5 reasons you should hire me as your next developer experience engineer

I have 10 years industry experience

I started my tech career as a full stack developer, and chose front end development as my specialism. After a few years honing my craft, I moved into a number of tech lead positions, working on the modernisation of a large and established bespoke e-commerce platform, and architecting and delivering a number of greenfield projects.

I did a lot of soul-searching during the first lockdown of 2020, and in 2021 I began my career in developer relations to bring together my varied experience in music, performing, teaching and tech.

View my full career history on LinkedIn.

I didn’t do a tech degree

I have a First Class Honours degree in composition from the Royal Northern College of Music (UK), a Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching, and Qualified Teacher Status (UK). I’ve always been a performer, confident in front of an audience of all ages, and I bring this to tech by delivering engaging conference talks, live coding streams and video content.

I began my career in tech by seizing an opportunity and learning on the job. As a result I have a deep empathy for beginners, career-changers and anyone who’s just figuring things out.

Learn more about my experience (including a brief career as musical comedian) in my episode of the GitHub README podcast, published in December 2021.

It’s always awesome working with Salma! She’s a creative teacher, willing to learn in public, and just incredibly authentic in everything she does. The whitep4nth3r community is SO fun to be a part of! — Brad Van Vugt, Battlesnake

I span disciplines and departments by default

I’ve worked in engineering organisations, marketing departments and product agencies, and as a developer experience engineer, I get great results by acting as a bridge between these disciplines.

As a DX Engineer, I will:

• 🛣️ road-test your new product features,

• 🗣️ gather feedback from the developer community,

• 📝 submit detailed issues for improvement,

• 👩🏻‍💻 write code and submit a PR,

• 📺 create engaging content to tell the world about what’s possible with your amazing new tech,

• 📊 and work with you on analysing the data to strategise on what’s next.

I’m not just a content creator

As a developer experience engineer, I don’t make content for the sake of content, and as a developer, I love exploring new tech, stretching its limits, and seeing how creative I can be.

Everything I create and publish comes out of deep product exploration, problem-solving for real-world use cases, and the desire to inspire developers of all abilities to build cool stuff with tech.

Check out:

• My projects on GitHub

• My blog posts

• Conference and meetup talks

Salma is a builder. You can't help but get excited about dev when she's the one teaching. She's one of the first people I direct companies to when they're looking to make a better connection to web devs. — Jason Lengstorf, Learn with Jason

I get people excited about coding

At the heart of everything I do is a desire to make people feel good through having fun. Whether it’s through helping you learn a new technical concept, inspiring you to explore cutting edge technology, or by building a silly website to make you laugh — I’ll make you remember me. And when I work for you, people will get excited by your product.

Some examples of how much fun you can have with code:

• A random code generator to learn and teach How to build, test and release a node module in ES6 (and if you google build npm module es6 you'll see my blog post as the top result!)

• An HTTP status code quiz to show what you can do without a front end framework

• A 90s-inspired website to show what you can do with CSS and a single HTML file

• I used ChatGPT to try and create websites without writing any code

I love to showcase all of this as a partnered streamer on Twitch to an engaged audience of over 9k followers, complemented by an active Discord server. At the time of writing, I'm ranked in the top 0.68% of streamers, despite live coding on a platform that's primarily targeted at gamers.

Salma’s energy is contagious and it shows through her passion teaching developers through engaging content. Highly recommend Salma to anyone looking to get an actionable and engaging story in front of developers. — Brian Douglas, OpenSauced

Contact me

I'm keeping an open mind about the type of company and technology space I'd like to work with next.

Learn more about me on my about page, and email me at whitep4nth3r@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter.