Introducing Twilio Developer Evangelist Adan Figueroa

Introducing Twilio Developer Evangelist Adan Figueroa

Hello world!

I’m Adan Figueroa, from Mexico City and in this post I’ll tell you how I became a Developer Evangelist at Twilio. I learned how to code in high school. The reason why I chose to study programming is a little silly. I remember when I was a kid I really got impressed after I watched The Matrix, yes, The Matrix, that movie that suggests that we live in a simulation created by computers. At that moment I didn’t understand too much to be honest, but I thought it was something really cool, and that gave me enough curiosity to try to code. After I wrote my first lines of code I knew that I wanted to do that forever. That feeling of facing a challenge, finding a solution and after several tries seeing how it all works it’s amazing.

When I was in college at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional, one of my best friends invited me to join a developer community, where we did some meetups and workshops, and I remember that I taught Android and Bootstrap there. Being part of the community made me want to get more knowledge and experience, beyond what I've learned so far, so this made me decide to get a related job.

In 2015 we won a hackathon that allowed me to start collaborating with Facebook, now Meta. At first we gave a talk in my college, then we did more meetups in different places and with different partners. This became the pilot for what is now a global Meta Developer Circles program.  Since then my career as a developer and my work as a community lead grew up in parallel, and actually, I could say that my career as a developer grew thanks to the communities I participated in, since I believe that you receive more than you give. Each event and each member of these communities that I met helped me to learn and improve my technical and non-technical skills.

I continued working as a developer for more than 10 years, collaborating with several startups and companies. I spent the last few years as a full stack developer using JavaScript, working remotely for companies in the USA and Canada as part of Encora, and during this time I have also tried to be a teacher/mentor, since I understood that sharing the knowledge you have is the best way to keep learning and improving your skills.

Now I’m happy to share that I’m a Developer Evangelist at Twilio for Spanish speaking countries in LATAM, and I’m glad to keep serving developers and communities to build amazing things in my region.

Let’s connect:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adanfigueroaj/

https://twitter.com/atticusfj