Chris Messina, Developer Experience Lead, Uber - EP 118

Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber, and pretty much an internet celebrity. From literally inventing the hashtag, to being a top Product Hunt user, to blogging on Medium, to his very own chatbot - The MessinaBot, we’re super excited to have him join us for this episode. Chris started his career with an interest for both art and technology. As a champion of the open web, Chris started off his career as a consultant before joining the Mozilla Foundation and helping them get their first 100 million downloads for Firefox. Afterwards, he launched some of his own startups and side projects before eventually joining Google to work on their social products (Buzz & later Google +) as well as building their developer brand. Today, Chris is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber - where he works with many different teams to help make it easier for developers to leverage Uber’s logistics platform. Chris also coined the term “conversational commerce” in 2015 and wrote what’s become one of the cornerstone posts for this new wave of technology and interface design. He continues to write about, experiment, and share his thoughts on bots, messaging, AI, voice, and the growing trend behind the many forms of conversational commerce. Chris joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what it was like at Google, why he decided to join Uber and what his role there is all about, how he saw the conversational commerce trend emerging, why he’s so interested in bots & messaging, and much more!