Airkit

Developer Advocate

We at Airkit are committed to helping our customers build the finest Customer Experiences possible. To that end we have a team devoted to ensuring our customers have all the resources they need to feel successful building and deploying our apps, our Developer Advocate team.

Our Developer Advocate team has several key responsibilities. We are responsible for our training programs, both internal and external. Directly teaching people how to use the Airkit studio and get their apps published. The Developer Advocate team is also responsible for generating the documentation that goes along with our lessons. We are responsible for building support.airkit.com. Some of this material is programmatically generated and other parts are lessons and instructions written by the team. Our last prevue is about enabling our customers to work with partners. Airkit is a great platform for customer interactions, but often times our customers want to pipe the information gathered in Airkit to a 3rd party system of record. We are responsible for writing the custom connections to these third parties.

As Developer Advocates we interface with many different teams on the Airkit side. We talk to the Platform Engineering team about new features or usability enhancements in the Studio. We interface with our Sales Teams to explain good use cases for our product. We talk to our Product Team about features that would enhance our productivity and app building. We work with our Marketing team to bring trainings to potential clients. We even act as an escalation for our post sales building teams.

The Developer Advocate team is here to help our customers build their experiences. This means that if you are building an application and run into issues we have a full set of resources here to help you finish your project. We are here to support you. If you need information on how a specific component works, we can write the documentation for you. If you have a team of developers that need some tutorials on our platform we can organize a teaching session for your team. If you want to build out a custom integration with your own custom system, we can architect and build that for you.

Our Developer Advocate team is a strong balance of software engineering and teaching. We are both builders and teachers. With our roll in the company we also have great visibility into many parts of the company that not all other teams see. This brings up some very fun and exciting challenges for us.

Here is a list of some our past accomplishments:

  • Building and deploying our first client projects.
  • Spearheading the construction of some of our largest client projects.
  • Writing the super useful MERGE_OBJECTS() Airscript function.
  • Writing out the documentation for our developer website.
  • Leading our first Flight School.
  • Producing our first Youtube Tutorial Video
  • Writing our SFTP integration
  • Running internal studio training for all of our new hires.

While this is just a small list of some of the projects the have done since our team was founded over a year ago, we have some very fun projects upcoming. We will be continuing to improve and add new features to our documentation. In addition we will be wiring more and more of documentation into the development experience. This means you will have access to the information you need as you are building your apps without having to head to the reference pages at our developer site.

In addition to providing these resources we will also be looking to offer more training opportunities to our customers to get them more comfortable with the capabilities of studio. We hope to do this via small group trainings, or potentially appearing at conferences and events.

The last, and perhaps one of the most important way we plan to help our customers is by continuing to build new applications in the platform. Using this new platform features we can make suggestions to our Product and Engineering teams about enhancing the studio.

Lastly, we want to ask for your help. We are here to make our developers lives easier. If there is something you think would help you build faster on our platform, please leave a comment below, or reach out to support@airkit.com with a Developer Advocate team.

Articles Written

Team

  • Proposed, designed, and helped create the first set of Airkit Flash Cards
  • Countless Interviews
  • Worked with HR to ideate different team initiatives
  • Have Cross team 1:1s with leaders like Spencer and John Kepp to better understand how the DA team can positively impact the other teams.
  • Lead New Hire Onboarding 101 sessions and welcome new people to the team
  • Sparking conversation with new hires.
  • Highlighting other teams accomplishments
  • Support and calling out members on my team for great work

Impact

  • Built the first prototype for email as channel for hack day, eventually converted to a Data Flow Operation
  • Launched our Youtube Channel and first video
  • MetLife
    • Data Records
    • PDF Validation and Automation
    • Validation and verification of Remitence Data, but PDF and StarTrak
    • Working with Post Sales
    • Taking over for Adam during vacation week
    • Taking over for Nathan during vacation week
    • Working through testing plans
    • Physician work for each quesiton
    • Continual support of Jake and others post completion of my work
  • Docs Written:
    • App API
    • Asset Properties
    • Working With Data
    • Creating a Salesforce Lead
  • Labat Apps:
    • Yoga Studio
    • Idea Suggestor App
    • 1-800 Number for Airkit
    • Beer Review App
  • Created the Company’s first Open Source Project in form of TM bundle (much work to be done here)
  • Adapter Work:
    • Slack
    • SFTP
    • Helped Amitab with box
  • Documentation Site Accomplishments:
    • Wrote the first node script for parsing out info from json schemas
    • Worked on the Hack Day for the doc site
    • Expose our documentation to the Studio, both through the ? button and by providing markdown for previewing function details on hover.
  • Wrote document on the DA team that I was able to to give to Elliot for recruitment purposes
  • Started the Labat Sticker Program
  • Helped direct the content and the team around Airkit Flight School.
  • Gave the first session of AK 102
  • Proposed and attended culture corner
  • Served as a point of training and integration with the 729 and Premier Property Janitor Project
  • Built out the Org Creation App. People no longer are bothered to create an organization.
  • Proposed the idea, planned the execution and oversaw the completion of the MetLife Debreif conversation
  • Referred 6 candidates that made it to the manager interview. 3 of whom are now teammates.
  • HALO Project:
    • Designed and produces the swag and backer card
    • Hyped the Projects during the Monday Morning Meeting
    • Worked with anyone who asked on getting their apps created

Moments

  • Printed up 3 x 5 ft posters of Ehikian
  • Continually help with taking photos at team events
  • Make an active effort to share photos at least once a month for Team & Moments
  • Built KyleKeepPaice.com
  • Designed the Holographic AK stickers
  • Jokes before Demos
  • Relationship with Stephen, to show others that Stephen is approachable
  • Pirate Day planning and attire
  • Fabian’s Cilantro Mason Jar Project

Excellence

  • Developed the Theme Import and Export for Hack Day. Went to prod the next week.
  • Wrote articles for our blog (1 published)
  • Covid App in a week