Mailjet Monday: Toby Sims

What do you for Mailjet?

I’m a Developer Evangelist. My job is to build relationships and work as a link between developers and our Mailjet technology stack. AKA professional PR & hustler (our informal motto at Mailjet is “hustle”).

I’m based out of London - all by myself, working out of Central Working, a coworking space. It’s a trendy office right in the middle of a hipster city. I fit in with my beard-hipster camoflauge.

London also has a great startup community. There are a huge amount of very cool tech meetups as opposed to larger conferences. I’ve gotten to know many solid startups, two of which are Twilio and Headspace. I’d recommend checking out the London API meetup sponsored by Twilio. People with different technology stacks and APIs go to talk about solving problems with APIs and how to update your product without making users hate you - which is a remarkably difficult process.

What’s one thing everyone should know about email/APIs?

People underestimate just how hard deliverability is and how many hoops the deliverability team has to jump through at the ISP level to get things to the inbox. Also, the possibilities with email (and Mailjet) are just endless. The Parse API and Webhooks always come as a nice surprise. The new A/X testing and list segmentation should prove to be pretty popular too!

What does a typical day look like for you?

I get into the office and tend not to answer emails until at least 11 am. As soon as you open your inbox, your day ceases to be. So those first few hours are just for me to hammer some work out, like documentation and event planning. It’s valuable to spend a couple hours of the day independent of the inbox.

Then, I plug in to the DevRel chatroom on Skype and get distracted by other things like support issues with plug-ins. As a Developer Evangelist, I’m part of the first line of defense for plug-ins and the Mailjet Github account.

At the moment a bigger project we’re busy with is updating our API and improving documentation on V3. In the evenings is when we really hustle - attend events, get to know the tech community and of course, eat free pizza. I swear after a year on the job, any Developer Evangelist will be allergic to pizza. And what you’ll also notice is that you can differentiate the quality of a meetup by their pizza. Some meetups will have warm beer and cold pizza, but better meetups will have cold beer and warm pizza.

Favorite Mailjet moment?

Physically meeting the team for the first time at HQ and realizing that I’m part of the bigger picture. Go team! They looked after me very well. We may or may not have had several alcoholic beverages over the week.

What’s next?

We've got some cool new API features lined up: A/x testing & Segmentation. Also, a boat load of events - I will be heading to Techcrunch in London and Web Summit in Dublin in November where they're expecting 25,000 people - the biggest event I've ever been to. That's gonna be pretty crazy. All the way up to December it's go, go, go. 2015 Mailjet success!