October 14, 2020 Dev Evangelism and the Crowd: an Uprisor Innovation Conversation with Meredith Hasset

Welcome back to our Uprisor podcast series, exploring the forces and trends driving the evolution of how the world works. Today we’re talking with Meredith Hasset, developer advocate at Corvid by Wix®. Clinton and Meredith discuss what it takes to introduce a new technology to developers, Meredith’s experience at Wix supporting Corvid and showcasing it to the developer community, and how dev advocacy can drive innovation.

Enjoy the conversation and check out a recap below.

DEV advocacy and AN OPEN DEVELOPER ECOSYSTEM

Meredith starts by sharing how STEM and volunteer opportunities helped pave the way for her to pursue a career in technology. After starting out in consulting she pivoted to sales engineering, a role that was more aligned with Meredith’s foundation in community empowerment. From there, she “stumbled into dev advocacy.” There is real competition for developer eyeballs and hearts, and real benefits to growing a community of devoted developers around a specific platform or tech stack. As Meredith put it, “I want to be showing you the edges of the technology. I want to be hearing what the developer community is interested in learning about the product and helping influence the direction of the product.”

“There’s so many times when we as developers are using the tool, and if it just did this one little thing, it would be so much better.” — Meredith Hasset

THE customization continuum

Corvid by Wix® is a comprehensive web development platform that advances Wix core offering of an extremely popular drag-and-drop website builder to the field of serious web application development. But as Clinton points out, it takes a lot more back-end technology to make drag-and-drop functionality work than the end-user is aware of — and these quick solutions don’t always provide the threads of customization that a business owner might need. To bridge this gap without introducing the headaches and cost of full-scale website customization, Wix released Corvid, a JavaScript development platform that serves as a marketplace for on-demand developer talent and consumers to strike that balance between standard solutions, specific customization, and usability. 

Though it was released in 2019, Corvid by Wix® has been instrumental during the global COVID-19 pandemic, allowing businesses to pivot to online models at a critical time.

Simplifying development and Empowering developers

The conversation wraps up with a discussion of how open innovation, open collaboration, and open knowledge play a critical role in empowering development velocity. While half the battle a developer faces is having the skill set needed to complete a client request, another major factor is weighing the development time it will take in relation to what they can charge. Tools like Corvid can simplify development and offer the benefits of efficiency and cost savings to developers and end-customers alike. 

Thank you to Meredith Hasset for taking the time to offer your insights with us.

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