Episode 98: Building Developer Tools, Managing Platform Products, Fostering Diversity, and Enabling Real-Time Data Applications with DeVaris Brown

Show Notes(01:43) DeVaris reflected on his upbringing on the south side of Chicago and college experience at UIUC, studying Mathematics and Computer Science in the early 2000s.(06:46) DeVaris shared his journey of learning how to program, make computers, and dive into the Internet.(09:35) DeVaris recalled valuable lessons from interning at Intel and Cisco Systems.(15:49) DeVaris shared his proudest accomplishments during his five years at Microsoft — first as a system engineer and then as an academic developer evangelist.(22:06) DeVaris recalled his experience working in the gaming and music space as the Chief Developer Evangelist at Marmalade and the Chief Product Officer at Klick Push, respectively.(27:49) DeVaris provided his perspective on the startup acquisition process.(29:13) DeVaris unpacked his two years as a platform product manager at Zendesk, where he drove the adoption of the Zendesk Developer Platform for developers to create unique customer experiences.(35:43) DeVaris revealed the challenges of building a technical community, given his experience at Zendesk.(38:25) DeVaris recalled his time working for a year as the Lead Product Manager at VSCO — a startup that builds digital tools for the modern creative.(45:12) DeVaris went over the challenges of building software for brand ambassadors and children’s playtime, given his time as the Head of Product Management at Slyce.io and the CTO at Super Heroic.(49:39) DeVaris reflected on his desire to scratch his entrepreneurial itch.(52:00) DeVaris gave advice for early-career technologists on evaluating startup opportunities.(55:51) DeVaris unpacked the product challenges he encountered while building tools for developers as the Director of Product Management at Heroku.(58:57) DeVaris touched on his one year as the first platform engineering PM hire at Twitter.(01:02:18) DeVaris shared the founding story of Meroxa.(01:04:28) DeVaris dissected how Meroxa’s platform architecture is designed at a high level — including a change data capture service, schema registry, event streaming service, API proxy, and incident automation framework.(01:06:06) DeVaris explained the technical challenges associated with creating connections between data sources and destinations in real time.(01:08:37) DeVaris zoomed into Conduit — Meroxa’s open-source, single-binary data integration tool written in Golang that provides developer-friendly streaming data orchestration.(01:12:32) DeVaris highlighted a few customer use cases of Meroxa.(01:16:16) DeVaris shared valuable hiring lessons to attract the right people who are excited about Meroxa’s mission and fit with Meroxa’s cultural values.(01:18:37) DeVaris shared challenges to finding the early design partners & lighthouse customers for Meroxa.(01:20:24) DeVaris gave advice to founders seeking the right investors for their startups.(01:22:58) DeVaris gave advice to smart, driven operators looking to explore angel investing.(01:25:17) DeVaris discussed the remaining barriers that prevent minorities from pursuing a technology career.(01:30:42) DeVaris imparted lessons from photography and DJ that benefited his career in product.(01:32:26) Closing segment.DeVaris’ Contact InfoLinkedInTwitterWebsiteGitHubMeroxa’s ResourcesWebsite | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTubeCareers | Medium BlogDocumentationConduit (GitHub | Discord | Twitter | Docs)Mentioned ContentArticles“Hello World, Meroxa Style” (April 2021)“Streaming Your Database Changes with Change Data Capture” (Part 1 + Part 2)“Conduit: Streaming Data Integration for Developers” (Jan 2022)“Why Conduit? An Evolutionary Leap Forward for Real-Time Data Integration” (Feb 2022)“Hello Meroxa 2.0” (April 2022)Resources for minoritiesKura Labs (A free training and job placement academy for Infrastructure Computing, DevOps, and SRE for students from underserved communities)Free Code Camp (Learn to code — for free)BooksZero To One (by Peter Thiel)The Hard Thing About Hard Things (by Ben Horowitz)PeopleTristan Handy (Co-Founder and CEO of dbt Labs)Arjun Narayan (Co-Founder and CEO of Materialize)Benn Stancil (Chief Analytics Officer at Mode Analytics)Chad Sanderson (Head of Data Platform at Convoy)Notes

My conversation with DeVaris was recorded back in April 2022. Since then, many things have happened at Meroxa. I’d recommend checking out:

Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.

Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

Subscribe by searching for Datacast wherever you get podcasts or click one of the links below:

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Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.

Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Subscribe by searching for Datacast wherever you get podcasts, or click one of the links below:

If you’re new, see the podcast homepage for the most recent episodes to listen to, or browse the full guest list.