Hello world! I'm Michael Jolley and I'm super excited to be joining Deepgram as the Head of Developer Relations. Most of my career was spent building with .NET and JavaScript, but today I consider myself a polyglot developer and love continually learning new languages, frameworks, and platforms.
Where it Began
I'm sure you've experienced one of those "Ah-ha!" moments. They aren't exclusive to code; maybe you were learning to cook or learning a new language. You finally hit that point where it "clicked" and you felt that rush of pride and accomplishment.
My career started writing custom software for clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. I spent nearly 20 years building and leading teams on some cool projects. As my career progressed, I moved into management roles and spent more and more time investing in the team members I was leading; helping them discover and learn new skills that would "level up" their personal and professional lives.
Looking back, I gained a lot of positive self-gratification from seeing clients use the software I wrote to empower their businesses, but that paled in comparison to the satisfaction of helping others have those "Ah-ha!" moments. So in 2018, I started moving towards developer advocacy and, in 2019, landed my first developer relations role at Nexmo (Vonage.)
So now, here I am... just a Developer Advocate... standing in front of developers... asking them to love me.
Full Transparency
Okay, so although this post is dated for November, I technically started with Deepgram back in April of this year. What have I been doing? In short, laying foundation and hiring. We've assembled an amazing team whose focus is on helping developers, like you, succeed. Whether you're using Deepgram's APIs or not, we want you to have those "Ah-ha!" moments.
That's why, in the coming months, you'll start to see us creating a ton of content, hanging out in communities, hosting hack-a-thons, and doing everything we can to help you level up your technical and soft skills. I get seriously excited every time I think about some of the things we've got planned. Hope to see you all along the journey!
If you have any feedback about this post, or anything else around Deepgram, we'd love to hear from you. Please let us know in our GitHub discussions .