Raymond Camden, Adobe

Thank you for tuning in to today’s TLDR episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and chief evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes, we explore specific topics from the world of APIs, but through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today, we have Raymond Camden, senior developer evangelist for Adobe. Raymond shared with me his belief in the power of storytelling when it comes to APIs, and how important it is to help our API consumers find solutions to the everyday challenges that they face. Let’s start with the basics. Who are you? What do you do?

Hi, I am Raymond Camden. I am a developer evangelist for Adobe on our document services team. I am a happily married father of seven, one stepchild, that’s eight total. Yes, eight. Three cats, one dog, and there’s a lot going on.

Well, I have three brothers and three sisters, so I can relate, from the other side. Well, welcome. I really appreciate you being with us here today. I’ve been a big fan of your work going back years. I’ve been doing API evangelism, which is a variation and offshoot of developer evangelism or advocacy, but I’ve been following your work even before I got started. So I would say you’re actually somewhat of a seed of inspiration in my own work and what got me going. So I’ve been following your work for a while. Thank you for everything you do.

You are most welcome. You know, I feel like I have been struggling with every single line of code I’ve written since day one, and I try to turn every struggle into a blog post, like 99% of the time, for me, so that I don’t forget. Although that doesn’t always work, and I have searched online for something and found one of my blog posts and been like, oh crap, yeah, I did have this problem before.

And it’s you having to answer it for yourself. That’s got to be rewarding and frustrating kind of all in the same motion, because there’s not someone else out there providing an answer for it, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So let’s start there. Normally I would dive into Adobe, but let’s start with you. How’d you get here? What got you into the business? What led you to doing this for a living?

So, my mother, this is back in the very early ’80s, I was like 7, 8, 9, 10 in that range, my mother’s employer gave her an Apple IIe to take home for her to learn on. Personal PCs were really new back then. And for some reason, when they gave her that Apple, they gave her a bunch of games. I don’t know what they were thinking. So I kind of stole it, I took it over and just started playing the games on it and stuff like that. And I forget exactly when, but at a very young age I saw the movie Tron. And I could remember being old enough to know, okay, this is a movie, it’s not really like how coding is, but I was young enough where it went all the way into my brain, like, oh my god, I’ve got to do that, that’s going to be awesome. So I started coding, and I opened up the Apple IIe AppleSoft BASIC manual and tried to learn. And the very first program I wrote did not work, and for hours I looked at it. It was probably like five minutes, but the duration gets longer the older I get. And I finally figured out the bug, I finally figured out what I did wrong, and that feeling of having my code work was like a drug fiend type. And I think I’ve been addicted to that ever since.

So I did a lot of coding. I went into school for comp sci. I quickly found out that math is hard. Or actually, you could be good at math and that can mean nothing at a certain level. So I switched to English. And about that time the web was coming up, and that’s what I just glommed onto. It worked really well for me. And early on I found that, again, I struggle, and when I struggle, if I take the time to just talk about where I struggled, what went wrong, and share the answer, turns out other people struggle too. So that has been successful for me.

I can say, in the last like three or four months, I found a PDF copy of the AppleSoft manual, and the issue that I had, it was like a two-line program, like “10 print hello, 20 print world.” Doesn’t get easier than that. And it didn’t work for me. The reason is that I was typing exactly what I saw in the book, right? Type what you see. So I would type “10 print hello,” space bar till the cursor wrapped around, “20 print world,” and enter. I wasn’t hitting enter. Looking at the PDF, they have in text like, hey, here’s your first program, blah blah blah, source code. And then after the source code was, okay, make sure you hit enter after everything. And now, years and years of experience, I’m like, no, no, people aren’t going to run it immediately, they’re going to run it, see it, and then keep reading. So that was a very good, like, yes, I know what I’m doing, there’s, moment.

There’s quite a few really interesting things in what you just said. So the first is sharing your struggle. But aren’t you embarrassed of what you don’t know? Aren’t you worried about what you don’t know, that you’re going to come off as being vulnerable or not knowledgeable in sharing that so widely?

Sometimes, yeah. So when I look at conferences, I look at some of the talks that are being given, like how, in JavaScript, and I realize I am never going to be at that level, and it feels intimidating, even though I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years. I feel like there’s a level I can hit. And there’s a certain company that builds a search engine out in California, and I applied there for a DevRel position, because I love to help people, right? And so I had this interview, and I talked about how I love to help people, my way of sharing knowledge and all that, and that went great, it was going awesome. And then it came to the, we need you to build us a Sudoku solver verifier in JavaScript. I’m like, I’ve never done that in production, I’ve never done that on stage, but sure. And I failed. And then I tried a second time and I failed, again, great interviews, blah blah process, stupid code interview, and I just failed. So yes, I struggle with that all the time. But I absolutely know that, as much as I feel like there’s people above me, I shouldn’t say above and below, there’s always people who need help, period. And no matter where you are on the scale, whether you’re a beginner, if you’ve been coding for two days, you can help somebody who’s only coded for one day. So I try to keep that in mind. That was long and I apologize.

I mean, you all, taking notes, and you touched on two or three other things. So, same here. Mine’s the Hangman coding challenge that I failed. I’ve gone through three separate interviews to the point where I was like, look, I want to work with you guys, I know what I’m doing, I have demonstrated expertise, and I can’t get through the door. And I would add another large company who invented something called clouds, and they do a lot of things in the clouds. They recently, someone higher up reached out to me and said, hey, will you come run this massive, important service for us? And I said, hey, that’s cool. But I love my job, I’m actually really enjoying my job at Postman. But you know what? I applied for that job about a year and a half ago and nobody ever gave me a callback, because I didn’t make it through the gatekeeping. And so I think your stories of gatekeeping in some way, A, might be keeping knowledgeable people out, but two, keeping the people who are actually going to help your communities figure all this out, make sense of this world, is pretty widespread. It’s a problem. I think leadership listening to this show should consider that, and how they’re going to address that.

I’m extremely privileged right now, and I want to acknowledge that, because I’m very lucky in that regard. But the last time that particular search company came to me, I said, sure, I’d be happy to talk to you and do interviews and give you a presentation, I am not doing a coding test, period. I’ll show you a lot of, I’ll show you 6,000 blog posts of various code, I’ll show you a whole library of the way I code. And the HR person, they’re like, oh, I’ll get back to you. And like a day later they called back and like, sorry, you’ve got to do it, when can we schedule? And again, privilege, I was like, no, thank you, bye. And they were shocked.

You can’t tell me you don’t know who we are.

Yeah, exactly.

I fully support you, and I know many folks like you and me that are out there that are just doing what we do, and again, privilege, we’re okay, we’re not having trouble finding work, we are working and doing some interesting things, but there’s places that are going to not have us working for them because of that. So yeah. I think the skill of being able to help people identify problems, programming for me is just a long series of challenges and problems and friction and not knowing what the hell you’re doing. And so is it that for you? Is it that seed that got planted, that first one you got figured out, now every other one you see as just something that you’re going to be able to succeed at? Is it the succeeding and getting out the other end, or is it the journey that really keeps you doing it after 20 years?

I like to see my computer do stuff. And that’s expressed in multiple different ways. I never let practicality stop me. I have built a lot of really stupid, impractical things. But I feel like every time I do that, I pick up something or I get exercise, you know, it’s kind of like if you jog, and maybe in your mind you’re pretending you’re being chased by zombies, that’s silly, but you’re still doing something practical, you’re still exercising. So I just enjoy building stuff. It’s my way of being creative, and I’ve had success in the past in different endeavors of building something very creative where it got like no attention at all, no blog views, no comments, but it 100% scratches that itch and just brings some joy into my life.

Another thing I noticed with you, as soon as we, we do a brainstorming session before this podcast, and I would say about half the folks, I need to kind of pull out, what are we going to talk about, what’s interesting, what’s top of mind, what are you comfortable with, and kind of set up and structure. I immediately noticed I wasn’t going to need to do that with you, and basically I was going to be able to just throw out a word, throw out a phrase, throw out a topic, ask you what’s top of mind, you had no problem sharing what’s top of mind. And multiple things top of mind, not just one, multi-threaded top of mind. And so I noticed this because this is one of the things I’ve emulated from your work, is you’re a very prolific writer, and I’m assuming, similar to the thinking about zombies when you’re running, that there’s other benefits to writing than just page views and someone reading it, right, that this has contributed to your success in other ways. Is this true?

Yeah, I mean, I was doing unofficial evangelism before it was really going. I mean, it’s been around for a while with Guy Kawasaki, I think, Apple. But I’ve considered it maybe only the last 10 years or so. I’ve been blogging since 2003, presenting a bit before that, but kind of unofficially doing this type of thing, because, partly because I knew I’ll never be the god-level programmer, but I can communicate, I can share ideas, I can write, I can write code in a way that people can look at. So unofficially I was doing it for a long time. And again, very privileged, where employers saw my blogs, they saw my presentations, and that helped me get more jobs. And pretty much everyone who hired me kind of knew, like, okay, Ray’s going to work, he’s also going to be doing four or five blog posts a week or something, and potentially presenting as well. That gave me the ability to kind of practice DevRel on the side for quite some time. I didn’t actually get a job in it until Adobe, first time around. This is my second time at Adobe, if 2013 or so. So I’ve only been, I say only, I’ve only been officially in this field, it is 2012, check, all right, so coming up about 10 years. I still feel like I have a lot to learn myself.

Bringing us back towards Adobe, is your primary role at Adobe to focus on Adobe APIs and features and capabilities, SDKs, or is it broader than that? Do you focus on a variety of topics and technologies?

So the team I’m on, and here I’m going to earn my paycheck for a few seconds. We have APIs related to working with PDFs. So kind of the more Swiss Army knife stuff of like merging PDFs, splitting PDFs, OCR, stuff like that, to more fancy things like powerful extraction, getting all the text and the styling and the tables and images out of a PDF. We also have a document merge PDF, where you can use a Word document as a template and then you take your data and you call our API and they spit out a dynamic PDF. I want to come back to that later because there’s some really good DevRel things in that that I like. So that is what my team covers in terms of what I feel my responsibilities are. It’s, I guess, pretty fairly common DevRel-type stuff. So, externally, I try to talk to people about what we do, I blog about what we do, I make demo applications of what we do, and I give presentations. So I have that aspect of just word of mouth. When I joined the team, I’d never heard of any of it, so I looked at it, I thought it was cool, and in my interview I said, you know, y’all have cool crap that no one knows about, so I’m looking forward to joining and trying to help with that. There’s also a very strong internal aspect as well. So again, using my knowledge of what people are going to screw up and how I think things should work, I try to work with engineering to give guidance, like, hey, you have this feature, yes, it works, but it’s obtuse and takes too many lines of code, just make it simpler, do this instead. So I try to give that internal feedback as well, to our docs, to our code.

So what else do you do to keep filling up that wellspring of creativity? Do you read? Do you do outdoors? Do you get offline? Is it purely programming? What do you use to refill?

So there’s a couple things. Not in terms of the refill part, but just the creative aspect, I use Microsoft To Do as a way to write stuff down, because my memory is pretty bad. And so I have a to-do list of just blog ideas. And I try to write it down as soon as possible, because I can forget it in like two minutes. And when I do feel uncreative, I can go back to that list and use it for inspiration, like, oh yeah, now I have time for that particular idea. So I recommend using any of the 10,000 note-taking/task/things apps as a way to organize what you do. In terms of what I do outside of being in front of a computer, I can also be in front of a game console. So I will video game quite a bit. My wife is a big Warcraft player, so we have two gamers, which works out great, so she’ll play on her laptop, I’ll play on the TV. I used to read a heck of a lot, the last couple of years it has slowed down. I love, absolutely love, to read, but I am probably at like a book a month now, whereas 10 years ago it was probably a book a week or so. I like outdoors, it’s just kind of hard with a large family. Now, I would love to go hiking at one point, but that’s probably later in my life, which I’m fine with. I’m fine, if I die tomorrow, I won’t feel like, oh crap, I wish I would have hiked. There’s a couple things where I put on my to-do list, once my youngest kid is a bit older. I learn drums, I want to do that, but again, I’m fine waiting 10 years. So basically, yeah, play games, I read, I get out when I can, it’s Louisiana, so nine months of the year it’s oppressively hot, it’s not really great for me, I don’t hunt or fish or anything, so it’s basically walking the dog for the most part.

Nice. Well, I really enjoyed this today. Thank you. It went, very few of the directions I have on my list, but it went all the directions that I wanted it to, and that was the purpose of this. I enjoyed talking.

Yeah, I think there’s lessons for leadership here when it comes to how do you, the importance of storytelling, it really is everything, how to shape your developer relations programs, how to incentivize and find people that are going to help get the word out about what’s going on. So I think there’s a lot of lessons for folks here. I appreciate you joining us today. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. This was a great time, and I really enjoyed it. I will keep reading and I’ll keep tuning in. And again, thank you for the inspiration you’ve had on my career, and we’re going to work on some ongoing storytelling around this, and some virtual events coming up. So we’ll ask you to come back if you have interesting topics that you want to share, feel free to ping me, and we’ll see how we get you back on the show.

Thanks again to Raymond for stopping by. You can find more about Adobe at adobe.com. And you can find more about Raymond at raymondcamden.com. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host, Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.