Meet Miro Engineering: Horea Porutiu advocates for developers
The Miro Developer Platform complements Miro — the visual workspace for innovation — by empowering developers and partners to build their own apps and integrations on Miro. In this blog series, we spotlight the people of Miro Engineering, so you can get to know the faces behind the platform. Our distributed team spans the globe across 12 regional hubs and 8 time zones, including offices in Amsterdam, Austin, Tokyo, and Berlin.
In this post, we’re featuring developer advocate Horea Porutiu, based in Amsterdam, who supports our partners with technical work streams and solutions.
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Tell me more about your role and your team at Miro.
As a Developer Advocate, I am responsible for helping educate and increase awareness of the Miro Developer Platform. This includes a lot of different things, such as helping answer user technical questions on our community forum and Discord Channel. It also includes meeting with partners and developers and helping guide them in their journey in building Miro apps and integrations. It also means creating compelling YouTube videos which resonate with developers and also coming up with unique ways to acquire new developers such as sponsoring Hackathons, collaborating on videos, and others. Finally, I also advocate for our users by helping sort user feedback and helping our product managers prioritize new features which our users deem the most important.
How did you end up working as a developer advocate?
It was my first job out of college. I kind of got lucky in a way :) I applied to work as a software engineer at IBM, and I got placed on the Developer Advocacy team at IBM and really enjoyed the role!
What do you enjoy most about being a developer advocate?
I enjoy the creative aspects of it. I love creating content, so one of my biggest passions is creating YouTube videos. I get a huge thrill in seeing how a video performs and also launching it. I also love creating open source applications and helping other developers build amazing applications. Check out the “Miro for Developers” YouTube channel to see some of the videos I’ve worked on!
What are some ways you help developers succeed?
I always put myself in their shoes and try to understand their problems and their unique situation. Without truly understanding their problem, you cannot solve it properly. Once I understand the problem, I try to solve it as quickly as possible to ensure I can get the developer “unstuck”. Mostly I just answer their questions on Discord or the community forum, but sometimes if I think that the question is general enough that it applies to a large portion of the community, I will create a video from the question. This is what I did for some of our recent videos on our Developer channel, specifically the “Deploy a Next.js (Miro) app to AWS Amplify”. That video came as a question from a developer and I thought it would be helpful to create a video on it so it would reach a wider audience.
Why do you think it’s important for organizations to have a developer advocacy program?
For any organization which is building a platform, I believe it’s a crucial role. Since many engineers are very deep into a specific feature / part of the codebase, it’s important to have a few developer advocates who have a more broad understanding of all of the features a platform offers and can answer most developer questions quickly. For more complex questions which may involve bugs or unexpected behaviors, then a developer advocate can pair with an engineer to dig a bit deeper and understand expected behavior. It’s a critical role to ensure developers are successful building on the platform, and ensuring that the company has apps and integrations which delight the users.
In your own words, what is the Miro Developer Platform?
It’s a way to extend the functionality of Miro. It’s a way to bring in data and ideas into Miro automatically. It’s a way to customize Miro to fit your specific needs.
Why should developers build with the Developer Platform?
To have the power to influence the lives of 60+ million people around the world. We offer great incentives for anyone who wants to partner or build with us too and we have many avenues to help you build a successful app.
How can developers get started with the Developer Platform?
The best way to get started is to go on our developer Hub, developers.miro.com. I recommend going through the Onboarding Essentials and then exploring the developer documentation. If you prefer video content, you can check our Miro for Developers YouTube channel to view our developer focused videos.
Outside developer advocacy, what else energizes you?
In my free time I love playing tennis and surfing. I love all sports and spending time outside, especially hiking and exploring.
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We’ll continue to feature Miro Engineering employees on our blog, so you can get a glimpse into their roles and the impact they have on the Developer Platform. Be sure to follow us to get reminders in your inbox when we post about engineering culture, technology issues, and product developments.
