Annie Sexton logo

Developer Advocate  •  Software Engineer

Headshot of Annie Sexton, Product Developer, Designer and Engineer
I'm a multi-faceted software developer and developer advocate with over 11 years of experience working on everything from software engineering to UX design. I've spent most of my career in the wonderful world of developer tooling, and I love working with talented teams to craft unparalleled user experiences.
Screenshot of Typist website
Founder

Typist is a refreshingly simple note-taking app built for developers, featuring auto-rendered Github-flavored markdown, ⌘K quick search, code block syntax highlighting, and keyboard shortcuts for days.

I've been on a long journey in search of the perfect writing app: something simple enough to quickly jot down notes, but equipped with the features I appreciate as a developer, such as markdown, code block syntax highlighting, and a myriad of keyboard shortcuts. Many apps came close, but each left me wanting. After years of searching, I decided to roll up my sleeves and build something myself.

Founder

Gensho is a tool that helps users build foreign language flashcards quickly by looking up words as you highlight them. How it works: Copy and paste in any foreign text (anything you'd like to study from, like song lyrics, news articles, etc). Then simply highlight the words you don't know. You can then download that list of words and their definitions, and upload them to literally any flashcard program. Supported languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

Designed, developed and marketed a SaaS product from the ground up, built in Ruby on Rails and ReactJS.

Gensho was a passion project of mine that I eventually turned into a full-fledge SaaS product, and now boasts a healthy following of over 2000 users.

Screenshot of Gensho website

Technical Writing

During my 11 years working as an engineer, I’ve fallen in love with every aspect of product development, from programming, to strategy, to design. While my roots are in development, I’ve collected a wide breadth of skills across many areas of expertise, thanks to my endless curiosity and hunger for learning.

Outside of work I love to travel, cook and write fiction. I was born and raised in the heart of Texas in Austin, and in 2019, after a considerable amount of globe-trotting, I decided to make a home for myself in the lush Pacific Northwest, in Portland, Oregon.

Work History

Fly.io

Deploy your apps globally in seconds

JavaScript Specialist & Developer Advocate

I work with the JavaScript developer community to help them understand how to use Fly.io to deploy their apps globally in seconds. I also work with the product team to help them understand the needs of the developer community.

Render

Platform-as-a-Service to build and host web services

Product Lead & UX Engineer

Led cross-disciplinary teams to develop platform features that attracted businesses to migrate their applications from our top competitor.

Worked directly with CEO to plan, define and build features using TypeScript, ReactJS, and GraphQL. Conducted competitive analysis reports to inform new feature development.

Heroku

Salesforce.com

Product Analyst

Developed initial strategy and roadmap for supporting a new product offering (Salesforce Functions)

Conducted customer research to identify user needs using data from internal support metrics and customer feedback

Identified customer pain points and developed tools to improve self-service, reducing ticket load on Support

Designed training material for new support team

Senior Technical Support Engineer

Provided in-depth support for Heroku customers on a wide range of technical topics, including performance issues, application outages, and development best practices

Assisted strategic accounts during app outages

Developed onboarding material for Heroku support team

Curated and improved technical documentation

Digital Telepathy

Digital web agency based in San Diego

Full-stack Engineer & Account Manager

Worked with clients to define project requirements, development roadmap, and acceptance criteria.

Managed development process from initial concept through site launch.

Built responsive marketing sites featuring rich interactions built-in JavaScript and CSS.

For a complete work history, see my LinkedIn profile.
Typist App
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