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

I’m excited to be looking for my next role as a Developer Experience Engineer. Here are five reasons why you should hire me.

🥳 Good news!

I am now working at Sentry as Senior Developer Advocate.

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:

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:

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.

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Salma is looking straight at you, sat at her desk. Behind her is a wooden wall with VHS style art on it depicting HTML and CSS in VHS cover art form, there's a bit of a shelf behind her on the right where you can see a plant and a GitHub stars trophy. In the foreground there is a microphone. She is folding her arms, wearing a black high next top and thick rimmed black glasses, sitting on a cream chair that you can see the back of. To the left behind her there is a glimpse of a pink patterned chair and another plant.

Salma Alam-Naylor

I'm a software engineer and developer educator. I make stuff on the internet on YouTube and Twitch. I help developers build cool stuff by writing blog posts, making videos, coding live on the internet, and publishing open source projects. Head of Developer Education at nordcraft.com.

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