Developer Spotlight — Eric Mann

This month we wanted to take time to highlight a member of our amazing community: Eric Mann.

He has contributed in so many ways to the community he’s written 14 blog posts, created several videos, and even wrote a guide on how to get started. Not only has he done that he also speaks at conferences and will take time to help people who ask questions at events. Now let’s find out a bit more about him!

Eric Mann is a software innovator who has done a lot to contribute to the community and amassed a sizable amount of points which allowed him to redeem a laptop by system 76.

He is a Director of Engineering at Vacasa which does vacation rental management — he specifically manages teams that focus on data ingress and egress, cyber security and a centralized infrastructure for their cloud platform. Not only does he manage these teams but he also builds out services in the cloud, cybersecurity investigations locking things down, as well as focusing on vendor reviews and vendor communications to make sure they’re using the right vendors for the right job.

He really loves so solve challenging problems and trying to figure out the best solution for the problem using code or vendors. His preferred programing languages are PHP, Python, Javascript, Go lang, Java and Scala.

He often attends conferences and found out about RingCentral, because he spoke to Mike who let him know about the gamechanger program and how he could be earning points towards awesome prizes while doing what he loves — playing around with code. Eric would actually come over to the RingCentral booth and tell others about it and encourage them to try the Game Changers program out as well (not just because he could get the refer a friend points then haha).

Eric said that often times engineers will go out to learn about technology, because they want to solve a specific problem so they will only learn about versus going out just to search out vendors for it.

The game changers program is a really fantastic way to sit down and start saying, I want to learn the system. I want to understand it. I might not have an actual business case for it. I might not have a problem I need to solve professionally yet.

He said that the game changers program really incentivizes you to learn more about the apis, because you can earn prizes, but also because you’ve worked through how to build an app and learning the technology when you are faces with a business challenge you will already know a solution for it.

Here’s the system at RingCentral that actually does everything we need it for. And that’s that’s to give an example where I’ve actually referred RingCentral at work now multiple times based on business problems that we’ve had specifically because of situations that I’ve gotten into working through the game changers program and trying to solve problems to win points. I know, understand the platform enough that I can evangelize it to, to my peers and to my colleagues and recommended as a solution for problems that we’re facing professionally.

Eric is a self-taught engineer — he originally went to school for physics and math to be a high school science teacher and from there transitioned to wanting to do research science which led into politics and finally into business management which get got an MBA in. Once graduating he came across some difficulties finding a job, because no one wanted to hire someone at his age and fresh skill sets — he was seen as too expensive, too experiences or too inexperienced and too risky. From there he fell into coding — he went online and started reading blogs, going to various meetups and just getting to know people in the community.

And frankly, it was the community that kind of raised me up and built me up and brought me to where I am now. So giving back to the community is really paying it forward and paying back all of the favors that I’ve gotten over my career that have helped me get to where I am now with a relative level of success that I would have not been able to achieve otherwise.

As for how he recommends you can get started coding or getting into a community- it’s really about finding a topic that you’re interested in learning more about. To truly learn it he recommends not just going and hearing about it, but “putting yourself in the hot seat and teaching someone else.”

I have grown the most when I volunteered to give talks about technologies, techniques, or integrations that I knew little to, nothing about in the first place, because now I am forced to learn it, not just learn as sufficient where I can use it, but learn it sufficiently deep enough that I can teach someone else how it actually works.

Now to get started with RingCentral he says “Really the Game Changers program is where it’s at because the program walks you through initial tutorials for how do you do basic SMS” as well as how to use other APIs and builds you up into building a full application. He goes on to mention that Phong Vu on our team created some really good tutorials on how to integrate RingCentral with AI technologies such as Monkeylearn in order to perform AI sentiment analysis along with how to utilize it to route things.

AI is where it’s at today and a really fantastic way to get started, because you can skip going to grad school to get a PhD in how to do machine learning and AI, and just leverage an integration that’s already there. And also marry that with something like ring central, where you have now interactive telecommunications between a phone and an AI machine or a computer and an AI machine.

These technologies can easily be applied back to your business problems. How can you automate answering incoming questions in order to decrease how often people actually have to answer calls and let a machine do the work for you, because often times its something that is already in the FAQ and could be easily answered by a machine.

We could not be more grateful for Eric taking the time to share his experience and thoughts with us as well as all his leadership and contributions in the community, and of course we are also thankful to all of our RingCentral Developers who help make the community as amazing as it is.

Not yet a RingCentral Developer? Join our Game Changers program to meet Anirban and learn more about how you too can earn great prizes and be a part of this incredible group of developers.