BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Mikaela Rodriguez

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.

Hi Mikaela, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

I grew up on the Mexican border in Laredo, Texas. My dad became a migrant farm laborer when he was a young boy, and my mom is a butcher’s daughter. Both of them went on to earn degrees and obtain professional jobs. They are a huge source of motivation and inspiration in my life.

Growing up, I was really into video games, computers, sound synthesis and other nerd things that are generally described as “boy interests.” I never considered myself technical, because those were just things I liked. I’ve always been an avid reader and figured pursuing some kind of degree in writing would be the best path for me to get a job I didn’t hate. I also got really into politics during the 2008 election cycle, which was around the time I graduated from high school. I chose Journalism as my major because I wanted to write about what was happening in the world.

My early twenties were spent in internships at various Texas news outlets like The San Antonio Express-News and The Texas Observer. I eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Texas State University. Looking back to my early 20s, I was very idealistic and didn’t understand that succeeding in the industry is difficult and requires lots of personal concessions. I quit a reporter job in my hometown to come back to Austin and figure things out. A friend referred me to BigCommerce and I started as a Tech Support Ninja in 2017.

It was weird — I realized that all I ever wanted in a job was to be faced with a series of problems and then get the satisfaction of tinkering around until I solved them. I asked for permission to start using more advanced tools, and started taking introductory web development courses on Treehouse and Codecademy. During that time I became BigCommerce’s Developer Community Moderator, which forced me to push the boundaries of my technical knowledge.

A year into that role, I earned a scholarship to a full-stack Javascript bootcamp at Austin Coding Academy. I then became the newest Developer Documentation Specialist at BigCommerce. I’m still in the bootcamp, actually!

What has it been like to attend a bootcamp while still working full-time at BigCommerce?

I think it’s been both easier and harder for me in many ways. It’s harder because my classmates are taking things one step at a time, but I’ve been exposed to the bigger picture. I often trip myself up trying to map out the entire forest instead of just focusing on the trees.

On the other hand, having real-world uses for what I’m learning has given me more motivation and understanding than someone who is exposed to concepts like APIs and front-end frameworks in an abstract way. I can fit each new skill in to my day-to-day work like a puzzle piece.

Tell me about a day in the life of a Developer Documentation Specialist.

Dev Docs is a great fit for me because I really enjoy diving deep into research about a thing, and then coming up with a way to tell the reader something about that thing.

The bulk of my job is to make sure that our documentation is exhaustive, accurate and relevant. In an industry like ecommerce, this isn’t the easiest task because we release new features all the time and are constantly iterating on the product to make it better.

We are a small team, so we often put our heads together to think through the best way to convey certain concepts to our readers. We brainstorm how best to present technical specs in a way that’s digestible. It’s very much like being on the editorial board of a newspaper. We rely on each other because every reader derives their own meaning from our words. You can approximate who your audience is through research, but you won’t have a perfect picture and you can only guess about prior knowledge they have. So you have to trust that your colleagues have good judgment and can help you make decisions about how to present information.

My main day-to-day involves learning about our product’s features, tools, APIs and technologies so I can synthesize what I discover into useful information for developers. This sometimes means tracking down Product Managers or Engineers to ask clarifying questions. I also rummage around in the source code of the product in order to document what’s there.

The Dev Docs team spends a lot of time testing things out — querying our API and stuff like that — to make sure the instructions we’re writing down are easily repeatable. We also copy edit everything we write, just like any other online publication. Weeding out grammar and spelling errors is part of the work. We use AP Style, but can be fast and loose with it at times, and that’s perfectly OK in this world.

Our documentation lives in Stoplight, and we use GitHub to streamline our workflow and push changes. We’re currently investigating using a static site generator like Gatsby as we continue to grow.

What is an important problem that BigCommerce is solving?

We want to give developers the tools they need to quickly grok the stuff that’s specific to the BigCommerce platform, so they can focus on building super cool apps and solutions for our merchants.

To accomplish this goal, I often ask myself these questions:

• Is what I’m writing here inclusive of developers of varying skill levels and backgrounds?
• Does this information include enough context?
• Will a user be able to easily correlate what they’re reading in the documentation to the app or project they’re working on or conceptualizing?

I think, ultimately, we want to make sure third party developers don’t have to take a bootstrap-y, DIY approach to building solutions on BigCommerce. We want it to be easy and intuitive to extend our platform, not make it some kind of test of mettle. I think that approach works for some technologies out there, but the culture that results from that is this kind of toxic loyalty, in my opinion.

What projects are you most passionate about building at BigCommerce?

We recently released BigDesign, a React component library with accompanying interactive documentation that I think is just — really slick and neat. I’m totally going to use it in my next app project. I’m excited about the opportunity to work with our Engineering teams on projects like this. It’s important to me that BigCommece continues to provide a path for building quick POCs and sample code that folks can hack on. I think once developers get their hands on the platform and see they’re supported by great documentation, that will lead to more adoption for us.

What’s the best career advice you’ve been given?

Surely this is not a universal experience, but no one ever took me under their wing, like in the movies. I think you have to be OK with the possibility that no one is going to hand you that golden nugget of advice that opens doors for you. I’ve had to really hunt down knowledge and bother people for answers if I didn’t understand something. I’m very comfortable with being the least-informed person in the room, and that has helped me immensely.

What advice would you give to other women in tech?

Your ability is shaped by your experiences, the resources available to you, the encouragement you receive from your support circle, and whether or not you have the time to practice new skills. My advice is to surround yourself with people who will build you up, and approach each challenge you face with the mindset that you can learn anything with the proper resources and enough time. Don’t ever let anyone make you believe you don’t belong or convince you that you fundamentally don’t have what it takes. You will get there.

We’d like to thank Mikaela for sharing her time with us and giving us a look into her day-to-day at BigCommerce. Follow Mikaela on Twitter @jmikrdgz and on Medium at Mikaela Rodriguez.