It didn’t take long for Jasmine Greenaway to realize she wanted to reach developers who used Microsoft’s technical stack.
At the time, she was working as a software engineer at web-based hosting service GitHub, focused on its extension for Microsoft Visual Studio. Greenaway found herself constantly discussing her now employer’s tech stack, a combination of software products and programming languages used in the development and deployment of a digital product.
“What I ended up realizing is there was a need,” says Greenaway, who began attending conferences and explaining VS at length. “It made me want to speak more to those folks, at least at booths, and it started to make me realize I had a voice in general, so I started doing more talks. Most of my skills or responsibilities lie within fixing bugs, doing features; being a software developer, I started to realize that I should go out more and speak more. That led me to Microsoft.”
As a Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, Greenaway is focused on the .NET software framework. “I show the .NET devs the interesting ways that they can use the cloud, specifically Azure, and am a voice for them,” she shares. “Be a fly on the wall for them for feedback; for product teams who are working on Azure and, just community, to be someone who can be there to answer questions.”
She began her tenure at the popular tech company in August 2017 and hit the ground running, speaking at conferences, hosting workshops, writing and editing tutorial content, meeting with the product team to develop a continuous feedback loop and collaborating with team members, to name a few things. Greenaway has also made herself accessible to the masses, providing insight on all-things web development. In addition to teaching beginner web development at LaGuardia Community College and co-organizing popular Brooklyn-based meetup, BrooklynJS, she carves out time to talk open source, Azure and .NET on Twitter. You’ll find her creating Twitter lists and reading through articles that come across her timeline in-between her daily to-dos.
Social media essentially sparked her nearly 10-year career in the space.
“My first exposure to tech was at a very young age when AOL was still around,” she shares. “I remember getting my first computer, and I would play around on a site called Geocities to make my own sites, and then that eventually evolved into making custom templates on LiveJournal and Myspace. I was like a mad scientist, taking things out, putting things in and seeing what happens.”
Part Myspace tinkering, part meteorology (yes, she had plans of becoming a meteorologist), it all led Greenaway to her current career choice.
“When I started taking more CS [computer science] classes, I realized that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, specifically, I had like a bunch of ideas. Thankfully, my first internship really solidified my career in working with the web.”
Now at Microsoft, she’s invested in furthering her skills.
“Microsoft has a lot of learning resources. They have an internal site you can go to. You say, I want to do machine learning and they have all these resources, all these things set up for you to do that,” says Greenaway. “They also provide boot camps for us, and they provide speaker training, which is really nice. I also know I can reach out to another Cloud Developer Advocate for information because we all love to help each other out. We all are always talking to each other.”
She values greatly the support of her colleagues and upper management.
“It’s really comforting to know there are people here that want to help you invest in your career, and are invested in your career.”
