Hi there! 👋 My name is Carter Rabasa and I'm a builder. I've been building products and businesses my entire life, starting with a Doom clone I wrote as a teenager on my TI-85. I started my tech career as a software engineer but quickly moved through product marketing, developer relations and product management roles. All along the way, I've built businesses, communities and products. The common thread across all of these things: I love software, I love building things and I love serving developers.
I currently lead Developer Relations at Courier, a multi-channel notification and messaging platform for developers. Prior to Courier, I spent 6 years at Twilio where I helped build out their early DevRel team and, after moving to Product, shipped a suite of prototyping, debugging and serverless tools for Twilio developers. Prior to Twilio, I spent 3 years at Microsoft where I worked on Developer Marketing programs for Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 8.
In my spare time, I run the SeattleJS meetup, organize the CascadiaJS conference and lead 200 OK, an angel investor group that focuses on the dev tools space.
I am based in Seattle, WA and am married to Carrie Rabasa. We have two awesome kiddos and a beloved Labradoodle named Otto.
The easiest way to reach me is at carter.rabasa@gmail.com, but feel free to shoot me a DM on Twitter or book some time for a chat!
I've worn a lot of hats in my career, but the common threads have always been technology, community and a desire to learn. I am constantly building things.
- Head of Developer Relations at Courier
- Advisor at HeavyBit
- Founder and Angel Investor at 200 OK
- Product Manager at Twilio (shipped TwiML Bins, API Explorer, Debugger and Functions)
- Developer Evangelist Manager at Twilio (managed west coast team)
- Developer Evangelist at Twilio (helped launch Twilio MMS)
- Developer Marketing at Microsoft (ran a global developer contest for the launch of Internet Explorer 9)
- MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas 🤘
I've been organizing communities my entire adult life, everything from kickball leagues to software meetups to angel investor groups. I get my energy from being around people, helping them and creating fun. The last 10 years I've run the CascadiaJS conference, which has helped thousands of developers find jobs, build their networks and uplevel their skills.
- Have run the SeattleJS meetup on and off since 2012.
- Started a co-working space for developers (now closed).
- Helped organize the first Sports Hack Day in Seattle.
- Organize the annual CascadiaJS conference (see 2022 event).
At Twilio, I learned about the importance and value of storytelling. Giving developers great documentation is just the start, the next step is to inspire them to imagine what new things they can build.
- Introducing Twilio Functions — Public Beta Now Open
- Why Hiring is Broken
- Real-time Visibility Into Application Errors with the Debugger Webhook
- Building More Powerful Voice Applications With Enhanced TwiML Bins Templates
- Easily Make API Calls to Any Twilio Product Using the New API Explorer
- Introducing Templates for TwiML Bins
- Convert Videos on Your Phone Into Animated GIFs Using Node, Libav & Imagemagick
- Fun with Photo Filters Using Node, Hapi and CamanJS
- Integrating Twilio With Your Rails 4 App (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
- Building a real-time SMS voting app using NodeJS, Socket.io and CouchDB (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
- Work/Life Balance as a Developer Evangelist
I've only given a handful of public talks in my career, but they were all about topics near and dear to my heart. I actually prefer to support other speakers, which is one of the reasons I love organizing meetups and conferences.
- Twilio Functions product launch
- Building Twilio apps that scale
- Helping everyone learn to code
- How to build community
I dove into angel investing in 2019, and never looked back. As a person who lives and breaths programming, I decided to specialize in developer tools and developer-adjacent startups doing interesting things in community and hiring.
- Fission - identity, data, and compute for dweb
- Abbot - chat ops platform (YC S21)
- Enode - Infrastructure for green energy apps (YC W21)
- Begin - build and deploy platform for functional web apps on AWS
- Battlesnake - coding competitions and community
- Major League Hacking - largest student hackathon league in the world
- YData - data quality platform
- Codiga - code analysis
- Autocode - platform for webhooks, bots and APIs
I'm more of a hacker than a software engineer, but here are a few things that were pretty cool when I built them.
- DCKickball LLC (later merged to create United Fray, a social sports and media company)
- Event Loop LLC - owns and operates the CascadiaJS conference
- DevLocal - a co-working space for devs (closed in 2016)
- Fizbuz Inc - developer profile product (shut down in 2022)
- I was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in full pointillistic glory in 2005 (pdf)