Meet the DevRels
By: Satwik Hebbar
Tags: Platform, Announcements, Developer Relations

From a fledgling platform exclusively built for Freshdesk, to a multi-product platform with trend-setting features, the Freshworks Developer Platform has come a long way in the last 3 years. What could however still be described using the same adjective “fledgling” is our support for the Freshworks developer community. For a long time, all we offered to our developers, besides the platform itself, was reference documentation, a sample app repository, and a bespoke support experience through the Freshdesk support portal. A lot of this was loosely held together by the same team that built the platform.

As more developers came onto our platform, we started to realise a few challenges -

Support tickets were falling through the cracks or going unattended for long periods of time.

Valuable lessons from support interactions were not aggregating into meaty feedback loops to shape the future of the platform.

Besides reference documentation, hardly any other content was being churned out to help developers succeed on the platform.

Developers often ended up interacting with the cold, hard surface of the platform, and at other times the impatient albeit talented engineers behind it.

Very similar to the needs of a growing child, our growing developer community needed nourishment through engagement, a variety of content, and tooling. It also seemed to need a human face to the platform — a Developer Relations (DevRel) team.

2019 saw us scour the local talent pool for engineers who bring a dollop of empathy alongside their coding chops and enjoy working with developers to solve problems. Given the dearth of experience in this niche area, finding our new team was no mean feat, but that is a story for another day. While our Developer Advocates have been busy at work for a while now, we never had the chance to formally introduce them (except if you had attended one of our 2019 FreshHuddles). Now is as good a time as any.

Our Developer Advocates at Freshworks. From L to R: Hem, Saif, Vel and Ravi.

Saif

The youngest of the lot. Saif caught the DevRel bug young when he was still in college, conducting developer events such as workshops and training programs for hundreds of student participants, as a Student Partner for the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Dell. Originally joining us as an intern, Saif brought so much energy to the role, we decided to have him own the launch of our Developer Certification program. Saif also refreshed our sample app repository and is in the process of completely revamping it for the multi-product platform that we are today.

Ravi

Raviraj comes to Freshworks with a combination of developer experience from building an ITSM application and support experience from working with users of the same product. Ravi is a fan of OSS proudly sporting his Hacktoberfest t-shirts and for a while was building and maintaining his own email client. At Freshworks, Ravi worked with strategic ISV and CTI partners to help them launch their integrations with Freshworks, while publishing content for advanced use-cases such as Data Storage at scale. A lot of Ravi’s work goes behind the scenes, like streamlining support processes so they can scale and investing in app code review standardisation so that we can accelerate the code reviews. In the next couple of months, you can look forward to new tutorials and advanced sample apps from Ravi.

Hem

Hemchander had already been on the receiving end of Developer Advocacy, as a developer on the SAP platform, and had grown to appreciate the unique challenges of this role even before he joined us at Freshworks. With a regular itch to learn new stuff and share his learnings, he was heretofore writing publicly very often. Hem churned out our detailed coding guidelines after an extensive study and analysis of the app review rejections and delivered our first training program at the FreshHuddle, Berlin. With an obsession to track his time and work deliberately, Hem allegedly makes David Allen proud by (actually) getting things done. In the next couple of months, Hem will be behind a loud announcement we are going to proudly make to our community.

Vel

Velmurugan is another developer convert — he switched from web development to DevRel, coming from a team that built and managed a digital content platform for Cognizant. He brings experience in the toolchains behind web portals, as well as building training programs for semi-technical users who push content to these portals. Vel helped set up our new training program, right after he revamped the out-of-date sample apps for Freshservice. At the last FreshHuddle in Berlin, Vel was partner-in-crime with Josh from ResponseTap as they together pulled out 2 apps on Day 2 of the event. Vel also set up our swanky new tutorial portal, built on Codelabs. There is a lot more that Freshworks and its developer community will surely leverage in 2020 from this ardent fan of Flash, who believes there is no greater superhero.

Our DevRel team is just getting started. We look forward to enjoying watching more developers succeed and build their businesses on Freshworks. We have an exciting year planned ahead and are eagerly standing by to meet our developers at multiple locations across the globe. But why wait for that opportunity, when our DevRel team is really just a Calendly invite away?