I saw Leah McGowen-Hare speak at last year’s Salesforce TrailheaDX conference for developers focused on building apps on the Salesforce platform. And after seeing her captivate a conference center of thousands of developers with her knowledge of cloud development platforms and coding tools/environments, I was struck by a couple of things. I have gone to countless tech conferences over the past couple of decades, but I had never seen an African American woman deliver a keynote to a group of hardcore developers. And she had the whole crowd eating out of the palm of her hands with her mix of experience, knowledge and passion for coding and developers.

In addition to being Director in Tech and Product for Salesforce, she’s also director of Developer Evangelism. And after seeing her present again at the Salesforce Analyst Summit this week, I was anxious to ask her a few questions about her journey to being a developer evangelist, and what it would take to see more folks that look like her get into coding and developing apps in the cloud.