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Kwame Asante
I taught myself to code in Accra using a secondhand laptop and YouTube tutorials with buffering that tested my patience more than any distributed systems problem ever has. I was 16 and wanted to build a website for my school. That website was terrible: Comic Sans, auto-playing music, a visitor counter that I'm pretty sure only counted my own visits. But it started something.
I got a scholarship to study computer science at the University of Cape Town, and during my second year, I made my first open-source contribution, a small bug fix to a JavaScript testing library. The maintainer thanked me publicly and merged it within an hour. That experience, writing code that was immediately useful to thousands of developers I'd never meet, was more motivating than anything I'd experienced in a classroom. I was hooked.
Over the next few years, I became a regular contributor to several open-source projects. I maintained a popular Node.js middleware library, contributed to Deno, and eventually became a core team member of an ORM that I won't name because the governance drama is still ongoing. Open source taught me that building software is a social activity, and the best technical decisions are often the ones that make contribution easier, not the ones that make the code theoretically optimal.
In 2021, I joined Supabase as a Developer Relations Engineer. Supabase was the perfect intersection of my interests: an open-source company, a developer tools product, and a team that believed DevRel should be a growth function, not a conference attendance function. Over two years, I built the community programs, created the tutorial content strategy, and developed the contributor funnel that turned Supabase users into Supabase contributors. The community grew from 20K to 200K+ during my time there.
The thing I care most about is DevRel's ROI problem. Most DevRel teams can't prove their value because they measure the wrong things (conference talks given, tweets published, swag distributed) instead of the right things (developers activated, community-sourced content generated, support tickets deflected, open-source contributions received). At Supabase, I built an attribution model that tracked the developer journey from first community touchpoint to first paid deployment. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than "vibes."
I left Supabase in 2024 and moved to Berlin, where I split my time between writing, advising open-source companies on community strategy, and contributing to projects I care about. I joined Signal because the intersection of open source, developer relations, and business strategy is fascinating and wildly under-covered.
I live in Kreuzberg, Berlin, though I go home to Accra regularly. I DJ on weekends (afrobeats and house), I play football in a Turkish league in Neukölln, and I believe that open source is the most effective technology distribution mechanism ever invented, and also the most economically misunderstood.
Experience
- Developer Relations Lead, Supabase