Meet 6 Mentors Shaping a Better Future for Developers

Meet 6 Mentors Shaping a Better Future for Developers

• Twilio’s Developer Searchlight project honors mentors and leaders who dedicate their time and positive energy to shaping a better future for developers.
• Our search for “epic mentors” and “community builders” was open to anyone around the world, 21 or over, who is helping elevate developers.
• This year's six honorees are creating community and throwing open the doors to the industry so more people can become developers and succeed in their careers.

Developers are most successful when they have others supporting and inspiring them. It might be the person who mentored you and showed you how to code, or who built and nourished a community where you felt comfortable asking questions and connecting with peers. It might be someone who noticed you on an open-source forum and gave you a hand, helping you understand a key tool and establish yourself as a contributor. It might be the manager who ensures that you're empowered and have the resources you need to succeed in your job every day. No matter who that person is, having someone who's got your back is critical to success.

Twilio's Developer Searchlight is a global search for the most inspirational, effective leaders supporting developers today. One of the core principles of Twilio's Developer Network is a dedication to team culture, which means, very concretely, caring about and supporting one another. Developers are most successful when they can build strong, long-lasting relationships and join communities with strong values of inclusiveness, diversity, growth, and excellence.

And becoming a developer should be fun! It's why we built TwilioQuest – our retro video game that teaches you to code – and it's why we put such a high value on people who are able to share their love of coding by empowering and enabling others with enthusiasm and passion.

The search for six

We wanted to highlight people who are helping make that vision a reality, so we put out a call looking for people to nominate an “epic mentor.” We were looking for the people who are the "bright spots" in their networks or organizations — those who help others on their coding journeys, regardless of where they are in the world or what tools they are using. And we were amazed at the response.

We received an overwhelming response to our call for nominations this year. Our judging panel of industry experts included Abadesi Osunsade, the CEO of Hustle Crew; Eyal Manor, the CPO of Twilio; Jody Bailey of CTO of Stack Overflow; and Lybra Clemons, the CDO of Twilio. These judges evaluated nominees on three impact factors: creativity, long-term impact, and role-model characteristics.

After reviewing all the nominations, the judges selected six people who deserved special recognition for the passion, love, and mentorship that they have offered to the developer community. These six people are our Developer Searchlight honorees.

In six different ways, these honorees have dedicated their time and positive energy to shaping a better future for developers. Our field is richer for their contributions. Read on for our deep dive on these awesome individuals!

Suchi Deshpande empowers developers while bringing personalized learning to a diverse range of students

Suchi Deshpande is the co-founder of Learnfully. She has two sons, both of whom are neurodiverse, and co-founded Learnfully in 2020 after seeing how her sons — as well as her friends' children — were facing challenges in their virtual classrooms during the pandemic lockdowns.

Learnfully's mission is to bring personalized learning to scale, helping both neurodiverse and neurotypical learners gain access to the resources they need to be successful. As a co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Suchi is working to create a more equitable and inclusive environment for everyone.

Suchi is an effective product leader who people describe as "smart, empathetic, and able to execute tactical deliverables while also retaining a big-picture business perspective." She invests an enormous amount into her work relationships and builds them through mutual respect. No micromanager, Suchi believes in hiring the right person, then getting out of their way.

She's also a leader who is not afraid to empower her team. Developers often crave very specific, concrete guidance: What task do you want me to accomplish? But Suchi prefers a different approach. She wants developers to understand the larger problems they are solving for, why they matter to the customer, and what the range of possible solutions might look like. That way, developers build empathy for the customer and have a deeper understanding of how to solve their problems. They also feel more autonomy, ownership, and empowerment about their own work.

As a product leader, Suchi prefers to work side-by-side with developers as partners. Yet her background also includes hiring and managing engineering teams. Suchi's technical background and curiosity enable her to roll up her sleeves and talk shop with dev teams, building trust and confidence. She believes that brainstorming the solution together is extremely important because it leads to understanding and internalizing the context behind the decision-making.

In her previous role at MuleSoft, Suchi advocated for developers, building products specifically designed for developers. For example, she oversaw MuleSoft's "Connectors" product, which allowed different platforms to talk to one another. However, these connectors depended on third-party platforms' APIs, so any updates to those APIs required updates to the Connectors code. To facilitate this time-consuming maintenance, Suchi helped MuleSoft create an SDK that empowered developers to build and maintain these connectors much more easily.

In other words, rather than give the developers a single fish, she taught them to fish. That's a good summary of Suchi's approach to empowering and enabling developers. Even if it's uncomfortable at first, Suchi would rather lean into the challenge and have the developer teams emerge stronger and more autonomous.

Marcus Eagan supports the open-source community through personal, financial, educational and code contributions

Marcus Eagan is a staff product manager at MongoDB and dedicates his free time to mentoring and assisting the open-source community. He contributes to the Apache Lucene and Solr products while also troubleshooting technical issues with developers using MongoDB and Atlas search.

Marcus ensures diversity and inclusion are at the forefront of his work. In the open-source community, he's always on the lookout for members of underrepresented communities looking to break into tech. With his background, Marcus is able to help them use open source as a learning medium and also a forum for them to gain valuable coding experience.

For example, a Bangladesh-based developer named Azizul Haque Ananto was building a search engine called Ask Hadith. Marcus noticed Azizul’s interest in online forums and proactively reached out to him, suggesting that he take a look at Atlas Search. Following that, Marcus worked directly with Azizul to make sure he correctly implemented full-text search functionality within his app. The resulting blog post was eventually a major factor in Azizul landing a software engineering job.

Marcus donates his time to the developer community and also supports the Apache Foundation and IETF financially. He also does a wide variety of public speaking to help educate developers on building more delightful search experiences. Marcus has spoken at the Southern Data Science Conference, MongoDB World, AllThingsOpen, WebSummit, and MDB.locals (in Dallas, SF, and Austin). Additionally, he frequently speaks to college students—the majority of which are attending HBCUs—who are aspiring tech entrepreneurs.

He still finds time to code, too. Marcus has contributed security improvements to open-source projects including Apache, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and others, and his contributions comprise thousands of lines of code. And even when he's contributing code, he keeps his eye out for opportunities to make open source more inclusive. For example, Marcus proposed and completed the work to remove offensive and inaccurate terminology from the Apache Lucene and Solr projects and update them to use more inclusive terminology. Thanks to Marcus’ efforts, there is no longer replication terminology in these projects using "master" and "slave" terms, and the code itself explains why the use of “master” and “slave” is not only offensive, but inaccurate.

A champion of inclusivity, a mentor, and a passionate contributor to open-source: all these things make Marcus a Developer Searchlight honoree worth celebrating.

Kunal Kushwaha is sharing his passion for education and learning through YouTube, Discord, and more

Kunal Kushwaha is a developer relations engineer for CivoCloud. Although Kunal has only recently begun his professional career, he has already significantly impacted the developer community. In his massive global following – 300K+ followers on his YouTube channel and 50K+ learners on Discord – Kunal advocates for education and learning in the developer community. He's launched social media challenges such as #100DaysofCode, and has published online tutorials and courses covering data structures, algorithms, machine learning, DevOps, and more topics.

Kunal is the founder of WeMakeDevs, an organization that provides completely free hands-on training, mentorship, career guidance, and job/networking opportunities to students around the world. WeMakeDevs promotes hackathons, conferences, community meetups, mentorship sessions, hiring opportunities, and more. The organization is run by students, for students.

Testimonials from both organizations show that Kunal has a unique ability to reach developers at both ends of the experience spectrum. Students and new developers admire his way of making complex concepts seem clear and simple, while industry veterans note that even they have something to learn from him.

He is also an ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), having started the official student community group for the foundation; a coach for Major League Hacking; a TEDx speaker; and has worked with a number of large developer-first companies in mentor, ambassador, and coach capacities.  

Rukmini Reddy, a champion of empowerment and collaboration, led the rollout of a new Slack platform

Rukmini Reddy joined Slack as SVP of engineering when everyone was working remotely at the height of the pandemic. She has wasted no time making a profound impact by quickly jumping in to unite her remote teams, improve onboarding and training processes, and make every member of the engineering team feel heard, supported, and valued.

Her teammates note that she's passionate about her role in empowering the engineering management teams and continuing to foster a healthy, collaborative working environment at Slack.

By taking a human-centric approach, Rukmini is able to help developers define their career paths. That starts with frequent 1:1 meetings — sometimes as often as every day for the first month of a new team member's employment. While these meetings might only last 15 minutes, they help Rukmini understand each team member's communication style, key motivators, career goals, and overall values. And she doesn't hesitate to get to know about their offline lives, including families, pets, interests, and hobbies, which helps her form deeper connections.

Rukmini's team, which develops the Slack platform, has achieved some serious business milestones in the past year. Under Rukmini's leadership, her team completely transformed the platform to introduce a brand-new modular architecture. Developers can now create reusable workflow "building blocks" that can be shared with other developers and non-technical users, allowing both groups to deploy and remix for their custom use cases. And developers can deploy code to the Slack platform quickly and easily via a new command-line interface Rukmini's team built. This transformation gives developers a faster, more flexible way to build on Slack.

As a woman of color, Rukmini is passionate about mentorship and elevating the women around her. Women of color are dramatically under-represented in the tech industry. While things are changing, they aren’t changing quick enough. For Rukmini, the best way to promote representation for women on her teams is by acting as a champion on their behalf.

Ashwin Kumar Uppala is giving back by coaching coders and building local hacker communities

Ashwin Kumar Uppala works at Major League Hacking as a coach and event representative and is also the creator of HackClub Hackerabad, a student-run coding community.

MLH is a student hackathon league that sponsors over 200 hackathons a year. In Ashwin's own words, "Coaches are the people you want at every hackathon." They are passionate developers and community members — people who love to learn and are equally excited to teach what they've learned and to support their peers at all skill levels.

Ashwin started giving back to the developer community after attending and winning some hackathons. First, he started by mentoring or judging hackathons, then progressed to writing blog posts, speaking on podcasts, and even joining global conferences.

Ashwin wanted to "be the change you wish to see" and founded HackClub Hyderabad, a college club that could provide guidance, resources, and community. He was concerned that students were falling into the traps of tutorial hell, fake internships, outdated tools and resources — and that they were missing great opportunities. HackClub Hyderabad tapped into a strong need: The first offline session saw over 170 students attending on campus. Subsequently, the club received inquiries from students across the state; the club now has over 500 members, and over 770 students from around the world have participated in the club's Discord server.

Among HackClub Hyderabad's projects is a speaker series called "Beyond the Binary," which is focused on helping coders learn about two critical career development aspects: the need to learn skills beyond coding, and the need for the tech community to be more inclusive about non-binary (non-gender-conforming) and other diverse groups.

Ashwin is making an impact. One nominator shared, "Ashwin has helped me get out of my comfort zone and become a better public speaker," and noted that he has helped introduce the students in his community to open source and to better opportunities. What's more, he has made sure that the community is inclusive, ensuring that every member feels heard. He takes feedback seriously, does not differentiate among people by level of experience or gender — and gives everyone opportunities to lead and host events.

Bekah Hawrot Weigel champions inclusion and equity through virtual coffee

During the pandemic, Bekah Hawrot Weigel founded Virtual Coffee, which one member described as "the most inclusive and alive community for developers I've been in." Another said it is "one of the most supportive groups I've ever been in." The community centers on a Slack group with almost 700 members, which has been hosting bi-weekly virtual coffee get-togethers on Zoom since April 2020. These coffees provide friendly conversation about tech among an estimated 30-70 developers at a time. It's a diverse, global community that provides a sense of belonging to its members, who help each other learn new skills and lift one another up.

Virtual Coffee also runs an open-source initiative in October to help both experts and newcomers contribute to open-source projects. There is a Virtual Coffee podcast and newsletter as well. In addition to all that, Virtual Coffee offers channels for supporting people with specific interests or needs: people looking for jobs, neurodiverse folks, people who need help, and those who are looking for pairing.

Inspired by her own experience, which included trauma recovery, Bekah is developing an open-source postpartum wellness app. She was inspired to make an app that can help other mothers track their own mental health.

Through her community building, Bekah has become a mentor and champion to those around her. One nominator writes: "Bekah has been an amazing support and mentor to me from my bootcamp days to my current professional life as a developer advocate. She is open about her growth through trauma and her story is an inspiration to hundreds of developers."

By building an international online community with inclusion and equity in mind from the start and by showing a willingness to confront and learn from any issue, Bekah has grown a diverse group of people and encouraged them to flourish in their careers in tech. "She is a powerhouse for good in tech," as one fan writes.

Thank you to all our nominees, and congrats to the honorees!

Congratulations once again to all our honorees. We can’t wait to see what you build next! Follow along on @TwilioDevs to keep in touch on future projects like this from Twilio.

Sam McEvans is Director of Developer, Product & Technology PR at Twilio.