Andy Hattemer

About ¶

I work at Materialize building content and developer community with the goal of helping Data Engineers and Developers build a new generation of real-time applications.

Before Materialize, I worked for five years at DigitalOcean where I worked in Marketing and later on DigitalOcean Community, a website of thousands of Tutorials Tools and Q&A focused on solving developer problems. I managed the team of Writers, Editors, Community Managers, and Developers who worked together to build a knowledge base used by 5 million developers every month.

Before DigitalOcean, I did SEO, revenue optimization, and other development projects for BNY Mellon, Country Financial, Enterprise, Avis and Budget car rental, Ford Europe, Morgans Hotel Group and Getty Images.

I publish articles here and cross-publish them on Dev.to and Hashnode, you can follow me on twitter or connect with me on linkedin.

Posts

• Collaboration and Coworker Red Flags

  A list of red flags I see at the start of a working relationship that indicate it won’t work out. I know it may come off as a bit negative, but all of the most magical work I’ve done has come from finding great people to work with.

  2023-05-12

• Buying B2B SaaS at a company is like playing a hand of Poker

  The dynamics around the process of buying multi-user business software tools like Trello at a company are similar to a poker hand.

  2022-06-13

• The role of Developer Experience at Materialize

  Read the WHAT and the WHY of the developer experience team at Materialize, if you like the ideas and see the potential, we’re hiring!

  2021-10-07

• Why Materialize: Recommended Reading List

  A collection of articles that convinced me about the necessity and long-term inevitability of a technology like Materialize.

  2021-10-07

• Don't make the same mistake I did when sponsoring Podcasts

  I learned a costly lesson that in tech podcasts, an early focus on monetization, or more generally on the “business” of podcasting, is a much better indicator of long-term success than “buzz” or reputation of the hosts.

  2021-01-21

• Technical Writing for Learners vs Builders

  Over my time working in various roles ending with Director of Community Growth at DigitalOcean, I found a useful mental model for thinking about the reader’s state of mind when they find your writing. I don’t think I’ll ever come up with a better mental model for technical writing than this one, but as they say “all models are wrong, some are useful” so hopefully this is useful in better aligning your technical writing with the reader’s needs.

  2021-01-20

• How to build an audience with technical writing

  Focus on writing at the edge of the internet where people are looking for answers and you’ll be adding value to the internet and improving your chances of finding an audience.

  2020-12-31

• Visual Explanation of Segment

  Segment (the customer data / analytics tool) can be confusing at first. This page provides a visual map and a collection of recommendations and tips on using Segment.

  2017-05-03