Marcus Olsson

While I wrote my first lines of code in QBasic during elementary school, I started building software professionally in 2011. Having majored in computer graphics during college, I worked on implementing algorithms for image-based lighting, and later on developing visualization software for GIS applications.

In 2013, I joined Citerus—a small consultancy in Stockholm that offered courses in agile software development. Fortunately, while I mainly helped teams build distributed applications, I also had the chance to learn from several great educators, through the many seminars and workshops we offered.

In 2016, I joined the data team at Bonnier Broadcasting as a Data Engineer, where my main focus was to build a GDPR-compliant data warehouse on Google Cloud Platform that supported both batch and streaming data processing.

After organizing Go meetups for more than four years, I realized how much I enjoyed (and missed) teaching, both as a mentor and through public speaking. I wasn't yet sure how I could combine my passion for teaching and my experience in software engineering until I joined Grafana Labs as their first Developer Advocate in 2019.

During my time at Grafana Labs, I built a range of educational resources for the Grafana plug-in platform. For three years, I supported developers from the plug-in community, through tutorials, forum support, and webinars. Working with an amazing team of technical writers, I was also able to drastically improve my technical writing.

Deciding to move from Engineering to Developer Relations was easily one of the best decisions I've made. After three years as a Developer Advocate though, I started looking for the next step. I wanted to focus on the parts that I loved about my role: Developer Education.