the index AI tooling my writing how I lead for AI agents say olá talks playlist my path hackjudge Lauren on stage at DevRelCon New York 2026, mid-talk, one hand raisedthat's me
olá, I'm Lauren

Developer experience is a growth metric. I find where developers get stuck and prove what fixing it is worth.

I lead ecosystem teams, and every program I build works like a course, for developers and the agents they bring with them.

See the work CV Contact

Developer experience

A shorter path from first try to shipped

I run developer experience across docs, education, and tooling. When AI coding assistants didn't know our language, I shipped the tooling that taught them, and I turned community questions into a weekly friction report that engineering acted on.

Ecosystem

Programs that end in working software

I build the programs and partnerships that bring developers in and keep them building, including hackathons with Major League Hacking across 5 regions and a fellowship that turns strong contributors into advocates. Developers enter at their level and leave having shipped something a stranger can use.

About

I taught before I could code: first scuba diving in Belize, then high school English in Seattle. In both, you learn fast that the quietest student is often the one who got lost 4 steps back and is too embarrassed to say so.

Then I learned to code, badly, and became that student. I know exactly what it feels like to read documentation written by someone who has forgotten what it was like not to know.

That's the job, as far as I'm concerned. When an academy I built lost 492 learners, not one of them complained. They all quit at the same step, environment setup, before writing a line of code, which meant it was fixable, and we fixed it.

No one lists on a resume that they were once bad at the thing they now teach, but it's the most useful qualification I have.

I tell the longer version of this story, from the classroom to code, in an interview with CodingCatDev.

Selected work

Recent work, built in the open

Built, 2026

hackjudge

Runs every hackathon submission in its own disposable sandbox, then hands the broken builds to a coding agent and reruns every build to check the fix. The agent never grades its own work.

WalkthroughRepoPart 1Part 2

AI developer tooling

Midnight Expert

Our language was too new for any AI model to know. I sourced, funded, and shipped 16 Claude Code plugins in 2026 that load the docs into an agent's context, then check what it writes 5 ways, all the way to running it on a devnet.

SiteFireside chat

Built, 2026

lauren.md

A version of me written for AI agents. When someone asks an assistant about me, it can read my work, my availability, and rules for quoting me accurately, all from one Markdown file I keep current.

VisitSee what agents read

Programs, 2025 to 2026

Measuring hackathons by what runs

I swapped registrations for a harder measure: whether the team finished with software that runs. That went from 10% to 64% across 4 events. In New Moon to Full, 216 of 247 submissions compiled and 10 teams went live on chain.

Related post

Talk, DevRelCon New York 2026

Zero to Ecosystem

What I learned building developer community for a technology no one had heard of.

Watch the talk

Podcast, 2019 to 2023

We Belong Here

Lessons from unconventional paths into tech. I created and hosted it for 67 episodes.

Listen

Leadership

How I work

How I run a team, written for the people who join mine.

Read it

Writing, June 2026

What it takes to build docs worth reading

Why I tied documentation to what developers built with it instead of pageviews.

Read

Talk, DevRelCon New York 2025

Beyond Badges

How gamification can supercharge developer engagement, if you design it around what people build.

Watch
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Path

From the English department to developer relations

  1. 2024 to 2026

    Director of Developer Relations at Midnight Foundation

    Player-coach across advocacy, developer education, docs, and developer experience, through mainnet. Owned the budget and what got reported to the executive team, and negotiated several partner agreements. Put Midnight in Electric Capital's developer data for the first time, and built the process that qualified and submitted all of its roughly 1,700 repositories.

  2. 2024 to 2025

    Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder at Accelerate Polkadot

    Won contracts to produce technical education for the Polkadot ecosystem. Owned product direction, content strategy, and client delivery.

  3. 2022 to 2024

    Director of Developer Relations at Parity Technologies

    Promoted from Staff DevRel Engineer. I led 12 people across 2 teams, and when the global developer community needed something from Parity's engineers, it came through me.

  4. 2023

    Smart Contracts Instructor at Polkadot Blockchain Academy

  5. 2021 to 2022

    Staff Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic

    Set the content strategy for getting developers started: tutorials, streams, talks, and workshops. Promoted to lead the DevRel team in 2022.

  6. 2021

    Director of Community at Puppet

  7. 2019 to 2021

    Developer Education Manager at Vonage

    Promoted from Developer Educator. Built Developer Spotlight, which brought in outside developers to write tutorials.

  8. 2018 to 2019

    Technical Product Manager at GoDaddy

  9. 2018

    Software Development Engineer at Amazon Kindle

  10. 2011 to 2017

    English Department Chair at Seattle Academy

    Curriculum, hiring, and developing the faculty. Left to retrain as an engineer at Ada Developers Academy (Cohort 8).

Index

Everything else, in one place

Every title below opens the talk, post, or repo.

talks

writing

built

listen

Contact

Give me a ring

I'm looking for my next leadership role helping a platform grow the ecosystem around it. The title might say developer experience, ecosystem, or something I haven't seen yet. I'm based in Portugal and work with teams anywhere. I'm open to permanent or contract roles, and I can contract through my US company.

Tap a circle on the dial to reach me.

Or, if rotary phones aren't your thing: Email LinkedIn X GitHub DEV lauren.md (for AI agents)

hello?tap one to dial

My first website, 2018

Hello World!

In 2018, a few months into Ada Developers Academy, I built my first website about myself. It had avocados, a watermelon photo frame, and a link to my GitHub that said, "Hello World."

I'm so proud of that girl, and of how far she's come since. Go say hi to her 👋

Visit my 2018 site

Screenshot of Lauren's first website from 2018: watercolor avocados on a peach background with an ice cream logo reading Lauren Lee, developer 2018