👋 Hello!
I'm Chris Traganos / @chris_trag / "Trag" at work / or simply "Chris" works great too. 🙌
Welcome to my mini about-me page 🎉
I assume you landed here by social media or meeting in real life. Either way, welcome and I hope we get the chance to connect.
🤔 Who am I?
Currently I'm leading the Developer Advocacy team at Stripe. It's an amazing place where I get to work alongside incredible developers and founders from around the world as they build products on top of our payment APIs and infrastructure services. In addition to Developer Advocacy, I co-lead Stripe's Open Source council, where we work to best support OSS contributors at Stripe and within the developer community.
My focus is "Scaled Developer Advocacy", which is just a fancy way of saying that I'm focused on courting millions developers to choose Stripe as their favorite payments platform. Most days I'm working to launch new outreach programs, evangelising our API updates, and growing the collection of technical workshops on our YouTube channel. In addition, I wrote an article covering how we approach work: "Welcome to the Golden Age of Developer Advocacy".
Beyond work, I'm a father of 2 awesome kids and husband to an incredible partner. Over the past two decades we've moved from Boston to SF and now Austin. It's been a fun adventure.
🗺 Locations
I'm currently splitting my time between Austin (primary), Seattle, and San Francisco. I moved to Austin a few years ago with my family and love it so far. Reach out if you are curious about moving to ATX!
When travelling I'm usually working from Stripe HQ and/or the Seattle office every 6-8 weeks. Our team is globally distributed and the in-person planning sessions are the best. The majority of any given month I can be found in and around downtown Austin.
Some places I've lived:
- Austin, TX
- Sunnyvale, CA
- Arlington, MA
- Lexington, MA
- Woburn, MA
🧳 What have I done?
I have the standard LinkedIn page that lists these details and here's a quick recap of a few teams I've had the privilege of working for (and some things I learned along the way!)
💬 Mio
A tiny YC-backed startup based in Austin.
- What I did: Worked with hundreds of Slack 3rd-party developers to port their chat bots to Microsoft Teams. Eventually, I took on product & conversational UX as we pivoted into cross-platform chat.
- What I learned: Start-ups are hard, learn as much as you can, and small offices force you work things out quickly.
📺 Roku
Streaming television platform that spun out of Netflix way back.
- What I did: Leading up to their IPO, I worked with a team of engineers, product managers, and developers to re-launch the Roku developer community and the developer website.
- What I learned: Unlike many SaaS startups, hardware products have a several month production cycle that forces planned releases. In addition, keeping a user interface simple for the consumer was so valuable to see in action.
🐘 Evernote
Note-taking app and open API for storing text, images, attachments, etc.
- What I did: Spent 4+ years launching and scaling the developer relations program along with organizing the annual developer conferences and accelerator program.
- What I learned: Companies are a complex series of interconnected relationships. Keeping an honest culture while rapidly growing is really hard and crucial for long-term survival.
🎓 Harvard News Office
The central communications arm of Harvard University.
- What I did: I was a web developer for the digital comms team where I was maintaining Harvard.edu and re-launching the Harvard Gazette.
- What I learned: You can get many things unblocked and out the door once a majority of stakeholders across an organization see benefits to working together towards specific shared goals.
🏭 Harvard Campus Services
The University's department for all things operations.
- What I did: Shuttle websites, environmental safety pages, dormitory pest control, etc. I started off as an intern and slowly worked my way into their full-time web developer role. I now know WAY too much about pests after having to manage these pages 🦟🕷🐞
- What I learned: The power of mentorship and having a boss that is willing to teach and take a chance on you.
🐟 Legal Sea Foods
Boston's top seafood restaurant and fresh Mail Order delivery business
- What I did: Fun/crazy early-stage career path: Worked initially as a restaurant host then was asked to head over to restaurant HQ during the holiday season as they needed help packing live lobsters to ship across the US 🦞📦. Eventually I jumped into a Customer Service role that eventually became an opportunity to work on their online newsletters, designing print coupons, and updating their online ordering website.
- What I learned: Show up, google/youtube everything, and work well with others. Also gained a healthy appreciation for quality New England Seafood.
🤝 Let's connect
To start, the best way to reach out is over Twitter or LinkedIn. If we already know each other, I'm always down for 🍭Marco Polo.
I'm open to speaking at conferences, providing app / UX feedback, reviewing developer documentation / dogfooding, sketching, resume reviews, and providing advice/introductions (if/when appropriate!)
If you'd like my assistance, it would help to make your request clear and provide the details in advance of a conversation 👍 (Half the challenge is scheduling and making sure I could be useful, tbh)
~ Chris aka "Trag"
P.S. Credit to @DynamicWebPaige for the idea of having a simple bio page
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