Field Notes

Lessons from the work: the problem, what Rob did, and what he learned.

• 3/31/26 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  National Parks × Chalk: A DevRel Take-Home, Built and Launched

  As a DevRel, you're expected to do it all: build the thing, write about it, and get it in front of the right people. So I treated a take-home project like a real content launch.

• 3/10/26 • Things I've Built, Megashift, Field Notes

  ClipGo: Turning Podcast Episodes into Daily Social Clips

  Every Megashift episode had a dozen shareable moments, and almost none got clipped. I built an AI pipeline that finds, cuts, captions and posts them, and learned to distrust its success messages.

• 2/27/26 • Things I've Built, Field Notes

  Letting an AI Agent Pitch Me to Podcasts, Safely

  Pitching myself to podcasts meant hours of research and writing, and sending an email is irreversible. I built an agent to do it, with guardrails so it couldn't embarrass me.

• 10/15/25 • Building Communities, Field Notes

  Delivering DevCon 2025

  Amazon's largest internal engineering conference was mid-planning when its leadership departed. I stepped in to own the content strategy and get 11,000 engineers a program worth their time.

• 10/14/25 • Things I've Built, Field Notes

  Learning a Production Stack by Shipping a Paid Directory

  I wanted to really understand payments, accounts and admin tools, so I built a local business directory with Stripe subscriptions on Astro and Supabase.

• 7/10/25 • Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes

  Giving Amazon a Voice in the Developer Productivity Conversation

  Google-backed frameworks like DORA and SPACE dominated how the industry talked about developer productivity. I led the content strategy that put Amazon's Cost-to-Serve framework into that conversation.

• 6/15/25 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  When Engineers Stop Trusting an AI Agent

  After an AI coding agent launched, developers started reporting answers they couldn't rely on. The fix wasn't more marketing. It was a product change I helped get onto the roadmap.

• 5/15/25 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  Installed Isn't Adopted: Rolling Out an AI Coding Assistant to Amazon's Engineers

  Getting engineers to install an AI coding tool was the easy part. Getting them to keep using it took hands-on workshops, a churn dashboard and a four-layer way of measuring adoption.

• 3/15/25 • Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes

  Turning an Orphaned Talk Show into a Change-Management Engine

  I inherited a talk show with no owner and no purpose. We rebuilt it around three use cases and made it the main way the company learned to use its AI tools.

• 12/15/24 • Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes

  From Blasting Everyone to Reaching the Right Engineers

  Hundreds of product managers were announcing features to tens of thousands of engineers with no audience strategy. We built the personas, standards and governance to fix it.

• 10/15/24 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  Making Software Health a Habit Across a Huge Engineering Org

  Coding standards, merge practices and CI/CD hygiene varied from team to team. Turning 'better software health' into a company-wide habit took research, real case studies and a repeatable review rhythm.

• 9/15/24 • Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes

  Building an Employer Brand Developers Actually Respond To

  Our team competed for engineers against companies with much stronger stories about what it's like to build there. A competitive audit gave us language that worked.

• 8/15/24 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  Finding the Developer Bottleneck Worth Fixing

  With limited bandwidth and no playbook, I built a way to combine usage data with what developers were actually saying. It pointed straight at code upgrades.

• 11/27/23 • Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes

  From Invisible to On the List: Repositioning Capital One for Developers

  Capital One was doing serious engineering work, but developers saw a bank. We reframed the brief, proved the claims, and took the story to where developers were.

• 6/15/23 • Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes

  Quality Over Volume: Rebuilding the Data Behind Developer Marketing

  Our developer survey said no one had heard of Snowflake, a sign we were asking the wrong people. Fixing the panel, the personas and the agency brief meant missing a target to hit the right one.

• 5/15/23 • Teaching & Enablement, Field Notes

  Teaching AI and Machine Learning to People Who Aren't Engineers

  Managers have to make real decisions about AI without a math or coding background. As an assistant professor, I taught AI and machine learning through practical applications instead of theory.

• 5/15/22 • Building Communities, Teaching & Enablement, Field Notes

  Scaling Android Support Across Asia-Pacific Without Scaling the Team

  Students across Asia-Pacific wanted more Android support than a central team could deliver across time zones. So we trained the people already there.

• 4/15/22 • Things I've Built, Field Notes

  Automating Certificates for Community Organizers in 93 Countries

  Student community organizers around the world each needed a personalized certificate. A small Google Apps Script turned a manual chore into a spreadsheet and a button.

• 4/14/20 • Developer Adoption, Field Notes

  I Built a Plugin to Find Out Where Developers Got Stuck

  To grow Adobe XD's plugin ecosystem, I went through onboarding exactly as a new developer would, and wrote down every place it hurt.