Story

I began writing online after spending hours playing an MMO game that I wanted to improve. With no software development knowledge, I decided that because the game lived online, I probably needed to learn how to build a website.

I found Piczo, a free website builder, and started sharing my game development ideas alongside scans of pictures I had drawn and coloured in Paint Shop Pro.

My focus quickly shifted when I discovered I could change the colour of text and backgrounds. During my High School Musical phase (which I am still in, if anyone was wondering), my website became red and white, inspired by Wildcats colours.

After trying Freewebs, I got my first subdomain from the blogging community. Later, I won a Christmas contest hosted by Namecheap and bought my first ever domain.

I wrote my first lines of front-end code alongside my first words on my blog. Pawlean became my online, very public diary. I also started tweeting in 2009.

Despite all of this interest in tech, I dropped Computer Science after feeling like an outsider in my GCSE Computing class and opted for a career in healthcare.

I enrolled in a three-year Biomedical Sciences course at The University of Sheffield, intending to pursue a postgraduate in Medicine.

I quickly realised that I did not want to work in the field at all.

When a university project came up with a local agency, I used it as a chance to do something different. #GivaLiva was a campaign that encouraged organ donation. I made a simple carousel website with my hand-drawn sketches and a very detailed social media campaign.

That caught the agency's attention, and I was offered my first internship as a Software Engineer.

I took a two-year break from my blog to focus on my studies and get into university. I did not think I would get back here, but on 19 August 2015, I opened it again after a random spark of inspiration during a Biomedical Sciences lecture where some fruit flies were thrown at me.

I know, talk about a wake-up call.

When I returned to blogging, I adopted the name “Pawlean,” which is the pronunciation of my name, an alter ego, and my infamous Xbox Live Gamertag. This name became a huge part of my identity, along with my blog.

I found Code First Girls' coding courses running at my university, so I signed up curious about what we would build in a group setting.

I enjoyed it so much that I became a course instructor, teaching two six-hour classes every week for three years. Without realising it at first, I ended up building a local community around the courses that became known as #shefcodefirst.

Outside the course, we travelled around the UK to tech conferences to learn about the industry together.

Eager to experience life outside being a university student, I took a year out and worked as a Communications and External Engagement Intern at the University of Sheffield.

Alongside my placement year, I spent my spare time teaching students how to code with Code First Girls, exploring opportunities in tech, attending events, and organising hackathons.

When I returned to my studies, I had more clarity on the direction of my career. My obsession for the next few months was to double down on anything that could get me into the tech industry.

As I wrote my dissertation on cancer cells, I worked several jobs: remotely as a web developer, supporting students with their entrepreneurial ideas at the university start-up facility (USE), and working as a student vlogger highlighting tech initiatives at the university.

I also grew the #shefcodefirst community, attended and spoke at tech events, and kept building my online presence.

After graduating, I joined BT's Digital Engineering graduate program, where I spent two years learning as much as possible. I rotated through architecture, software engineering, platform engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE).

Outside the day-to-day, I stayed active in company initiatives and the UK tech scene while documenting my learnings on my blog.

I also experimented with different formats for storytelling. I created “Inspiring Figures”, a series of conversations with people from all walks of life, and in 2020 I had an “everything” podcast.

At the end of the graduate program, I joined a newly formed SRE team where I introduced SRE principles from Google into the organisation. We later spoke about it at SRECON20.

Later, I moved to Flutter (Sky Bet), doing similar platform engineering work with cloud native technologies.

Whilst I enjoyed engineering, I wanted to consolidate my interests in latest tech, community building, and education.

When I asked the tech community what this was, they pointed me to developer relations and the people leading developer communities.

In July 2021, I pivoted to my dream role of building communities and creating content full-time at Gitpod.

For three years, I built a successful community around the product, launched community programs (Ambassador, OSS and Start-up), led social media, created content that reached thousands of developers, and organised conferences and community-led meetups.

Inspired by Gitpod's "world from anywhere" theme, this was also the era I became a digital nomad, travelling and living around the world.

I joined Vercel in June 2024.

There, I helped build the Vercel Community strategy across the company, grew a global team of five, and helped create a community of Vercel experts through education, live sessions, and meeting developers where they are.

After two wonderful years at Vercel, I decided to leave to move on to my next exciting adventure. I recently reflected on the last few years in Community and DevRel.