Episode #98: Making Serverless Accessible with Bit Project with Daniel Kim

About Daniel Kim

Daniel Kim (He/Him) is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic and the founder of Bit Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to making tech accessible to underserved communities. He wants to inspire generations of students in tech to be the best they can be through inclusive, accessible developer education. He is passionate about diversity & inclusion in tech, good food, and dad jokes.

Twitter: @learnwdaniel
Volunteer with Bit Project: bitproject.org/volunteer
Learn Serverless with Bit Project: bitproject.org/course/serverless

Watch this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oDdrbDXQG6w

This episode sponsored by, CBT Nuggets.

Transcript:
Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Daniel Kim. Hey, Daniel. Thanks for joining me.

Daniel: Hi, Jeremy. How's it going?

Jeremy: It's going real ...

Daniel: I'm glad to be here.

Jeremy: Well, I'm glad that you're here. So, you are a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, but you're also the founder of Bit Project. So, I would love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and what Bit Project is all about.

Daniel: That sounds great, Jeremy. My name is Daniel. I'm a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, which means I get to help the community and go find developers and help them become better developers. And I got into developer relations because I founded a school club and now it's a nonprofit, but it started as a school club, called Bit Project, where me and my friends gathered together to teach each other awesome web technologies. And yeah, that's how I got my start. And I am still running Bit Project as a nonprofit to help students around the world build and ship projects using awesome technologies and help them learn and become better developers.

Jeremy: Right. And one of those awesome technologies is serverless. And that's what I want to talk to you about today because this is a really great program that you're running here that helps make Serverless more accessible to more people, which is what I'm all about, right? So, I absolutely love this. So, let's go back and talk a little bit about Bit Project and just get into how it got started. You mentioned it was a project you were doing with some college friends, but how did it go from that to what it is now?

Daniel: Yeah. So, I started this, I think, late freshman year when I was still in school at UC Davis. I was not a computer science major, actually. I was an electrical engineering major, but as I got into technology and seeing all the possibilities of things you can build with cool tech, I was like, "I really need to get into web development because this is so awesome. I can make changes on the fly. I can see awesome things. I can build awesome things with my hands." Well, with my computer. So, yeah, I got a couple of friends together because I'm a very social person so I like to build and learn things together with my friends. So, I got a couple of them together. We rented a lecture hall and then we just taught each other everything we knew to each other. For example, I was super into Gatsby and React, so I was teaching my friends React. Other friends were super into backend development, so they were teaching me things like how to design APIs and how to connect a frontend to a backend, like really awesome things to each other.

And it started like that until I decided to scale the program so I could help more and more of my fellow students. So, instead of doing four-person meetups, I would organize a workshop. And those workshops turned into sponsored workshops with funding, which meant a lot of free food, which meant more people, and it just ballooned into this awesome student organization where we always had the best food. We had free Boba, free pizza, and we would share with each other all these awesome technologies and tools that we learned how to work with using in our projects. So, that's how it started.

Jeremy: Right. And then, so once you got this thing rolling, obviously you're seeing some success with it, then you get into developer relations?

Daniel: Yeah, definitely. So, that's when I understood what I wanted to do with them for the rest of my life. I didn't want to be that production engineer on-call all the time. I wanted to be that engineer that helped other engineers become more successful and find the joy in programming. I love seeing when developers find that "aha moment" when they're learning something new and help them become better developers. And I found that out when I was teaching my friends how to program because I got more joy out of seeing other people succeed than me succeeding myself. So, I was like, "Developer relations is the path for me." So, that's why I directly entered developer relations right out of college, because I was like, "This is what I'm meant to do." Because one of my favorite things to do is figure out how to break down really complex ideas and concepts into more fun, easy-to-understand chunks so everyone can succeed and have a good time. That's my thing.

Jeremy: No, I love that. I love that because I feel like, especially people who are maybe not traditional tech people or don't have a traditional tech background, sometimes it just takes a little bit of twisting of the presentation for them to really understand that. And I love that idea of just reaching out and trying to help more people because I'm on the total same page with you here. So, now you go and so you get into developer relations and you've got this Bit Project thing. And so is this something that you wanted to keep as a side project? What was the next evolution of that?

Daniel: Yeah, definitely. So, I think Bit Project is an extension to the advocacy work I do at New Relic. Because at New Relic, my job is not to push New Relic the product. We have amazing product marketing managers and other folks who do that. My job is to make it easy for people to level up the community, like the people in the community to level up as developers and help the community. And one way I do that is through Bit Project. So, a lot of the work I do at New Relic mirrors or is parallel to the work I'm doing at Bit Project, where I help make complex ideas more accessible to developers. So, in a way, it's not more of a side project. It's like a parallel project of what I'm doing at New Relic, what I'm doing at Bit Project.

Jeremy: Right. And so in terms of the things that you're teaching at Bit Project too because that's the other thing too. I think leveling up developers is one of those things where, I mean, if somebody wants to go learn HTML or CSS or one of those things, there's probably plenty of resources for them to go and do that. There's probably nine million YouTube tutorials out there, right?

Daniel: Definitely.

Jeremy: But for concepts like Serverless, right? And I mean even Serverless with Azure and AWS and some of these other things, these are newer things. I've actually interviewed quite a few candidates for a recent position that I'm trying to fill and not a lot of them are learning this stuff in college.

Daniel