Sue Smith - Developer Learning Leadership

Hiya I'm Sue Smith. I work in developer learning and live in Glasgow, Scotland.

tl;dr I specialise in education strategy and leadership for software work

This site lists a rundown of my past work, but you might find these others useful too:

Consultancy

2026-?

From June 2026 I'm building a few bits and bobs of my own, but am also available for consultancy work.

My focus is on helping organizations leverage learning to navigate changes in how we make software.

Here are some links to conversations with me:

Some articles that reflect my current approach:

Check out buoyancies.com for more info about my services.

Fastly

2022-2026

I initially joined Fastly as part of the Glitch team when the platform was acquired. I moved from my position of Developer Experience Lead to the Product Experience team in 2023, to lead a cross-functional Learning Experience initiative. I brought the mindset I'd developed working on some of the most popular dev platforms on the web to a company whose developer enablement approach was in its infancy.

During my time at Fastly I worked to influence culture change around product engagement. Working closely with many teams including engineering, product management, documentation, marketing, and sales enablement, I establised education as a shared priority leading to better outcomes.

Built a framework for delivering interactive product learning experiences in IDEs.
- First in Glitch and then GitHub Codespaces, these guided learners through understanding edge computing by making apps in the browser.
- This framework exemplified good practice in developer education, informed by learning theory and built to teach in extensible, remixable ways.
Delivered a program of employee training, with teams across the company engaging with the product hands-on for the first time.
- This program was so popular I had to extend it to more teams and product lines, with participants reporting significantly increased confidence in their roles.
- Part of the goal was to normalise employee use of the (technical) product. One outcome of the program was creating a rich pipeline of actionable UX improvements.
- Employee training enabled me to refine my product learning resources for customers and community developers. It also helped me forge relatonships that helped increase the impact of this cross-functional program.
Contributed written, video, and interactive content aimed at developer and beginner audiences.
- I authored a suite of material to make product onboarding fast and easy for a wider range of users, and worked closely with other content producing teams to bring about a shift in how we approached product learning.
- Historically the company's content teams were siloed within their respective functions, I led by example in publishing material across company and external properties through collaborative programs I then invited additional coworkers to.
Built the company's first product certification platform, awarded to customers who took part in technical training sessions.
- I was able to design and test certification on web delivery and edge computing outcomes through employee training and community developer engagement, iterating on the results before making them available to customers in an enhanced form.
- Having previously used an issuing service which underwent a pricing increase, I used my knowledge of the Open Badges standard to implement a self-hosted certification issuing system at the edge at low cost.

My goal at Fastly was to build an infrastructure for learning that established education as a foundational practice across functions and audiences. This is a strategy I've thought about for many years, so I was glad to have the opportunity to make it real.

Highlights from my time at Fastly:

Glitch

2021-2022

I joined Glitch during its last couple of years pre-acquisition by Fastly. We were a very small team during this time so my role as Developer Experience Lead on the product team was extremely varied.

Managing the Starter projects, including the "Hello" apps which shape the experience for most new users to the platform.
- When users created a new project, it would be cloned from one of these interactive templates, with in-project learning supports acquainting the user with the framework or app type in question inside the editing environment.
- On learning from product metrics, one of my primary enhancements was to add suggested first edit steps inside each project, which led to a significant increase in subsequent engagement.
Managing the product metrics pipeline.
- Creating dashboards and reporting assets to share with the wider team. I also identified product issues and proposed / actioned UX improvements.
- Like any large scale open platform, Glitch suffered a significant amount of platform abuse, keeping an eye on metrics inevitably involved investigating and taking steps to mitigate this.
Contrinuting to product management.
- This was a time where Glitch was working towards an acquisition, and so product management meant building in the context of partnerships to enable that.
Contributing to support, community management, and help docs.
- Glitch was a community-first platform, so building dialogue and supporting relationships with users was a core facet of the work.

A highlight of my time at Glitch was contributing a change to the editor codebase that allowed project authors to create guided experiences that bridged the app preview pane and source code:

I used this enhancement in an open framework for learning that I talked about at DevRelCon.

Postman

2019-2021

As Developer Educator at API development platform Postman, I was the company's first dedicated education hire during a time of significant growth:

Designing education strategy to serve product and API literacy learning, build adoption, and deepen engagement.
- Collaborating across functions, including developer advocacy / community, product / UX, solutions engineering, and customer success / support.
Building a training framework leveraging automation to deliver self-serve learning experiences inside the product.
- Incorporating Postman utilities such as collections, test scripting, mock servers, monitoring, visualization scripting, workspaces, and OpenAPI specifications. This scalable framework was informed by learning theory and remixable by partners.
Implementing Postman's first certification program.
- Recognizing learning achievements in API literacy, testing / automation, and API adoption / onboarding for publishers. Via Postman's Student Program I built a reusable training and certification pathway with partners in colleges, universities, bootcamps.
Participating in and organizing events.
- Speaking and training at Postman Galaxy tour / virtual conference, webinars, streams, student events such as guest lectures.
Managing user documentation. I developed the product's first editorial workflow and managed a team of technical writers.
- Liaising with product management and engineering to publish written content for a rapid release cycle via an open source community site. The docs received millions of pageviews a month and doubled during my time there – improvements targeted quality while remaing agile.

Highlights from my time at Postman:

Dropsource

2016-2019

I started as Developer Educator at low-code mobile app development platform Dropsource and later transitioned to Developer Advocate.

Leading education and developer relations
- Building engagement and contribution pathways for community members to succeed within the product ecosystem. The platform integrated with external data sources via OpenAPI.
Owning documentation and content.
- Authoring / editing product reference material and tutorials walking learners through complete solutions. Adopting a docs-like-code approach to help center implementation.
Hosting live learning experiences.
- Webinars and multimedia resources such as instructional videos.
Managing the Dropsource community.
- From its inception, together with the initial user / customer support effort, for which I was eventually able to hire.
Building demo APIs and apps.
- For customer development and in-product learning.
User advocacy to product.
- Contributing to copy and UX via the platform plugin system. I also liaised between engineering and product management during a challenging growth period in the company's development.

Hack Aye

2015-2016

Inspired by my time with the Mozilla Foundation, in 2015 I co-founded a non-profit organization in Scotland dedicated to helping people learn the tech and collaboration skills in open source. With Hack Aye, I led a series of participatory learning sessions in association with local partners.

Example workshops included using GitHub to collaborate on campaign resources and using Webmaker browser tools to "correct" (vandalise) websites. We connected to Mozilla's network throughout this time, including leading a session at the Mozilla Festival and partnering on funding applications.

Mozilla

2014-2015

I worked at the Mozilla Foundation between 2014-15 on a variety of open education programs. My first project was authoring API docs and tutorials for Open Badges infrastructure / tooling.

Creating a suite of education materials for the Open Badges certification standard familiarized me with the spec and ecosystem in a way that I've continued to leverage throughout my career.

I collaborated on storytelling and communication for community members in the Hive Learning Network, particularly the education program in NYC.

The experience I had working at Mozilla had a huge impression on me, and still informs the way I communicate and collaborate.

Development and content

2007-2014

For several years I worked as a freelance web developer and content creator. I did a ton of technical writing on coding topics. I would learn how to code something, then author content to help others learn it.

Development projects included websites and multimedia applications for a range of clients, including an online graffiti drawing app and web-to-print software, as well as a long-term engagement with a local public service organization, building games and interactive components targeting child protection / health education issues.

Over the years I authored hundreds of web development articles, including fully functional sample code learners could extend. I worked on product documentation from time to time, including help material for an XML IDE. When Android came along I focused on it for a while, creating tutorials, courses, and videos. My own apps included nonsense sentence generators and a madlibs-inspired grammar learning game.

Masters course

2006-2007

In a desperate attempt to retrain and improve my career prospects, in 2006 I went back to Glasgow uni at almost 30. This intense course equipped me with a foundation in software development. We learned Java to an advanced level and some foundations in a load of other languages and technologies. It was a huge challenge, but in the end I was awarded a distinction and the class prize.

The Computing Science dept asked me back to tutor and facilitate lab sessions on the course I had just completed. This was a great introduction to helping people learn programming skills.

Before tech

2003-2007

I spent a couple of years doing a variety of low paid service and office admin jobs. It was miserable! It inspired my to consider getting trained to do something else, luckily the Scottish government was funding software courses at the time...

Arts venue management

1996-2003

For 6-7 years I worked at a public sector arts venue I ended up managing. I'd started as a student during which time I both worked and studied full-time. (My undergraduate degree was in English).

As Arts Manager, I negotiated, booked, and marketed a program of arts performances, classes, and events. I also supervised the daily operation of the licensed community space, as well as budgeting, and carrying out performance measurement.