Mailjet Monday: Shubham Sharma

What do you do for Mailjet?

My role can be broken out into three parts. The first, involves regularly attending hackathons, meetups and developer events. At these events, I gain good insight into where the bigger tech trends are heading; it’s constantly growing into something new. Second, involves regularly reading and monitoring online platforms (Quora, Stack Overflow, Twitter). My goal is to not only educate the online community about Mailjet’s API but to help fellow developers build winning email campaigns. Last but definitely not least, is “pre-sales”. Through the previous two points, I’ll often encounter email users facing roadblocks with their current email program or looking to learn more about API use-cases. I talk them through some of these points and explain how they can solve these issues with our product.

What is your coding language of choice and where do you code best?

In school, I’ve coded a lot of projects with C. C is a low level language, but it’s great to use because you can manipulate everything; you’re closer to the processing and have more control over the machine. I’ve also been dabbling a bit into Javascript recently.

But I’m the biggest fan of PHP, the language I started with 8 years ago. It’s not the most sophisticated language since it’s easy to pick up and “ready to go”, but over the years, I’ve learned to use it for more complex processes.

As for when I’m at my most efficient… definitely when I’m coding in my room at 2 in the morning. No distractions, just silence.

How do you use the Mailjet API on a day-to-day basis?

There are a few, but I use our Send API the most; it allows you to send email with one http call. One of the convenient uses is for monitoring servers for my school, EPITA. I’ve programmed an automatic alert, so when something goes wrong I receive a real-time email notification.

Any advice for students looking to work as a Developer Evangelist?

Well, the Developer Relations space is a pretty niche one. I myself, started off as a developer. It’s pretty essential to have some coding experience first. As a Developer Evangelist you have to be able to communicate with developers but to also translate these technical terms into layman’s terms for the rest of the users who are interested in your product.

Above all, you have to be passionate about developing and about your product. There will be moments when you’re stuck on the same problem for many hours on end. There are other times when you’ll pull all-nighters for hackathons. Your day doesn’t always end once you leave the office either, you’ll spend a lot of time networking after hours. But it’s great fun, it’s the best job in the world.

Favorite Mailjet moment?

There are so many, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a number of tech events where I’ve met some incredible people and have seen some groundbreaking ideas. But if I had to choose one, it would be the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. I’ve participated in a number of hackathons in the past, but this was a whole new level of hacking; there were roughly 500 hackers and various languages being used. Since we sponsored the hackathon, I stayed up with the hackers through the night, helping integrate Mailjet’s API in different languages and various frameworks. It was an awesome learning experience and we ended up being the second most used API!

[ Posted Mon, 26 May 2014 12:00:00 ]