BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Karen White

Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.

We recently sat down with BigCommerce’s Developer Advocate, Karen White, to talk about how she’s working to enhance the developer experience and about leveling up as a self-taught developer.

Hi Karen, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

I consider BigCommerce to be the place where I really built my career. Before coming to BigCommerce, I had gone back to school to get a degree in technical writing, and that’s really the first time that I had the opportunity to start doing some web development. I didn’t expect my programming classes to be some of my favorites because I think there’s this misconception that if you aren’t building computers by the time you’re in grade school then coding isn’t for you. I had never done any kind of programming before, but from my first classes in HTML, CSS — and later JavaScript — I realized that writing code could put you in the zone, where you suddenly realize that you’ve been immersed in a project for hours.

I started at BigCommerce as a Technical Support agent and then moved to a role on our Community team, moderating the Developer Community. It was a great opportunity for me because it was a brand new role when I stepped into it, and I had a lot of freedom to determine the direction of the role and our Developer Community. I really wanted to make the Developer Community a space that developers came back to for reasons outside of just getting their questions answered. The types of problems I was helping to solve allowed me to grow my skills exponentially in a fairly short amount of time.

Later, I was promoted into the Developer Advocate role, which was kind of a dream job for me. As Developer Advocate, I’m helping BigCommerce think about developer experience in a more high level, strategic way. There are a lot of things baked into that: documentation, API design, community & support. It’s a great role for someone who’s interested in a variety of disciplines from programming to writing to public speaking.

What does it mean to be a Developer Advocate?

My role is to represent the interests of the developer ecosystem to our internal teams, so the work that I do tends to be very cross-functional. I might be meeting with our Product team to talk through developer feedback that we’ve received or interviewing a developer to talk to them about their work building on BigCommerce.

A lot of my time is spent making sure we’re providing the right resources to make developers successful, and lately I’ve been working to launch the BigCommerce Developer Blog (which you’re reading right now!) The blog serves a few purposes, but one of the main ones is to provide content that complements our documentation. When we do a product release that matters to developers — like the Widgets API — I help make sure that we’re announcing it here on the Dev Blog in a way that kind of encapsulates what’s important and gets you excited.

I also get out of the office to meet our developer community face-to-face and talk about what’s new and exciting for BigCommerce developers, and also how we’re thinking about challenges like API design. You can catch me at one of our Partner Summits or at API the Docs, DrupalCon, and Nordic APIs Austin API Summit.

What’s an important problem that you enjoy solving at BigCommerce?

This is a really exciting time to be on the Developer Relations team at BigCommerce because we’re doing some big things as a company that rely on our partnership with the developer ecosystem. There’s a need to offer a level of flexibility to merchants that isn’t possible with a closed system. For a variety of reasons, you might need to integrate with a CMS or some other kind of front-end presentation layer, or third-party systems on the back end. We’re at this inflection point where Open SaaS — and the APIs that make that possible — are really core to our mission and the direction that we’re going in as a company.

It becomes really important, then, that we’re providing resources — documentation and other types of content — that enable developers to build these things. It’s also important to have an open line of communication with developers so that from a product standpoint we make sure we’re building the right thing. And then, we have to ensure that as we grow and scale as a company, that we’re being good citizens within our ecosystem and lifting up our Partners as well. Figuring out how we all move forward together is one of my most interesting challenges right now.

What projects are you most passionate about working on at BigCommerce?

The Developer Blog is actually my favorite thing to work on right now! It allows me to pick a topic that I think is interesting but don’t necessarily consider myself an expert on, and then really go deep researching that topic in order to be able to explain it to an audience. I recently wrote a post on Continuous Delivery and automated deployment, which was super interesting, and then I have a few more posts coming out soon on PWAs and software testing. It’s basically an excuse to pick a topic that I’m really curious about and then interview someone who knows a lot more about it than me. It’s all under the pretext of research for the article, but the truth is I just want to find out how things work!

Which resources do you pursue to stay current on industry news?

Aside from the couple of classes that I took in college, I’m pretty much a self-taught developer. I’ve either learned on the job or through online resources, so I’m very big on seeking out information from a variety of sources to keep expanding my knowledge and stay current. One of the biggest drawbacks of being self-taught is that you don’t know what you don’t know, so I think that being hungry about seeking out information helps to provide that broader view.

I’ve been really big on podcasts lately. Some of my favorites are Syntax, The Changelog, JS Party, CodeNewbie, Frontend Happy Hour, and The Bike Shed. It’s incredible how much quality content is out there. I also love the community at Dev.to. They feature some excellent tutorials and it’s a friendly and inclusive space. I subscribe to a million email newsletters, so I’m always finding interesting articles from Medium, Smashing Magazine, or CSS Tricks. And Twitter is amazing for finding what’s new and interesting.

Are there any tools that you use as a developer that have changed the way you work or made you more productive?

VS Code has a lot of features that just make it a pleasure to use. The integrated terminal is really nice for me because you don’t have to context-switch between windows, and you’re always automatically in the current working directory. Also, built-in support for Emmet and extensions like ESLint save me a lot of time. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface with everything VS Code can do — I’m always discovering neat new things in the command palette.

This might seem like a small thing, but really understanding GitHub and Chrome Dev Tools was a big leap forward for me when I was first getting into development. Those two tools are where I spend a lot of my time trying to answer a question in the code and getting to the point where the tool feels like an extension of yourself is pretty important for productivity.

What advice would you give to others of your background?

The biggest piece of advice I would offer is to do things that scare you. When you’re self-taught and trying to establish yourself in the tech industry, there are going to be a lot of “firsts,” and doing something that you’ve never done before can be uncomfortable — especially if it involves public speaking!

Surround yourself with people who will allow you to make mistakes (because nobody is perfect the first time), but don’t use imperfection as an excuse to not lean in to new experiences. Being uncomfortable means that you’re pushing past something that allows you to grow. And when it’s over and you can breathe again, you‘ll be ready for the next opportunity!

We’d like to thank Karen for giving us her time and sharing her story. Follow her on Twitter @karen_pwhite