Introducing Developer Evangelist, Enterprise Gyasi Calhoun

Introducing Developer Evangelist, Enterprise Gyasi Calhoun

It was 2017, my last Summer internship as a developer before starting my senior year as a computer science graduate in hopes of becoming a full time software engineer. Senior year of college has always been a special moment for me. It’s when I became passionate about frontend development and found a new love with cinematography and vlogging. I even purchased my first camera in the Fall of 2017 and that’s where the whole tech-software engineer-social media influencer journey started.

Throughout grade school I never really had the chance to pursue art as a hobby because I spent so much time playing sports, in addition to a very – very – short amount of time being a college football player. In hindsight, it was a great decision to focus on school opposed to sports in college. Honestly, I don’t think that I would be where I am today, nor had the freedom to become a YouTuber.

By my senior year of college, video editing became a new sport. With each video I could push myself to new limits while also stepping away from the world and into this new hobby of storytelling. This journey reinforced what I already knew, that storytelling is one of the most powerful communication tools because we all have access to one – our own. All of our experiences and the stories of how we got to where we are today are what make us unique.

Documenting my own story surprisingly launched me into becoming a content creator and programmer with over 300,000 followers. (Feel free to check out my YouTube channel at “https://www.youtube.com/c/gyasilinje”.)

Each video granted behind the scenes access to my programming journey and the struggles and success of walking into those new doors – working as a software engineer in healthcare, digital marketing, and banking have all taught me something unique and valuable – even if I didn’t see the value in real time.

As a full stack developer working in healthcare, I continuously had to think critically about the customer’s experience and compliance. As a frontend developer in digital marketing I had to ensure that every webpage we built was accessible and responsive, to make sure all our customers had a good user experience. Working in fin-tech, investment banking taught me how to be more of a T-shape engineer – an engineer that has a wide breadth of development knowledge but is an expert in their stack.

I am extremely excited to join Twilio as an Enterprise Developer Evangelist with Flex. I’m extremely fortunate to be working at a company where unique roles like developer evangelism and advocacy even exist.. Although excited, I did have some hesitancy in walking through this new door. It kind of felt like making the decision to leave college sports all over again.

See as a programmer, it is common to feel that you only bring value by writing efficient code and pushing out as many new features as possible. So as you can imagine, transitioning to a role that doesn’t require that wasn’t easy. I’d be lying if I told you it was. It took some time for me to realize that completing Jira tickets and merging pull requests is no longer my priority, but providing services that help and guide our customers to the right solutions for their business problems is.

Thinking back to why I became a programmer, I always found joy in building services that improve the lives of an end user. All of those experiences are also what led me to become a developer evangelist.

Sometimes, I think it’s easy to overlook the benefit of doing things you don’t necessarily like as a developer. whether that’s writing CSS, implementing tests, or setting up your Jenkins pipeline, all work has some undesirable parts. A friend of mine once said that, “You’ll only figure out what you like by doing something you don’t like.''

I’ve never let the hard things hold me back so I’m looking forward to this new field to play on and what lessons it will bring. As a developer evangelist, I’m most looking forward to using my passion of content creation and working cross functionally with product and engineering teams to help customers write their own story with Flex.

Essentially, every developer role I experienced led me to this point where I now can take all those experiences and lessons learned and apply them to this new role. I hope that each developer I interact with feels empowered and inspired to create for good.:

I'd love to connect with you:

• Instagram: @GyasiLinje
• YouTube: @GyasiLinje
• GitHub: Gyasi11