Brandon's Blog
About
Hi, I’m Brandon West.
I love technology and playing around with new and exciting things. I fell in love with computers when my parents bought an Apple IIGS sometime around 1988. Then, in 3rd grade, my computer lab teacher opened my eyes to the magic of modems. When my dad got a work laptop that had a 2400 baud modem, I started dialing in to local bulletin board systems with phone numbers gathered from the back pages of computing magazines. The BBSes fostered communities of people that loved technology as much as I did, and I was hooked. Then a bit later, the world wide web came along, and I was lucky enough to turn my passion into a career.
My first real experience as a developer was writing Visual Basic 6 and VBA applications, which quickly turned into writing ASP applications in VBScript. Since then I’ve been able to work everywhere along the stack of web applications, from debugging bad SCSI cables in server racks at data centers to performing ETLs on top of AS400s to designing user interfaces. Things have moved quickly since then, and there’s no better time to be a software developer or builder than right now.
Since 2011, my focus has been telling the stories of great technologies and the people that use them while working in the field of Developer Relations. I’ve had the privilege of hiring and leading great teams of Developer Advocates for companies like SendGrid and AWS, which has given me the opportunity to travel to 40 different countries while attending and speaking at tech and startup-focused events with incredible people. I’ve been able to improve the developer experience of interfaces and software libraries used by tens of thousands of developers by connecting directly with customers and product teams and created educational content that has been seen by millions of people. And I still manage to code a little bit, though not nearly as much as I once did. Do you think I might be able to help your company next? Let’s talk.
