I'm joining Pinecone.io as a Staff Developer Advocate!
I'm excited to share that I'm joining Pinecone.io as a Staff Developer Advocate!
Why Pinecone?
Pinecone.io makes the world's most performant cloud-native vector database, which is essential for storing and efficiently querying embeddings. Vector databases are critical infrastructure in the midst of the AI revolution we're currently experiencing.
Over the last half year or so, I've been getting deeper into Generative AI and its many use cases, particularly focusing on how to improve and enhance developer workflows (such as my own) with tools like ChatGPT, Codeium, etc.
But the main thing that got me interested in Pinecone was their outstanding technical content, and the very talented team behind it. My first introduction was James Briggs's outstanding YouTube videos, which led me to Pinecone's own learning center.
As I got deeper into their examples, ran some of them and experimented, I was blown away at the quality and amount of deep technical content that Pinecone was giving away for free. If you've read my work before, you know I'm fanatical about open sourcing things and sharing learning for free with other developers.
I've also written about my initial, very positive, experiences with Vercel, and, in addition to James's technical content, I learned that another very talented staff developer advocate, Roie Schwaber-Cohen, was shipping outstanding Vercel templates that implemented full-stack GenAI chatbots complete with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
If you want a great intro to what vector databases are and how embeddings can give AI models accurate long-term memories (and prevent hallucinations), check out this great intro by my colleague Roie.
After considering a few other opportunities, I found that I was most excited about joining this team and going deep on Generative AI use cases and vector databases.
Why pivot to Developer Advocacy?
In short, I've figured out that I love technical storytelling as much as I love building systems and applications.
I've always been a writer, but since January of 2023, I've found myself increasingly itching to not only produce technical tutorials and deep-dives, but also share them with my fellow developers.
I also enhanced my production pipeline, modernizing my portfolio site and migrating to Vercel for more rapid iteration, as I wrote about here.
My game plan was simple: continue to do my day job as an open source developer, continue to learn in public, but also capture my best learnings, insights, favorite new tech stacks and tools via my blog, YouTube channel and even Twitch!
Learning in public has brought me a lot of personal joy, especially when I share my learnings with others and get feedback that it helped even one other developer. When I found the opening at Pinecone for a developer advocate that would combine:
- development of applications to demonstrate the latest and most effective patterns around applications that leverage the latest AI technologies
- open source development to assist the overall community and make it easier to build AI applications
- technical storytelling
I knew the time had come to jump in, join the team, and go deep on a completely new technology stack, after spending the last 3 and a half years immersed in Infrastructure as Code, SDK and tooling development and deployment automation.
Why does this mean so much to me?
I am a self-taught developer. When I was starting out, and to this day, the work of others who have been generous enough to decide to write up their insights, code blocks, special hacks, secret fixes to that one weird error message, etc and share them with the world, have helped me immensely in my quest. I do the same to give back to the developer community and broader technically-minded community.
Pinecone is hiring!
If you're interested in joining the Pinecone team, check out this page!
