Carmen Huidobro

(she/her) | Developer Relations, Technical Content and OSS

Hello!

I’m a Developer Relations Strategist, Team Lead, Developer Educator and Keynote Speaker with over a decade of experience in Software Engineering. Having been a contractor for the majority of my career has given me a bevy of perspectives.
My main motivation is community. I’ve actively worked with children, refugees as well as software builders both new and experienced. I organise conferences, workshops and other events aimed at helping empower folks in their tech journey.
I’m located in Vienna, Austria. If hiring, please understand that relocation is not an option.

  • 🇨🇦 English spoken
  • 🇨🇱 Se habla Español
  • 🇦🇹 Deutschsprachig
  • 🇫🇷 Eh... bof

Problem Solving Skill Areas

Developer Relations

DevRel strategies, programs, event organising, public speaking

JavaScript

Node, React, Vue, Svelte, deleting the `node_modules` folder, "silly React shenanigans"

Devops

Heroku, Docker, Sentry, CI, AWS, k8s

Developer Education

Workshops, bootcamps, video courses, written content

Ruby

Rails, Sinatra, Rubymotion

Mobile, Native Development

iOS, Swift, Android, Kotlin, React Native, macOS

Elixir

Phoenix

Rust

CLI, WASM

Management

Go-To-Market initiatives, technical training, interpersonal expertise

Navigating Browser Cookie Popups

Getting as few data to be shared as possible

Kudos

Carmen is a great engineer, very resourceful when it comes to dealing with new technologies (software & hardware) and an all around wonderful person to hang out with!

— Dražen Lučanin, developer, data analyst and the founder of Punk Rock Dev

I would put 5 stars for JS 😛

— Antonija Šimić, Frontend Developer

If you’re hosting an event, looking to educate folks on a particular skill set, or seeking to build empathetic, inclusive, and engaged spaces — look no further than Carmen!

— Erin Mikail Staples, Developer Advocate

Carmen is a fantastic educator. He has the uncanny ability to explain coding-related things in easy-to-understand ways and perfectly adapted to the learner’s skill level and way of thinking.

— Kai Katschthaler, Developer Content Specialist

Selected Experience

Developer Advocate and Developer Relations Strategist

Directus

https://directus.io

Developer Educator

September 2024 - Present

DevCraft Academy

https://devcraft.academy/

Head of Developer Education

July 2023 - August 2024

Suborbital Software Systems

https://suborbital.dev

Senior Developer Advocate

February 2022 - June 2023

CodeSee

https://codesee.io/

Head of Open Source

January 2021 - January 2022

Distribute Aid

https://distributeaid.org

Developer Relations Lead

March 2022 - Present

Mozilla Tech Speakers

https://wiki.mozilla.org/TechSpeakers

Tech Speaker

December 2018 - Present

Responsibilites include:

  • Built positive relationships with CTOs, open source as well as emerging software developers.
  • Planned and executed major DevRel content programs.
  • Wrote, planned and executed major Open Source Strategies.
  • Held technical and keynote presentations at large conferences.
  • Led teams of contractors in strategies with OKRs of my design.
  • Collaborated with worldwide open source events.
  • Organised conferences as well as meetups.
  • Held weekly livestream shows, where we discuss open source as well as do livecoding.
  • Primary focus on accessibility.
  • Designed and co-created dev champions programs.
  • Performed numerous Developer Experience audits.
  • Extensive DevRel mentorship.
  • Conducted Go-to-market initiatives, increasing userbases by 160% and helping grow a 12,000 open source platform.
  • Co-organised numerous open source initiatives, including Rails Girls Summer of Code, Where2Help.wien, Global Diversity CFP Day, Distribute Aid.

Developer Education

Bad Website Club

https://badwebsite.club

Founder

November 2022 - Present

UpLeveled

https://upleveled.io

Guest Instructor

2021 - Present

Escuela Frontend

https://www.escuelafrontend.com/

Curso Profesional de TypeScript Video Course

January 2021 - Present

Class Central

https://www.classcentral.com/study-group/js-bootcamp-spring-2022

Free JavaScript Bootcamp

January 2021 - Present

Responsibilities include:

  • Written and led workshops at conferences and companies.
  • Produced and edited tech community video content.
  • Hosted, recorded and edited tech community podcasts.
  • Written blog posts published on platforms such as Escuela Frontend and Dev.to.
  • Planned out full JavaScript and TypeScript video courses.
  • Ran free tech bootcamps with a combined total of over 35,000 learners.

Freelance Full Stack Web Engineer

Meet & Eat

https://meetandeat.takeaway.io/

Catering app and infrastructure

Incredible Bee

https://incrediblebee.com

Devops and website maintenance

S-Team

https://www.s-team.at/

Consulting for Noetutgut and Notrufnoe

Rails Girls Summer of Code

https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/

Consulting, devops, app maintenance and feature additions

Punk Rock Dev

https://punkrockdev.com/

Consulting for Zoomero and Craftstrom devops, full stack web engineering

October 2009 - Present

  • Applied clean code practices to existing web apps, simplifying the onboarding experience of first-time contributors.
  • Applied test-driven development techniques to increase stability.
  • Built full-fledged JSON APIs with self-made authentication, authorization as well as payment handling.
  • Applied frontend frameworks to existing backends.
  • Regular, security and feature-oriented dependency management, keeping up with development trends and removing unmaintained dependencies.
  • Performed code reviews for pull requests on Github, collaborating with fellow maintainers and giving feedback to first-time contributors.
  • Applied and maintained a readable, consistent git history using rebasing, merge commits, and other practices.
  • Devops tasks, including deploying continuous integration tools, staging, deployment tools, test suite running, linting, review apps, monitoring and/or Docker.
  • Implemented Agile practices, assisting in ticketing, organizing standups, kanban reviews.
  • Introduced optimizations to improve web performance.
  • Wrote and maintained codebase as well as API documentation.

Freelance macOS, Android and iOS App Developer

Incredible Bee

https://incrediblebee.com

Chief Software Officer

macOS, Objective-C, RubyMotion

Craftstrom

https://www.craftstrom.com

Commercial solar panel mobile tool

iOS, Android, React Native

Bloom Diagnostics

http://bloomdiagnostics.com

Bluetooth blood measuring tool

iOS, Swift

drd

https://drd.at/

Platform for making video calls with doctors

iOS, Android, React Native

Primed Mind

https://primedmind.com/

Guided meditation platform

iOS, Android, React Native

February 2011 - Present

  • Developed and deployed major upgrades to existing apps, increased sales.
  • Applied test-driven development techniques to ensure app stability.
  • Developed and maintained a streamlined command line toolchain for building, testing and code-signing apps, increasing productivity.
  • Prepared and maintained separate versions of apps for the Mac App Store in compliance with Sandbox rules.
  • Documented and fixed issues reported by users using Redmine.
  • Performed major React Native upgrades, along with dependency management.

Cofounder, Chief Technical Officer

MarketData.Cloud (Defunct)

https://marketdata.cloud

June 2016 - June 2018

  • Developed JSON market data API from the ground up.
  • Wrote and maintained user and developer documentation.
  • Wrote a business plan, SEO, market research, customer relations.
  • Customer support in English, Spanish and German.
  • Wrote press releases, resulting in increased web traffic.

Education

Formal Education

B.Sc. Software Engineering

Vienna University of Technology

October 2007 - Present

Lemmings Summer and Winter Batch

Lemmings.io

Summer 2016, Early 2018

Introduction to Machine Learning

Stanford University

January 2018

  • Modules included - Software engineering and project management, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, information security.
  • Seminar paper - The evolution of mapping tools and their implementations.
  • Bachelor thesis - Teaching kids to code - Bridging the gap between scientific research and practical experience.
  • Building Facebook Messenger Bots.
  • Product Design.

Self Study

  • Fundamentals - Refactoring (Beck, Fowler, 1999), UNIX in a nutshell (Robbins, 2005), Extreme Programming Explained (Beck, 1999), Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Feathers, 2004), Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (Metz, 2007).
  • Object Oriented Programming - Design Patterns (Gang of four, 1994).
  • Programming Languages - Programming Phoenix (Tate, McCord, Valim, 2016), Programming Elixir (Thomas, 2014), The Rust Programming Language (Nichols, Klabnik, 2018), Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! A Beginner’s Guide (Lipovaca, 2011).

Community Work