overview
After seven months as a frontend engineer on the core website team, I made a lateral move into Developer Relations. I wanted to apply my engineering background to technical education, translating Ably's complex real-time messaging platform into clear, actionable resources for other developers.
The focus was on developer experience (DX) and education — explaining technical concepts, building working JavaScript prototypes, and advocating for JAMstack and WebSocket architectures through high-quality technical content.
what i did
Code as technical content
Engineered prototype JavaScript apps as the primary artefact for developer education. Each demo was a working application demonstrating a specific Ably feature — WebSockets, presence, history, channels, pub/sub — written cleanly enough to serve as the reference implementation for the accompanying documentation.
Developer advocacy and tutorials
Authored developer-facing engineering tutorials anchored to the prototypes. I focused on integrating real-time infrastructure with modern web architectures, including Netlify Functions, Netlify Identity, Netlify Edge Functions, and various static site generators.
Technical concept explanation
Produced technical explainer content to demystify real-time protocols. I authored and presented comprehensive guides on the WebSocket protocol, publish/subscribe messaging patterns, and serverless edge integrations, establishing a standard for Ably's educational materials.
Internal enablement
Codified the technical content production process in internal documentation, ensuring other engineers could reliably produce high-quality tutorials and demonstrations without friction.
published articles
technical presentations
Publish & Subscribe with JavaScript and Ably — An explainer of the pub/sub concept followed by a narrated code demonstration building a simple app with the Ably SDK.
The WebSocket Handbook by Ably — A walkthrough of the Ably WebSocket handbook, covering the protocol, use cases, and how Ably builds on top of it.
Building a realtime quiz app with AWS & Ably — A full tutorial walking through building a realtime quiz application using AWS services and the Ably platform.