Making complicated things make sense.
That's the thread through everything I do: developer relations, writing, speaking, teaching, and the occasional photograph.
I'm Aditya Oberai, and I lead Developer Relations at Appwrite, an open-source backend platform. My job sits at the intersection of engineering and communication: product launches, documentation, education, and community. The throughline is simple: when a developer meets a tool, I want that first conversation to go well.
01 Career journey
My path into developer relations started at hackathons. As a computer science student, I spent weekends building things against deadlines and helping other students do the same, first as a participant, then as a mentor and organizer in communities like Major League Hacking, which named me one of its Top 50 Hackers in 2021. That same year, a project called CodeCapture, built so students without computers could learn to code, won the Education category at the Microsoft Imagine Cup's India chapter. It taught me something that stuck: the technology was the easy half. Explaining it was the work.
I joined Appwrite in 2021 as a Developer Advocate, when both the platform and its community were young. Over four years I answered thousands of questions on Discord and GitHub, wrote more than 140 articles, launched an education program that reached 15,000+ students, ran hackathons for 7,000+ developers, and helped onboard 70,000+ new community members through initiatives like Hacktoberfest. In December 2025, I stepped into leading Developer Relations at Appwrite, owning our public-facing product releases, content strategy, developer docs, and AI ecosystem tools that help developers build with Appwrite through tools like Claude Code and Cursor.
02 What I care about
Three things, mostly.
- Clear communication: documentation, blog posts, and launch announcements are products in their own right, and they deserve the same care as the code they describe.
- Education: Projects like CodeCapture and most of my writing exist because someone, somewhere, is learning this for the first time.
- Communities: not audiences but communities, places where people know each other's names, answer each other's questions, and stay long after the swag runs out.
03 How I work
- Evidence over adjectives: I'd rather show you a launch, an article, or a number than call myself passionate.
- Teaching over selling: if the product is good, explaining it honestly is the best marketing there is.
- Writing things down: most problems in developer relations turn out to be documentation problems wearing a costume.
04 Beyond work
When I'm not working, I'm usually holding a camera. Photography started as a conference habit (hallways, cities, people mid-laugh) and turned into a serious pursuit; my archive lives on Pexels(opens in new tab), free for anyone to use.
I write about developer relations, developer tools, and whatever I'm currently figuring out at oberai.blog(opens in new tab).
And I still show up at hackathons, these days usually on the judging side.
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