Discord is a popular communication and streaming platform that was originally launched in 2015.

It was first popularized in the gaming space, but its user base has grown to include a broad array of communities, businesses, and social groups.

Justin Beckwith is the Director of Engineering at Discord.

He leads engineering for the platform ecosystem organization and has played a pivotal

role in developing Discord's embedded app SDK. Justin joins the podcast with Sean Falconer to talk

about leading engineering at Discord. This episode is hosted by Sean Falconer. Check the show notes

for more information on Sean's work and where to find him.

Justin, welcome to the show. Greetings, Sean. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So you're a director of engineering at Discord, leading platform ecosystem.

I wanted to just start off by having you kind of walk us through and walk myself through some of your journey to Discord.

And what was the state of the product as like a developer platform when you joined?

Yeah, so I had a really unique opportunity

in joining Discord. It's coming up on three years since I've been here, which is hard to believe.

And before this, most of my career was really an enterprise software. So I'd worked a lot on cloud

developer platforms, had an opportunity to work on Azure, on Google Cloud, a couple of different

platforms there. But this was the first consumer platform I had a chance to work on., on Google Cloud, a couple of different platforms there. But this was the first

consumer platform I had a chance to work on. And one of the things that really drew me to it was that

there's this large, vibrant, excited kind of, there's just a whole slew of developers that

were already there. They were already building things, building chatbots, slash commands, rich presence,

all kinds of any way that they could extend what was on Discord. People were trying to do it.

And it was kind of a unique opportunity to walk in where that ecosystem had been defined.

It was kind of core to the product and I'd have a chance to come in and work on something that

inspired people. How do you think working on something where you're building essentially,

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