I Found My Coordinates: Code, Community, and Okta

Summary

A career progression through community leadership and software engineering led to a new role at Okta. Starting as a campus ambassador and Google Developer Student Clubs lead in India, the author organized hackathons, workshops, and meetups to foster peer learning. To effectively advocate for developers, an internship as a Developer Advocate at Zuplo prompted hands-on engineering experience as a Software Development Engineer at JPMorgan. After mentoring over 10,000 students and growing a technical community to over 600,000 members, the author joined Okta as a Senior Builder Advocate. In this role, advocacy extends beyond traditional coders to support AI builders, low-code creators, and developers utilizing identity and access management tools.

Context

The author sought to bridge the gap between community building and developer advocacy by gaining hands-on software development experience to better understand developer pain points.

Approach / What changed

The author founded a Google Developer Student Clubs chapter, interned at Zuplo, worked as a Software Development Engineer at JPMorgan, and subsequently joined Okta as a Senior Builder Advocate.

Takeaways

• Advocacy requires understanding developer pain points firsthand, leading the author to gain direct engineering experience as a Software Development Engineer at JPMorgan.
• The author served as a pioneer Google Developer Student Clubs Lead at their institution, becoming one of 280 leads across India.
• The Senior Builder Advocate role at Okta addresses not only traditional coders but also AI builders, low-code and no-code builders, and LLM agent developers.

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