A Need for More Media Developer Experts

I had the opportunity to speak with Doron Sherman, V.P. of Developer Relations, Cloudinary about their Media Developer Experts (MDE) program that was introduced during their user conference. The new program was established to foster a community of developers and influencers interested in media management and visual communication.

According to Doron, as the internet becomes more visual, more developers are responsible for the management and delivery of rich media. However, it's not part of the core skill set upon which developers are trained. Images and video have a lot of complexity about which developers need to learn the fundamentals about the appropriate image formats for different types of content to load quickly and perform without latency.

“Developers are at the heart of our culture here at Cloudinary,” said Doron Sherman, VP of Developer Relations at Cloudinary. “Creating a structured program to support and advance the careers of developers and influencers passionate about learning, building, and sharing rich media technology and best practices is a timely and unique opportunity that we’re thrilled to invest the Cloudinary resources towards.”

Cloudinary MDEs will receive prioritized access to the Cloudinary platform, products, and internal resources, as well as training opportunities and community events. Certified MDEs will also play an important role in contributing to the broader developer network across the media management ecosystem through a variety of efforts including open-source projects, hackathons, meetups, conferences, workshops, content opportunities, and more.

Cloudinary strives to facilitate knowledge transfer and reducing the boundaries of becoming proficient in the end-to-end media processing challenge. Cloudinary provides an easy to learn API to implement applications upload, store, optimize, transfer, and deliver securely with a single line of code. According to Doron, "Cloudinary gets you 90% there with no learning curve documentation, certification helps you become proficient with Cloudinary."

In talking to Doron about the current and future state of images and video he sees mobile continuing to grow in importance which increases demand for compelling, performant, optimized images and videos for a small device since humans process visual information 60,000 times faster than any other format. The experience you get from electronic devices mimics the physical world in the closest way possible; however, you still have to adjust your phone. Over time, Doron sees improvements in devices, software, networks, and bandwidth providing seamless mixed-reality experiences.

If you are passionate about media, you can join the MDE program and share with your communities and topics of interest with regard to rich media and develop new content to share with developers to expand the knowledge base.