-source developer communities by speaking/attending conferences in PHP, JavaScript, Vue.js, API communities, and too many to count. Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to contributing to and connecting with open-source communities.

So, the journey begins. Stay tuned for Appwrite’s upcoming initiatives, community announcements, and features. Appwrite will be doing endless impactful and big things, and will be one of the best tech companies ever!

I look forward to staying in touch and continuing to learn from you all.

🐦 My feed on Twitter 💜
🐦 Appwrite on Twitter 💜
⭐️ Appwrite on GitHub
💻 Learn with Jason episode on building apps with Appwrite