A warm amazee.io welcome to Alanna Burke, our new expert on Documentation, Training, and Developer Relations!

After ten years as a back-end developer, Alanna decided a change was in order. Still carrying a torch for Drupal, content management systems, and helping others, she is now working as a documentation writer, trainer, and developer advocate at amazee.io. Alanna also serves as a track chair for DrupalCon North America, is on the leadership team of Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, and serves the Drupal Community Working Group as an ambassador to Drupal Diversity and Inclusion.

Her first ever job was working on stage crew in high school, and then in college. She started college as a technical theater major and intended a career in stage management. She was professionally stage-managing after her freshman year for various productions around the city and realized she didn’t need or want a degree in theater, and she didn’t think it would pay off her student loans, either. An amazing professor in her computers and applications class (which she took because it counted as a lab science) did everything she could to recruit Alanna into the computer science department, and it worked! She became her mentor and friend and is the reason Alanna so passionate about getting underrepresented folks into tech.

She’s most proud of her writing and speaking skills, skills she’s worked on her whole life. And she loves doing them both. She loves being really engaged in her work and knowing it has a purpose. She’s passionate about doing work that helps and empowers people, that enables them to get more engaged in tech and to better understand it. Alanna has a screenshot saved somewhere of a co-worker who said “Thanks! I feel so empowered!” after Alanna had helped her with a particular problem, and that is the feeling she wants everyone to have. 

She’s looking forward to having a lot of fun working on documentation and training, and helping our clients and users, but she’s also excited to see where the Developer Relations side of this role goes, especially as the world changes a bit and events look a bit different. She wants to figure out how she can be most helpful to everyone in the company and everyone we interact with.