Zürich, June 9th 2021
After more than eight years working with the Google Developer Relations team, this Friday is my last day. Starting next Monday June 14th, I will join the Machine Learning Site Reliability Engineering team at Google. So after all no big deal... or maybe it is.
TL;DR
Well, it has been a long ride for me.
Since 2004, quite before joining Google DevRel, I have been working driving the success of open source software products and creating a thriving Open Innovation Ecosystem of developers mainly in Europe, LATAM and US.
Even before we had a name for it... so you might wonder what Developer Relations is about. Let me explain a little bit.
I strongly believe that inherent self-organisation, scalability and sustainability of Open Innovation Ecosystems has turned out to be a critical mechanism supporting innovation. GNU/Linux, Firefox, Android, Kubernetes, Kaggle or Tensorflow are just a few examples of open platforms. You can get an idea of how huge is this taking a look of the CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape, gathering contributions from companies with market cap of $15.37T and funding of $16.8B.
So actually, you probably agree with me that open data, open source and developers communities are good not only for the tech industry, but also benefit the world at large. But even more importantly, currently many many companies also agree on that and they have organisations working with developers communities and support open source.
Therefore, during these years, working in different companies, I was (1) nurturing technological influencers and communities everywhere to boost technology advocacy, adoption, quality, and perception; and (2) identifying needs and perspectives across developers identities, backgrounds, viewpoints, and cultures, building reliable loops into products teams, programs, and policy strategies.
This is what I call Developer Relations and the truth is I have still a strong commitment with a big chunk of these thoughts. So what then?
As some of you might know, last year I finished my PhD [R1][R2][R3], researching software quality processes in open developer ecosystems. Since then, I was more and more convinced that in order to improve my understanding of developer communities, I should look for a position with a deeper involvement in the engineering processes and enterprise developers.
Machine Learning SRE at Google, with new TPUs, software stacks and massive ML models coming, is one of the best places to participate in the future of computing, and thus in this new role I will be able to develop my passion for the technical ecosystem up to a new level, expanding my activities to an entire new area.
Actually I truly believe that we will be able to scale up software engineering organisations thanks to developer relations. So maybe this is not a farewell, just a see you.
The challenge, no doubt, is huge so wish me luck!
Almost wrapping up, let me share some funny facts of my time in Developer Relations:
- Since 2014, 8000 Km running around the world.
- Since 2016, 1.130.000 Km, travelling for 1350 days visiting 36 countries and 175 cities.
- Public speaking for more than +20000 developers all over the world about communities, cloud, ML, android and computer science.
- Camino de Santiago with GDG organisers: 5 days hiking +130 km (GDG Peregrinos’ Tech). All participants are still alive, although with minor injuries, mostly psychological .
- Four editions of the Almo’s awards preceding NFTs. These are high value collectible swag 👽 👾 for GDG organisers.
Last but not least, my last words of gratitude for all those who were part of my community these years. An amazing number of developers, from a huge variety of contexts, backgrounds and countries: I was fortunate to meet you all, you made of me a better human being.
As mentioned, I am not going far, so you can still reach me at Google mail address and if you want to keep posted about my daily experiences, follow me on Twitter or Linkedin.
Thank you!
