Mary's background

Mary Thengvall: I fell into developer relations and I say that a little facetiously. I have a journalism background, but I grew up around tech. My dad used to bring computers home for us to try out, but he wasn't a developer and wasn't involved heavily in code.

I taught myself how to create a website when I was in middle school and the Yahoo! plug and play websites were around, but that was about it. I graduated from college with a journalism degree, but at that time, here in the U.S., many of the newspapers were letting their editorial staff go. I was trying to figure out what was next for me and I ended up taking a public relations job at O'Reilly Media.

I was writing about technical topics and having been a journalist, I like to know what I'm writing about. I did a lot of research into Drupal, Python, and Java as I was writing press releases for the books. I was soon asking, "How do we know that these are the topics that...