March 18, 2011 Announcing the CloudSpokes Developer Evangelist – Jeff Douglas

Beginning next week I’ll be starting a new position at Appirio on the CloudSpokes team. One of the great things about Appirio is that, like the cloud computing industry in general, the only constant is change and new opportunities are always being incubated within our company. Since I started with Appirio I’ve been on the delivery team working 40-60 hours a week on client projects. I absolutely love it! In between my “normal” working hours I squeeze in blogging, tinkering with new technologies, developing demos and writing articles for developer.force.com. It’s always a blast and never a dull moment.

About a year ago we started work on our CloudSpokes community. We ran it internally for awhile to flesh out the concept and work out the kinks and finally launched it last Valentine’s Day. CloudSpokes allows developers to participate in challenges, build a diverse portfolio of technology skills, learn something new, and even earn a little cash on the side as well (btw… take 15 seconds and join the community so you can see what cool things are going on). We’ve completed some pretty great challenges in our first month such as building out OAuth2 support for Ruby to authorize Heroku apps for Force.com, a Firefox plugin utility for developers, a “Cloudy Code Obfuscator” and some XSLT transformations for customer projects. We currently have challenges for HTML5, an iPhone app for salesforce.com Admins and a Google chat bot. There’s more fun to come as we will be announcing as series of related challenges to really energize the community site. We’ve pledged to give away $1 million in prize money so we have to get crackin’!

CloudSpokes is off to a great start but Appirio wants it make it #superfrickinawesome! So beginning next week I’ll start my new position as Developer Evangelist for Appirio and CloudSpokes. Half of my time will still be down in the trenches of Force.com client projects but the other half will be devoted CloudSpokes and the developer community in general. What does this mean for me and hopefully the community?

• Part of my job will be helping the CloudSpokes team develop new challenges, judge contest submissions and manage the day to day operations of the site.
• I’ll get to concentrate on blog posts and demos to help enterprises accelerate their adoption of the cloud. Since we focus on technologies such as Force.com, Google, Heroku, VMforce, Amazon Web Services, Workday, Twilio and mobile, you should expect to see more coming your way.
• I’ve always been not-so-secretly jealous of the Force.com Developer Evangelists, so now I’ll get a chance to (hopefully) work with them more closely. We are also fostering relationships with evangelists from Heroku, Twilio, VMware and AWS so our goal is to include them more in the community. We may have an exciting announcement on this front soon.
• I’m a little ADD (actually, my wife says I have ADSO… Attention Deficit… oh! Shiny Object!!) so anything new is fun for me. I’m really excited that I’ll be able to work with new and emerging technologies that I typically am not exposed to. I’m really getting my hands dirty with Ruby and Heroku and I think that will be a focus for awhile. I’ll also be getting into mobile stuff for iOS, Android, Sencha and HTML5.
• My new role should also prevent my wife from divorcing me as my working hours shouldn’t be as crazy.

So if you have any ideas on what you would like to see or what you think I should do, the please drop me a line!