SeaGL speaker Q&A: Tessa Mero

Tessa gives her talk titled, “Nom Nom: Consuming REST APIs” on Friday afternoon.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: Yes! My name is Tessa Mero and I live for my family and the developer community. :-) I absolutely love encouraging and inspiring others and also bringing people together in a community and everyone sharing knowledge with each other. Currently I am a Developer Evangelist for Cisco DevNet. DevNet is a department that was born about 2 years ago to create a developer side of Cisco where we create new products from Open Source Software to APIs that will help make your work more productive and efficient. Cisco has also switched from a networking company to a software and services company and we want the world to know this. I specifically advocate on Cisco Spark (a chat/collaboration tool) and Tropo (a Voice/SMS API). I find these 2 API’s absolutely fascinating and love teaching people how to make their applications better by creating more automation for their work flows.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: Since I love to teach, having a background in education, teaching web application development at Edmonds Community College (Lynnwood, WA), I love helping people extend their knowledge. I also love learning new things for the sole case of showing others how to do it. In this talk, I will be going over the basics of REST APIs and how they can easily get started with learning how to use ANY API. This is a basic level talk and does not require coding knowledge to join, so I encourage any level of expertise can be part of the talk.

Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: This will be my first time at a SeaGL event, specifically my first time at a Linux conference. I’m quite overwhelmingly excited and want to be more involved at events in the Linux community as I have heard nothing but positive feedback on the community. I’m really hoping to get the opportunity to learn from others and meet a lot of people.

Q: So, you run the local PHP meetup… what can you tell us about that?

A: Yes! I run the Seattle PHP User Group and the Pacific Northwest PHP Conference in Seattle. SeaGL was kind enough to offer us a booth (THANK YOU). I will have our Vice President of the Board be at the booth giving information about our community and how much we would really love the Linux community to be part of our events. We give talks with such a range that we would love to have more speakers on DevOps! There will always be topics that will work for any developer in general, so please check it out. Come find out more information at the SeaPHP Booth and also come there to get free goodies!