Introducing Twilio Developer Evangelist Dominik Kundel

Introducing Twilio Developer Evangelist Dominik Kundel

“Hey! This is the greatest event of my life!”.

We were at the first public edition of jacobsHack!, a hackathon I co-founded, and the feedback came from one of the attendees who had just started as a freshman at Jacobs University in Germany. Hearing this from a freshman after months of hard work and being completely sleep deprived was the most rewarding feedback I could ever expect. But let me give you a quick recap of how I ended up in that moment.

From design to hacking

Being fascinated by computers and technology my whole life, I knew I wanted to study something with technology.  This led me to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Jacobs where I got introduced to their CS club. One of their first meetings I attended was an introduction to JavaScript workshop.

Coming from a design background, learning to code was addictive as it gave me a way to quickly visualize my design ideas.

At the beginning of my second year of college, my friend who led the Intro to JavaScript workshop and I decided to attend our first hackathon at the Facebook World Hack tour in Berlin where we developed a web app called “Social Roadtrip”. The amazing atmosphere of a huge group of developers fully focused on building amazing hacks and learning from each other fascinated me and I immediately got addicted to hackathons.

In 2013, it was still hard for students to find hackathons in Europe and while I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to at least a couple of them, a lot of my peers weren’t able to. Together with a few of my friends we decided to start a hackathon at Jacobs to introduce others to the world of hackathons.

The first edition took place in one of our dorms with the goal of inspiring Jacobs students to work on cool projects outside the classroom. Just eight months later I found myself at what was the first public edition of jacobsHack! and where I started my path of where I would see myself in the developer world.

Student turns into a teacher

Starting jacobsHack! was hugely rewarding. It was amazing to see what the attendees could learn and build when they gather together as a community at  jacobsHack!. The thrill from when I wrote my first lines of code came back every time a participant’s face lit up in the moment their hack worked. Once I graduated from university I wanted to find ways to continue to create those moments for developers.

Having gained a lot of my skills from being taught in person by fellow developers rather than alone in my room browsing the web, I wanted to give back by helping other developers and those who wanted to become one.

After holding workshops in the CS club I got the opportunity to teach  coding workshops for kids at HackerSchool in Germany and the local CoderDojo in Dublin.

The fascination of the kids for programming grew with every line of code they wrote to turn the blank canvas into a Snake game. Simply showing some cool CSS tricks led to more rotating YouTube videos, images and paragraphs on their websites than you will probably ever see out in the wild, but the excitement in the room was incredible.

Over time, I realized that while I love writing code, inspiring people into coding and teaching them cool new things you can do with technology gives me incredible joy and that I did not want to do this only in my free time but turn it into my profession.

sed -e ‘s/Software Engineer/Developer Evangelist/g’ jobinfo.txt

I’m looking forward to meeting you all at meetups, conferences and hackathons in Berlin and all over Europe to hear how you got inspired to code and hopefully inspire you to build awesome new things!
In the meantime feel free to reach out to me:

• Email: dkundel@twilio.com
• Twitter: @dkundel
• GitHub: dkundel
• Website: http://kundel.co