Bridging the Gap: Building Careers in HubSpot Development

Sa.

Welcome. Welcome everybody. As you can see, I am not Dennis, I am not Anton, and I am not Toon. I am sj. But I am so excited that those awesome folks behind the developer hug have handed over the mic to me and this great crew of women to honor Women's History Month. That's right, folks. We get one month to acknowledge our amazingness to the world. I kid, I kid, I kid, I kid. We are constantly uplifted and supported by the wonderful people on our teams and in the HubSpot community. And I'm just so happy to be here connecting with all of you, sharing insights on experience experiences in building our careers, whether that be in HubSpot and development in general. Of course, talking a little bit about community building and all that good stuff. So I'm going to quickly introduce myself and then I'll introduce Let everyone else give a get a chance to introduce themselves. I'm SJ Morris and my pronouns are she, her and I run Dev community here on the amazing DevRel team at HubSpot. I am responsible responsible for such hits as the HubSpot ecosystem mentorship program sometimes for those of you who have been the dev parties that we have at Inbound, what what the welcome messages that you receive in your Dev slack and all kinds of other fun stuff. So I'm always super excited when I get the chance to connect with all of you in this awesome community. I have been working in community for over 20 years. Yikes. And in Devrel for over 14. And so much has changed in my career as it's evolved and I'm really passionate about setting the stage to help others build their careers. So I'm so happy to have this awesome group of folks here to talk about their experiences. Experiences in doing just that. So I am so lucky to be supported by my awesome panel. Hannah Seligson, Bri Hall, Brooke Bond and Jennifer Nixon and I will let themselves introduce themselves in just a moment. But first I just want to do some quick housekeeping to let you know how today is going to go. As you may all know if you signed up, we are talking about bridging the gap and building careers in HubSpot development. I'd say in development in general, we're going to be talking about our specific lived experiences as women getting up and running in these careers. But let me hand it over to the awesome Brook Bond. After we go through our intros, who will go through the developer Changelog. I will keep you up to date on everything you need to know about building a HubSpot successfully. And then we'll jump into our panel questions that may or may not include a couple of demos that you won't want to miss. And then we will open it up to your questions. So if you have any for us, please don't hesitate to drop them in the chat. Our wonderful chat moderator, Dennis Edson will make sure that we see them. And once we've gone through all the panel questions, we'll jump right into those audience questions. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to our incredible panelists to introduce themselves. We'll go Hannah, Bree, Brooke and Jennifer. So let's start with Hannah.

All right. Hi everyone. So I'm Hannah Seligson and I am on the developer advocate team here at HubSpot. I focus mostly on our CRM and our APIs, and prior to this I was an advocate within the cloud native community and before that I was a backend engineer building APIs. That's me. I'll hand it off to Brie. Thank you.

Thank you Hannah. I'm Bri hall and I'm a Developer advocate also on our DevRel team. I focus mostly with UI extensions. I've been on the team for Crazy to think now almost a year and a couple of months. And before that I worked on a different team within HubSpot as a front end engineer. I got to work on some of the fun CRM data components that are being used within the CRM. So that was a really fun transition to go from building the components to showing people how to use them. Before that I have had a couple of different front end roles where I've worked on telecommunications applications and open source design systems as well. So that's me.

Cool. Let's hand it over to Brooke.

Hi everybody, my name is Brooke, my pronouns are she, her and I am also a developer advocate here with HubSpot focusing on our education and communication. So currently you'll see me all over the HubSpot Developers YouTube channel. I have lots of great tutorial videos there. So if you want to learn about how to use our APIs, how to work with UI extensions, I've got lots of different tutorials and different topics so make sure to check that out. Before this I was actually on HubSpot Academy, so if you are also an Academy fan, you probably saw me in things such as the CMS for Developers course and some other fun Developer Academy videos. That's what I did. And previous to that I was a UX designer web developer for an agency. So I ran all of their web stuff. And yeah, I'll hand it off to Jennifer. Awesome.

Thank you ladies. I am Jennifer Nixon and I'm here representing the community. I am somebody who has some developer experience and I've transitioned my career many times. Community champions the inaugural mentors and mentorship program last year and yeah, doing some consulting and I've been in everything B2C, B2B Consulting Agency and just excited to be here.

All right, thank you so much everyone. I will hand it back to the incredible Brooke for our Changelog recap.

Awesome. Yeah. So it's the end of the month, which means we've got more great change log stuff coming. So let's go over a couple of them. So this is just a reminder that you saw last month, but the automatic deactivation of exposed tokens is happening in like a week April 7th. So just make sure that you know about this and you are ready for that change happening. This is for security, so this is going to be a great upgrade to our security that we're offering. But don't get surprised by this. Go ahead and rotate your tokens out. Make sure everything is all good to go before this update in April. Next up, the Clearbit Logo API is being deprecated and and the end of service is happening at the end of this year in December 1st. So make sure to check out the really great changelog that we have. It gives you an alternative for using this service. So if you're using this or if you know of any like services that you have been using that use this, let them know about this so that they can make that update. Next up, we have an update to our calling extensions. Inbound Calling is now available so you can now use Inbound Calling inside of that calling extensions STK and this allows developers to integrate third party calling applications. So air call RingCentral, those kinds of stuff with HubSpot enabling users to receive inbound calls from any page within the CRM. So make sure to check out this link to learn more about Inbound calling and how you can use it with the Extensions SDK. Next up, we have expanded language label support for Custom Actions API. So we have seven new languages that are now supported for use. This includes Polish, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and traditional Taiwanese. Traditional Chinese, not Taiwanese, sorry. So check that out. If you have any of your customers that work in those languages, you can now support those languages in your custom actions. And to go along with that language stuff, we now have a removal of the language restrictions on Marketplace listings. Now when you list your app on the marketplace. You can create your listing pages in any language, regardless of your apps, supported languages. That's super helpful for all of our international app developers out there. That's all I've got.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brooke. We love the consistency and updates and every d hug you give us all the latest scoops. So, okay, it's time for to jump into the panel and get into some of these fun questions. So let's jump right in. I'm going to start by asking each panelist sort of, you know, in a, in a nutshell, how they got started in their careers, what led them to HubSpot and anything else they'd like to share about their journey. I will start this, start us off. So as I mentioned, I have been working in Devrel for a long time, since 2011. My Devrel journey started when I was hired at a tiny little Montreal based API company where I did a crash course in all things Devrel and Dev community. Basically everything but the actual engineering of the product. I built out our community. I took on responsibilities like, you know, I was doing product management, product marketing, Devrel and you know, emptying the garbage because that's what happens at a startup. It was a crash course and looking back, it was really like a pivotal moment for me. And then from there I moved on to a bunch of different companies of different sizes focusing on Devrel and eventually more specifically Dev community. And in 2019 I brought that experience to HubSpot where I was very lucky to join to lead some of our Devrel programs. And then I left for a year. There are reasons for that that you can DM me about and they had absolutely nothing to do with HubSpot. And then I came back in 2022 to squarely focus on community and how it impacts our Devrel efforts. And I think that the thing that I love the most is that my career, you know, maybe I'm a little biased, but my career has been directly impacted by the communities I've been a part of that have gotten me to where I am today. And so unsurprisingly, I feel strongly that community building is a great way to build your career, especially if you're a part of an underrepresented group in tech. So with that, I would love to hand it over to Jennifer next to share her journey.

Awesome. Thank you, sj.

So my journey is a little bit unique. I followed maybe a non traditional path, but one of the things that has kind of woven throughout my journey is web development. I first coded a website in Junior high. I was the first in architecture school to have a website portfolio. Like web has led me to landing a lot of different roles, but it's never been my full time job. I've never been a web developer. So I first found HubSpot through inbound marketing. I didn't know it at the time. I was trying to research a new website solution to get away from like a home builder centric option. We needed a new sales CRM and every time I was going to Google I was finding different HubSpot things in onboarding. I just wanted to know everything I could. And the first session was set for like a week later. I started the certifications right away and I think There were like 10 at the time. I just kept going and once I had them all and new ones came out, I just kept going, going. So I've kind of just been addicted to the learning that's incorporated with HubSpot and how we can all grow better through the now the platform, but through the CRM, through the tools. And yeah, it led me to, I, I ended up getting like partner certifications and that led me to getting my first role with an agency. So just a, a lot of key moments that HubSpot has had in my journey.

Bre would love to hear your story.

Absolutely. I think my story starts from when I was a little bit younger. I've always been interested in technology. My dad used to, he was really good at swapping out like computer pieces on our home desktop and I would always just kind of like sit on his lap while he did that and just look at the different computer pieces. And eventually I started playing computer games and I think that's really where I started to get very interested in gaming and with technology. I really love to play the Sims 2 and I realized you could install your own mods for the game. And I was like, I want to make my own mods and I want to make the Sims, however I want to have it. That prompted me to take my first coding class in high school. And my first coding class was Java. And it was so great because it allowed me to be creative in a way that my friends weren't and. Or well, yeah, in a way that my friends weren't. Like they could paint and draw and do all this kind of fun stuff and I am not talented in that way. But once I started learning things like how to make a choose your own adventure story in Java with just like really simple if else statements and then switch statements, I was like, oh my goodness, you can't Tell me anything. This is exactly what I'm going to do. So I went to college for software engineering and that's where my story kind of takes a little bit of an interesting turn. It did take me, I think three years to find a job after college because something that I didn't realize before going in is that college kind of teaches you those foundational skills, but not practical skills that you might need to land an actual job outside of school. So I spent a lot of time learning and that's when I came across front end development versus doing more back end development, which is what I had experience with. And it was like falling in love with coding all over again. So I have been a front end engineer ever since.

Love it. I always love hearing your little stories breathe. They're always like, you always have such great aesthetics and choices. Brooke, love to hear from you.

Yeah, I started and I actually talked about this in my Developers After Dark podcast episode. So if you want to listen to that, to hear the whole story, you can check that out. But I had a Tumblr blog back in high school and I got really into customizing my theme for my Tumblr blog, adding in fun little CSS flourishes to make it really cool. And I got really invested in like making this blog like look however I wanted to. Like Bree said, it kind of lit up my world. I was like, I also can't draw very well, so I'm like, this is my drawing. And so I've always been into front end development. So I went to college for journalism. Realized I didn't like to be a reporter and ask people questions on the street. So I pivoted and my journalism program actually had track called Interactive Multimedia. And from there I was able to take a bunch of front end development classes. And after I graduated I started working at an ad age. I worked at an agency, we were a creative agency, but I worked on our internal website and blog and did UX and web design for it. And then we were HubSpot customers. We became HubSpot customers while I was working there. So I learned how to use the product and I really liked the product. And then during the pandemic I wanted a change up in like what I was doing. I wanted to go to a bigger company. I wanted to like have that more like, like more mentors, more people that I could work with because we were a very small company, about 30 people. And so I got reached out to on LinkedIn actually by a recruiter at HubSpot who recruited me for my job as an Academy developer professor. So I kind of just fell into this role. I didn't even know that developer education was a thing that you could do, but I was like this kind of like, because I do like writing. That was the part of journalism that I did like. I liked writing, I liked educating. And so it was so cool that this role was able to be a hybrid of like my coding skills and my writing and education skills. And I brought that over to the Devrel team and I've been loving it here. I've been on the team now for a little less than a year.

Well, goodness gracious, time flies. I also just want to point out, like, I love how we all have these like generational markers of our developer moments of experiences. Like it's either it's MySpace or Tumblr or Geo Cities. So Hannah, what's your story and what's your generational marker?

I guess I have experience both with Tumblr and MySpace and also live Journal. I don't know if anyone remembers that.

I really mean anybody. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. And it's also interesting, I feel like a lot of us have similar place. Even though we have non traditional backgrounds, they're also semi similar. So similar to Brooke. I went to school originally for journalism and realized, you know, this, this isn't really for me. But eventually I had a job as a project manager for like a small agency. And I guess that's when I really started to get into coding and I was like really working with customers and wanting to make changes and I really wanted to be someone who wanted to be able to implement the change instead of like report that change or manage that change. And so I went to a boot camp and I think this was like back in the day, this was like 2016. And this is back in the days when like boot camps were like physically like you went to a physical place. And we did that for about four months and it was just nonstop coding. And that's where I learned C sharp. So I wasn't a Java Java friend. Java's tough. So shout out to all of you. But yeah, from there. What was that?

Oh, I said we broke up.

It was so tough.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So from there I kind of was working as my first job. After that I worked as like a full stack dev and then I moved on to just doing back end development and I'd worked for an insurance company where we had these large legacy monolithic systems and we needed to start breaking them down to microservices. I was brought on to a specific API team, where we had to teach our development teams how to build and design APIs. That was where I got my first intro into advocacy, or just combining my passion for writing and programming and helping to teach people how to do this. I really enjoyed that. And from there, I guess that's when I kind of discovered, like, advocacy. I was like. I think back then, we called the Evangelism, and I was an API evangelist, and from there, I got into the cloud community, and I was an advocate for a CICD platform. Absolutely loved it. And then I transitioned to HubSpot, and I've been here for. In June. It'll be three years. So. Yeah. And I just, you know, it's nice to, like, be back working with, you know, API development and helping developers, and it's. Yeah, it's just a lot of fun, and I enjoy it. So.

Yeah, I mean, that was awesome, Hannah, but I. I hate to do this to you, but everyone ask Hannah about her Devil Wears Prada experience. One of these.

Oh, yes.

But do it.

Yeah. So, yeah, when I was in. When I was studying journalism, we had to have a, you know, an internship, and I remember interviewing for magazines, and I ended up working for fashion magazines, Women's Wear Daily and W Richer under Conde Nast. And then I moved on to a smaller magazine, Nylon. And it is exactly what you think it is. I mean, it is tough. It is. You know, I just remember photographers being like, get out while you can. And I was like, okay. And I was just like, you know, maybe this just isn't for me as I'm, like, babysitting an editor's children and, like, you know, like, also doing mood boards and collecting, you know. Yeah. I mean, there's fun aspects, but overall.

I was like, yeah, well, I'm glad.

That you landed where you landed, and we're so glad you're here. I just want to say thank you for the Joanie Love in the chat. She's very happy here. All right, so I'm going to pivot now. We've learned a little bit about how you all got to where you are today. Let's talk about the things that you're excited and passionate about, the things that you're working on on HubSpot or with the HubSpot community or whatever you'd like to share. So let's kick it off with with Bri.

Absolutely. So one thing about me, like I said, is I like video games, and I have a little demo to share because I have to sprinkle gaming into wherever I can, and a Little bit of a backstory. The reason is when I was learning how to code, when I was like self teaching, not when I was in school, there were a lot of times where I just like straight up felt stupid because I wasn't grasping concepts as quickly as other people said they were Online, like recursion took me a long time to understand and one of the things that I had to learn about myself was that's how I learn best. And I personally learn best when I remove technological concepts from the computers, from the technology itself. So for instance, recursion, once I put that into the realm of video games and thinking about it like a dungeon crawler and having a recursive function that takes you through until you achieve a certain thing that made it all make sense to me. So something that I like to do is help people to like to meet them where they are. Especially with things like HubSpot, where there are so many people who wouldn't consider themselves developers. And I want people to be able to understand the concepts of what we're trying to do outside of the technology, which will then help them become better developers, even if they don't necessarily consider themselves one. This is an example of something that I created, which is a private UI extensions card, which is mostly what I work on these days. I do a lot with UIE and I find that it is so fun. And it's basically a recreation of the game wordle. Basically we have a private app card here and it is. It looks a little bit similar. There are a couple of differences just because we have different components that we can use in UI extensions, but it would play exactly how you would guess. So if I enter a word like hello, we can see that two of the letters that I have are correct based on the fact that they're highlighted in green and then the rest are not in the words, they're not highlighted at all. And maybe I will change my guess again and get a different letter. So we can see that D is in the word, but it is in the incorrect place. But when I get the word guessed correctly we get an alert. I can see that I've won the game. And we can see this little grid that we have here. So this was something that was really fun just to do. I feel like this is a really great beginner project because it teaches you how to do things like use the context in order to pull from the account that you're on. It has really good use case of how to use the different components. And I'm actually also using a Serverless function to call a random word API as well to get that going. So you get a different word every single time you play.

Yeah, that was awesome. I will hand it over to Hannah.

All right. I guess it wouldn't be a webinar with me if I didn't talk about Postman. So, at HubSpot, I manage our public work space, which houses all of our API collection specs for end users to use. When I was an engineer, I used Postman religiously every day to build and test our APIs that we were working on. It's really interesting now to be in Devro and just focusing on Postman in such a different way. That different way is we are using this developer first tool to essentially just onboard our end users with our APIs. And so I think when I first started, this was a project that I got the green light to move forward with and I haven't looked back. And I'm just excited because now that we've established this public workspace for all of you to leverage, now I'm like, okay, what's next? Like, how can we build upon this? How can we make this more interactive? How can we make onboarding with our APIs easier? Postman flows is a new feature they have where essentially it's like you're using these drag and drop building blocks to leverage our public APIs and to build some workflow with this demo. Essentially what it's doing, it's a flow that's going to demonstrate how to create an invoice for a deal that has a draft status. Then we're going to associate it with a relevant contact company and line items. We're going to create new line items based on those existing ones, and then we're going to associate those with the invoice. Update the invoice test open, generate a new invoice and an invoice id. I don't expect you all to remember that we're going to share a repo where you can actually reference this exact flow. You can test it out yourself, and I'd love to hear your feedback on it. I did a recording just so we could avoid any sort of issues, but essentially this is what a flow looks like. I'm able to just use the drag and drops to build them. Each flow has an associated collection. It also has an associated environment when you are kicking off each flow you're going to use. For this one specifically, we're going to use a deal id. I'm providing an existing deal ID to kick off the flow. Then it Just walks you through. You can customize this. I can add typescript if I want to do something with the response data and pass that on to the next request. Hopefully no one's getting nauseous then what I'm going to do is I'm going to kick off the flow and you can see it running, then it's going to result. Provide me that new invoice ID. I'm going to go to my HubSpot account, I'm going to pull that invoice. Essentially, I'm just hoping to do more of these flows. If anyone has any use cases, you're like, man, I really like to see that, please let me know. I would love to build that because these are going to be meant for you to iterate on and customize for your own use cases. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hannah, you are indeed the postwoman, as so aptly mentioned in chat. Jennifer, we'd love to hear what you're working on these days.

Yeah, right now I'm working on.

How.

I can help support other champions to level up and rank and people who want to become champions or get involved in the community. So I'm working on a mini series on LinkedIn about the journey to a champion. So kind of going back to the beginning, how I got started and tips and tricks and all the fun highlights. I have a poll running right now, so if you want to vote on where you'd like to see information, you know, getting started, getting points, whatever it is, leveling up, you can vote and then I'll be sharing those posts coming up.

Love that. For those of you who aren't familiar, the HubSpot Champions program is a great opportunity for you to be incentivized and get all kinds of great things and rewards for helping the community out and sharing, you know, all these cool HubSpot updates. So Jennifer is definitely the right person to talk to about that program and we're always looking for more, you know, technically minded folks to join that program. Brooke, what have you got for us?

Yeah, so this is actually not HubSpot related, but I'm currently an adjunct instructor and I am teaching a college course and my students are tasked with building a website end to end for the semester. And so I am teaching them how to use a static site generator. We're using Eleventy, which is really fun to actually work with and we're also using Tailwind because that's such a fun way to make CSS more accessible when you're doing templating and stuff like that. Finally, I'm teaching them how to plug it into a cms. We're working through different things. Currently we're using DCAP CMS to connect it to Netlify and showing them how to grab that data from a CMS backend to put it to the front end. At the end of the semester we're going to be having a showcase of all of the work and it's going to be live streamed on April 23. I don't have the link to that live stream yet, but when I do, make sure to check out my LinkedIn and you all can join that and see all the great work that my students are doing.

That's so cool. I love that like we all sort of have this shared desire to facilitate education and so I love that you're like literally, you know, dropping, dropping the knowledge in a classroom setting. Brooke, that's so cool. I am not going to share any demos because I'm doing enough yapping in this class conversation. But I'm going to jump into, you know, something that's maybe a little more challenging and nuanced but I think really important to bring up and what I hope that, you know, the underrepresented folks listening today can relate to and for folks who don't necessarily identify as being underrepresented in tech, hopefully you can kind of listen in and learn how you can support those who face higher barriers to entering tech and you know, ultimately working in the HubSpot community. So I'd love to ask everyone on the panel if they'd like, this is optional as well because this is a little more nuanced to share any stories or experiences where they may have felt that identity underrepresented identity impacting their careers and their options or the moments where they face those challenges. So I will start just set the tone and so you'll know kind of like what to expect. So I mean, unfortunately I have a million stories that I could share in this, in this vein, but I, I think I'm going to start with something just kind of high level and that has a happy ending too. So about 12 years ago when I first started in Devrel, I was doing so many hackathons. Like as I mentioned, it was a three person startup and I was the one traveling and going to hackathons all the time, which is wild because I, you know, I know Nick thinks I'm a webmaster, but I may not actually be a full on developer like a lot of folks in this room. And that being said, I did what I could to demo our API help developers with their apps. And more than once, I did find myself as the only woman at these events. And sometimes they were overnight hackathons. And honestly, that could be just an intimidating experience. Like, as women, we are often taught from an early age that we should be extra cautious in all male environments. And sometimes it did feel like my voice could get lost or dismissed. But luckily I had some allies who recognized the situation and went out of the way to make me feel more comfortable and included and safe. And those people, I don't think they're listening today. They might be, they're from a long time ago, but they should know who they are. And I'm so grateful that I had those folks to help me feel included and safe in those situations. So if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you know, look for the folks who are there to support you and those folks who, you know, you know, you want to see your, you know, colleagues or community friends succeed, then raise your hand and offer them that support. And don't hesitate if you're going through that to really lean on their care and empathy. So that's my little story. I will hand it over to Bri if she'd like to share a story. And remember, panelists, this one is up.

Absolutely. I think one of the things that I've struggled with the most is being in spaces and people assuming that I'm not a technical person or trying to over explain topics to me that I know thoroughly. This happened at a conference where I built a demo for something and I was so happy because I was like, oh, my goodness, I get to actually, like, showcase and people get to see something that I built. So I took a lot of pride in what I had built and what I was creating, and I was ready to explain it and talk to people. But I very quickly realized that people didn't want to ask me the technical questions. They wanted to know who built it, but I was the person who built it. And then after saying that I was the person who built it, they still wanted to talk to somebody else who was technical. And that is a really hard barrier to get over when you are trying to be polite and not just be like, I'm the one. You're asking questions, you're going to ask them, but they're going to ask me because I did the building, I made the thing. And for me personally, I have come to grips that, like, this is what is going to happen. It is just unfortunately a part of some people's mentality that they can't always get over the hump of maybe I don't look like what their version of an engineer or somebody who's technical is, but what I do is I just continue to answer their questions to the best of my ability, and I no longer try to change their outlook or their aspect because it's not my responsibility to try to do so. So in this case, for this conference, I was able to answer questions, or if they had other questions and wanted to ask other folks who were around, they had the option to do that as well. Those folks did also have to ask me. But, hey, it all worked out. Yep.

That's. That's usually how we end up, you know, being like, look, I'm the one answering the question, bud. Anyway, Hannah, what was it like?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I was. Brie and I were actually talking a while back, and I was thinking. I was like, wow. Like, I was probably the only female on my team or identified as female for years, years and years. And it wasn't until I had worked with my first female engineer. Her name was Juna, and she's, you know, she's awesome. She's like a progressive Insurance. Right now. She's an engineer. But really, it wasn't until, like, then. And then when I pursued advocacy, I got to work with this amazing woman, Tracy Holmes. Shout out to Tracy. She, like, I don't know. It was really difficult because I didn't have a voice or at least I didn't feel heard, and I didn't feel just, I don't know, like I could take up space. And that was also, like. It was because of the environment, but it was also because of me. And, you know, I definitely was feeling kind of just like, not good enough or just, like, insecure. And nowadays it's like, my biggest advice for people is to just speak up.