How a hackathon win inspired a career in Developer Experience Engineering
“Over time, I felt excited to show my work since the team is big on empowering each other. We collaboratively help each other ship something even if it’s not 100% perfect. It’s better to get it out there and then get feedback.” — Ciara Nightingale, DevEx Engineer, Thirdweb
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb
My name is Ciara and I’m a Developer Experience Engineer at thirdweb. I graduated from Bath University in 2021 in physics. After deciding not to pursue a Masters, I started learning technical skills like front end design since I have always been interested in fine art and tying in arts and science felt complimentary.
I initially got started by looking into how to build front ends and then in Spring of 2022, I participated in the Chainlink Hackathon which was fully based in Solidity. I won the Women in Tech prize for that hackathon project and got a multitude of different opportunities from there which led me to lead a talk in London about my experience at the Chainlink Hackathon.
I realized I like to build, but I also like to connect people and talk to developers about how to build as well.
Being able to win a big prize in a hackathon made me realize I can enable others to do the same thing. I was noticing how others were wanting to run hackathons but didn’t know how. So it led me to see how DevRel roles were structured. That’s when I saw thirdweb was hiring for a DevRel role and got hired!
Being a Developer Experience Engineer I’m essentially our first line of defense — when we role out a new tool or product I am the first one to try it out. Sometimes that means that I go from digging into the source code and build examples with it . Then I talk to our Engineering team to find out how they built it. I make example apps, guides, templates, and enable other people to learn how to use our tooling more easily and streamlined.
I also write a lot of documentation and communicate our product, services, and tools to developers efficiently.
What are the values/team principles of the engineering team?
When I originally started it was all about shipping and iterating. I definitely felt a level of imposter syndrome. Over time, I felt excited to show my work since the team is big on empowering each other. We collaboratively help each other ship something even if it’s not 100% perfect. It’s better to get it out there and then get feedback.
More recently I’d say we’ve shifted slightly. We put more focus on the quality of shipping. We always ship amazing quality tools and we have a heavier focus on collaboratively helping each other out so that we are only shipping out high quality tools.
Sharing knowledge and collaboration is key. If you ping someone and ask them a question they’ll help you 1:1 to show you how to do something. There’s no gatekeeping or judgement and it enables us to learn so much faster in a safer space.
I originally had a lot of learning to do when I joined and the whole team — specifically our engineering team — enabled me to have the time and space to get it wrong and to learn.
How does thirdweb view engineering/our developer community?
In my opinion community is core to any product in tech. They’re the users, they’re the people who care and contribute feedback, they’re our second line of defense after our DevRel and DevEx team. They’re the ones who give us the most authentic feedback to iterate forward.
With a strong community we have support and can become self-sustaining because they believe in the product and in thirdweb.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience, how does this impact the work that we do on the engineering team?
We have so many different perspectives. More experienced team mates pass on a lot of knowledge and are in the weeds every day. So someone with less experience has a fresher take and unbiased view. We see it often with those with fresher perspectives coming up with a lot of different solutions. I find this balances each other out quite well.
Also, working with so many people from all over the world makes it super fun and interesting. It brings fun to the job and means that we have support 24/7.
What are some of the main obstacles our team faces and how do they overcome them?
Timezones is a big one. As much as it plays to our advantage, it can make setting meetings very difficult. Recording meetings makes our day to day much more helpful.
The other one I’d say is that remote work can be a little isolating. That’s where participating in our weekly Test Jam, team All Hands, or in our digital Gather space helps us create stronger bonds and team connections.
Thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our company vision?
I’d say that keeping up with what’s going on in web3 developer communities and using thirdweb in those communities is what I’m working towards.
Our whole thing is making it easy for developers but I can show them exactly how — seeing that positively impacting developer communities is exciting.
Author: Erika Khanna and Ciara Nightingale
Contributors: Joher Khan
