Dan Tolbert
I have been obsessed with technology and gadgetry for as long as I can remember. I help other developers get started with new concepts by writing documentation, guides, and client libraries. Day to day I can be found wearing one of many hats in sales, support, marketing, development, and product.
Developer Advocate - Raleigh, NC, US
2010 - B.S. in Electrical Engineering & B.S. in Computer Engineering - North Carolina State University
Experience
Developer Advocate, 2015 - Present
- Founded the developer relations team at Bandwidth and now lead team of three.
- Develop and maintain client libraries/sdks in NodeJS, Ruby, Python, C#, PHP, & Java
- Created and managed the release of a developer only site (dev.bandwidth.com) as the one-stop-shop for technical resource.
- Lead effort to revamp developer onboarding to the API platform. Transformed the process from multiple points of friction and customer contact to entirely self-service signup (with some guard rails)
- Online activity via Quora and blog posts brought in ~5% of all new API users.
- Primary technical resource for support staff throughout the entire customer journey from first touch to code-complete.
- Maintain close contact with sales team to provide pre-sales support and technical demos/overviews to potential customers.
- Help run, manage, and judge company wide hackathons and API training sessions. Worked with the HR team to create an entirely new new-hire onboarding program spanning two days. All new-hires now get hands on experience with the APIs
- Work with product marketing managers to build competitive landscape 'battlecards' to train sales and build marketing pages.
- Build, film, and run webinars demonstrating how to use Bandwidth's APIs to build small web apps.
Developer, 2013 - 2015
- Created a roll-your-own 'test cloud' using Appium and NodeJS to auto-detect and then run UI tests on physical Android and iOS devices for each new Pull Request via Github. Each test implemented a 'page' API that allows mobile developers to write basic tests by hiding the selenium & assertions in a 'smart' object.
- Created a test framework (NodeJS) and mock server for Bandwidth APIs that allowed me to record network requests (and mock the given responses) in order to assert end to end functionality.
Automation Engineer, 2010 - 2013
- Relentlessly automated lab infrastructure, test suite creation/reporting, and station utilization. Used MySQL, Python, Java, C, and Ruby on Rails to create and manage the automation suite. Efforts lead to constantly completing test plan execution 2-3 weeks ahead of schedule as well as an overall 60% increase in test-station efficiency.
Selected Projects
weshould.co & code.weshould.co
Nice little group messaging app written in NodeJS. Uses yelp, google, giphy, & Bandwidth's APIs to look up and display information within a group message thread.
Bandwidth's open source presence. Includes the SDKs and plethora of example applications.
