Grace Ashiru
Before her name showed up on conference posters and hackathon judge lists, Amarachi Iheanacho was a student who simply did not want to forget what she was learning. She wrote everything down.
“I did not start writing because I wanted to be a content creator,” she says. “I started writing because it was the simplest way to make things clear to myself.”
Those notes moved from her laptop to the internet. Blog posts and threads followed. Slowly, other students began to read them, then ask questions, then show up to hear her explain the same ideas in person. That was Amarachi’s first hint that her instinct to document was not just a personal habit. It was a skill.
As Google Developer Student Club Lead at her university, she turned that instinct into structure. She organised workshops, introduced hundreds of students to modern frontend tools, and became a reference point on campus for people navigating documentation, APIs, and frameworks.
“Most people were not afraid of code,” she recalls. “They were afraid of not understanding the docs. Once you fix that, you unlock a lot of people very quickly.”
Finding DevRel before it had a name
At the time, Amarachi did not have a neat label for what she was doing. She just knew she liked helping people understand technology. That work expanded when she helped co-organise Write the Docs Nigeria, a community that pushed documentation from the background of software projects into the centre of conversation.
“For many of us, documentation was something you did at the end, if you had time,” she says. “Write the Docs showed me that documentation is product experience. It is how people meet your tool for the first time.”
Those early years gave her two important building blocks: community experience at scale and a deep respect for clear, accessible language. The missing piece was a way to turn all of that into a real career.
 The launchpad
The real turning point was not a job, but volunteering. Amarachi began contributing to a small, developer-focused content collective that quietly helped African engineers grow into global DevRel and documentation specialists. The pace was different: deadlines were sharper, standards were higher, and the audience suddenly felt global.
“That was where it clicked that DevRel is a discipline, not just vibes,” she says. “There is strategy, there is process, there is a clear line between good content and real adoption.”
In that environment, she learned how to design tutorials, documentation, and learning paths that fit into a company’s overall developer experience, rather than sitting off to the side.
Working on global tooling
From that launchpad, her work began to show up in places she had once only read about. Amarachi contributed to DevRel and technical content efforts for developer-first companies.
For instance, at global companies like Eyer and Sidero, she played a key role in the company’s push to deepen developer relations momentum, helping developers understand how to handle API documentation.
“I saw how documentation decisions directly affect whether a feature is used or ignored,” she says. “If people cannot see themselves in your examples, they move on.”
It doesn’t end there; she co-organised and co-judged a global hackathon that attracted nearly three hundred participants. The work combined program design, judging, community engagement, and content around the product.
“It was the first time I saw my work touch so many people at once,” she says. “You could see the impact in real time, in the projects people submitted and the questions they asked.”
Technical storytelling as export
The consistency of her output soon translated into recognition. Hackernoon named her Contributor of the Year in both the JavaScript and Frontend categories, underlining her influence as a technical storyteller.
“At some point, I realised that writing about code is also building,” Amarachi says. “You are building understanding, confidence, and in many cases someone’s first contact with a tool.”
Conference organisers took notice too. She has spoken at events across Africa and internationally, including DevFest Lagos and other major gatherings, often anchoring conversations around documentation, DevRel practice, and community building.
Her talks do not just preach the importance of documentation. They show developers how to use writing as a tool for career growth and community impact, the same way she did.
A new profile of African tech talent
Amarachi’s journey reflects a broader shift in African tech. The most visible profiles are no longer only backend or frontend engineers who sit quietly behind products. Increasingly, the continent is producing multi-layered professionals who can code, teach, write, organise, and represent products to global audiences.
“People used to ask me if I was leaving engineering for content,” she says, laughing. “What I tell them now is that DevRel is engineering, communication, and community in one role. It is not a downgrade. It is a different way to ship impact.”
For global developer first companies, this mix is valuable. They need people who understand the pain of debugging a broken API call, and at the same time know how to turn that pain into clear documentation, demos, and community programs.
Amarachi sits squarely in that intersection. She has become one of the recognisable young voices in Africa’s DevRel landscape, proof that the continent is not just consuming developer tools but actively shaping how they are understood and adopted.
Her Global ambition for the future
Amarachi’s journey so far has been shaped by curiosity, community, and the discipline of explaining hard things simply. But the next phase of her career is anchored in something bigger: an ambition to lead one of the most respected Developer Relations teams in the world.
It’s an ambition that didn’t arrive suddenly. It formed quietly over the years, in late-night documentation edits, in community events where one question spiralled into twenty more, in GitHub discussions where clarity mattered as much as code.
To her, global DevRel leadership is not about influence for its own sake. It’s about scaling the impact she’s already seen in small rooms and online workshops: a developer finally understanding something that once felt impossible, a team shipping features faster because the documentation made sense, a community realising it can build more than it thought.
But perhaps the biggest driver behind Amarachi’s ambition is the visibility gap she experienced early in her career. For years, African DevRel talent was invisible in global conversations.
“My dream is to build a DevRel culture that is global in reach, but human at heart,” she says. “A team that feels like a home for developers from everywhere.”
