Meet the Navigators: DigitalOcean’s inaugural class of 2021

Posted 2021-12-16 in Developer Relations

DigitalOcean would not be where it is today without our community of developers, entrepreneurs, and builders. This year, we set out to further strengthen and support that community through our Navigators program, and we’re thrilled to honor our 2021 inaugural class of Navigators.

The Navigators program supports and rewards individuals who create content, code, and community engagements related to DigitalOcean’s products and services in order to help other developers reach the next steps of their journeys. Developers from around the world apply to be a part of the Navigators program. These developers already create content, community, and code contributions and if chosen are rewarded with things like cross-promotion via DigitalOcean’s networks, early access to products and features, direct links to DigitalOcean developer advocates, engineers, and product managers, invitations to speak at events, and more.

Chosen individuals are leaders in the developer community — writing tutorials, engaging our meetup community of over 60,000 members, or contributing to other types of content like webinars and tech talks. They love to help others learn and build and are champions of inclusion. Our Navigators are immersed in the developer ecosystem and have found success all over the world helping others learn and grow.

In our first year, our Navigators have already had a substantial impact on our community. Here are a few of the highlights:

Navigators made appearances on our weekly web show Cloud Chats
Navigators assisted with Hacktoberfest by organizing events, writing tools, and more
An eBook, written by Navigator Peter Mbanugo, was created to help developers build a serverless app platform on Kubernetes using DigitalOcean Kubernetes service
A new hire: Navigator Miguel Hernandez was hired as a Software Engineer on our Web Development and Community Platform team